The Identity-In-Practice Framework: A Situated Model of Professional Development
Professional learning is widely treated as a problem of content delivery. Courses are designed. Frameworks are rolled out. Competencies are mapped. Information is transferred, yet organisational culture often remains unchanged. This is because professional learning is not primarily about acquiring information. It is about becoming a particular kind of practitioner within a particular form of practice. Professionals are formed through participation. Through the work they are invited into. Through the practices they rehearse. Through the communities that recognise them. Through what counts as legitimate contribution. Identity is not a private attribute carried inside the individual. It is shaped and reshaped in practice.
Organisations change when patterns of participation change. Participation changes when identities shift. This reframes the problem of professional development. So, the question is not:
“What content should we deliver?”
It is:
“What forms of participation are we designing?”
Communities of practice are not informal supplements to formal structures. They are the primary sites in which professional identity is negotiated and stabilised. They determine what expertise looks like, what is valued, and who is becoming what. If we seek transformation — of culture, leadership, or performance — we must design participation deliberately. This involves:
* Structuring pathways from peripheral to legitimate participation
* Making expertise visible and socially distributed
* Designing cross-boundary encounters that reshape collective identity
* Aligning recognition systems with the identities we want to cultivate
* Repositioning leadership as stewardship of practice
This is not an argument against formal learning. It is an argument that learning is situated, relational, and identity-forming.
Programmes may transfer knowledge, but participation forms professionals. Organisations do not transform because people attend training. They transform because people participate differently — and in participating differently, become different kinds of practitioners.