International Journal for Innovation Education and Research ISSN 2411-2933 01-04-2022 International Educative Research Foundation and Publisher © 2022 pg. 200 Three Decades of Communities of Practice Conceptualization: revisiting the foundations of Lave and Wenger's constructs and their impact on contemporary learning theory Flávia Roberta Fernandes¹, Helena de Fátima Nunes Silva², Glauco Gomes de Menezes³, Jean Frank Teodoro Dantas Sartori 4 and João Augusto Wendt Mischiatti 5 , ¹ Information Management Masters and PhD Programme of the Federal University of Paraná ² Information Management Masters and PhD Programme of the Federal University of Paraná ³ Information Management Masters and PhD Programme of the Federal University of Paraná 4 Information Management Masters and PhD Programme of the Federal University of Paraná 5 Information Management Masters and PhD Programme of the Federal University of Paraná Abstract This article aims to identify the key authors and the theoretical foundations’ delineation of Lave and Wenger’s concept of Communities of Practice (CoPs) and its relationship with the learning theory. This exploratory and descriptive study applied a qualitative approach and bibliographic research based on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) publication “Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation”. All 48 references indicated in their research and the perceived relevance the authors have in academia. Data analysis was conducted using bibliometric and content analysis techniques with the aid of the NVivo software. The results showed the relevance of the key authors to the academy based on their number of publications, citation analysis, h-index, fields of study and contributions to those fields. We also identified that the concept of Communities of Practice is interdisciplinarity amongst anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Keywords: Communities of Practice; Etienne Wenger; Jean Lave; CoPs. 1 Introduction Communities of Practice (CoPs) are characterized by a group of people with common interests. These members are united by the will to expand their knowledge through a practice that aims to solve problems experienced by the group. They are collaborative and informally organized, focusing mainly on learning through individual socializations at their levels of participation (COX, 2005). The constructs of CoPs coined by Wenger in 1991 stemmed from his personal experience, as the author started in computer science research with studies on computer-based education addressing artificial intelligence and tutoring systems (WENGER, 1987), culminating with works in co-authorship with the anthropologist Jean Lave (WENGER, 2010). The approximation between them resulted in their shared