Indentities and communities of practice gme

Wenger, E. 1998. Communities of Practice – Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

In their book Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation, Lave and Wenger (1991) describe the concept of Communities of Practice (CoP) as the relations between newcomers and old-timers in a situated activity, defining learning as a process of legitimate peripheral participation. Individuals that want to become members of a community of practice, do so by following trajectories that hopefully will lead them from peripheral to full participation: “participation is always based on situated negotiation and renegotiation of meaning in the world” (1991: 51). Apprenticeship implies a kind of trajectory in the community, based on the relations between newcomers and old-timers in a CoP, thus learning is an evolving form of membership going through a first phase of way in (observation) and then practice (working). Acquiring full participation is also a matter of gaining legitimacy during the learning trajectory: “learning to become a legitimate participant in a community involves learning how to talk (and be silent) in the manner of the full participants […] For newcomers is not to learn from talk as a substitute for legitimate peripheral participation; it is to learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral participation”. (1991: 107-109) The aim of Wenger’s book is to offer an overview of the context where situated learning occurs: communities of practice. What is happening inside these communities? Who are the members and how are the different communities of practice, where all individuals belong, affecting the learning trajectory as well as the identities of the members? What is learning, setting the focus on participation? Wenger makes an interesting point when he declares that we are well aware that learning can occur anywhere, but the problem is that we lack “a systematic way to talk about learning as an integrate part of everyday life […] A key implication of our attempts to organize learning is that we must become reflective with regard to our own discourses of learning and to their effects on the ways we design for learning” (1998: 8-9). Taking the assumption that there is no activity that is not situated, Lave and Wenger describe the generality of any form of knowledge as the capability of the learner to re-interpret and re-negotiate the meaning of the past knowledge when creating the meaning of present circumstances (1991: 36). In order to make sense of the world, human beings need to choose what to focus on and what to leave in the background according to the context of the practice. Wenger’s perspective on learning as socially embedded with focus on social participation implies that the context in which people are engaging in different activities becomes also very important. Learning to become a full participant in a CoI means that no assumption on what is ‘good knowledge’ can be done. It is a complex process that individuals are engaging in and that needs to take into account both theories of social structures as well as situated experiences, both theories of practice and identity.

Negotiation of meaning and reification

Two important processes in the CoI framework are negotiation of meaning and reification. Meaning is not seen as just the relation between sign and reference but it is embedded in the practice as experience of everyday life. The negotiation of meaning is the location of the process of meaning through participation and reification (1998: 52). Wenger introduces here the concept of engagement: “human engagement is first and foremost a process of negotiation of meaning” (1998: 53), a process that is historical and dynamic, contextual and unique: “Meaning exists neither in us nor in the world, but in the dynamic relation of living in the world” (1998: 54). So even if negotiation of meaning can be seen as the process in which we re-use our experience, producing again a new situation according to the context, we may recognize the context, but yet it is not the same because we produce meanings that reinterpret their history in which they are a part (1998: 52-53). The term participation implies both a sense of taking part in the CoI, but also “the social experience of living in the world in terms of membership in social communities and active involvement in social enterprises. Participation in this sense is both personal and social” (1998: 55-56) and it shapes the experience of meaning, becoming a source of identity. Participation is a social experience not because several people are interacting at the same time, but because social participation gives meaning to our life. Even when we are sitting in our room, we always have to relate to others, to the communities we belong to. Reification means literally “making into a thing” (1998: 58) and defines the process of making a procedure, a tool, where a certain understanding is given form. We need tools and artifacts to perform our activities: to analyze the empirical material in our research we need abstractions that can be applied in the data, in order to understand and make sense of what is happening and this tools are created through the process of reification: “Any community of practice produces abstractions, tools, symbols, stories, terms and concepts that reifies something of that practice in a congealed form” (1998: 59) so that it can be re-utilized. The process and products of reification exist in the human condition of negotiation of meaning. It is in the strive to make sense of the world that human beings appropriate reification in their practice: a tool is such when we create and use it: “[…] the products of reification are not simply concrete, material objects. Rather, they are reflections of these practices, tokens of vast expanses of human meanings” (1998: 61). Bliss and Säljo refer to the symbiotic nature of interaction between individuals, tools and artifacts and social practices: “we shall be striving to develop a new theoretical framework which can account for, and thus attempt to explain, the nature of this interactions in order to better understand the role of context and situation in thinking, learning and reasoning” (1999: 10). Wenger argues that intrinsic and universal products of reification cannot exist since participation is a social process and therefore related to the context of the activity. This leads us forward to the concept of learning in the CoI and the processes of remembering and forgetting. By trajectories of learning, newcomers in a practice become full participant by sharing histories of learning and through reification: “we can forget events, but the marks they leave in the world can bring them back to us” (1998: 88). Remembering does not mean to indulge in the past, but rather to reinterpret the world, with the help of new experiences that bring new meanings, adapting the form of reification according to the practice and the context. I see a connection to the ecological theory of affordances, term coined by James Gibson, where the environment: “[…] is the material world as perceived and apprehended as something” (Linell, 2009: 25), rather that something that is. Human beings need to make sense of the world in order to exist in it (se also Wenger, 2003: 228, 289). Words are a typical form of reification and language as speech acts is an example of processes that imply both reification and participation. It is interesting that Wenger here refers to speech occurring in face to face interaction as “extremely evanescent” (1998: 62). In some kind of Computer Mediated Communication, such as text chat, the participation and reification in the negotiation of meaning occurs in manners that do not allow this evanescence: words that have been typed and sent in text chat stay in front of the participant, lingering for quite a while, allowing the processes of participation and negotiation of meaning to follow slightly different patterns. Haythornwaite and Kazmer illustrate the communication without a body in text-chat, where words are very important, as: “Communication in a chat-room has more heart and a lot less thoughts” (2004: 152). This means that there is a need for a higher awareness of what we are saying and competence about how that could influence the other participants in a positive or negative way. Wenger continues with his description of the CoI framework by defining what characterizes the Community (1998: 73):

Mutual engagement (membership)
A joint enterprise
A shared repertoire

In other words, the members of the community need to engage in negotiation of meaning: they are not just members in a group or team. They are part of a practice as a source of coherence. Practice defines the level of mutual engagement and membership and does not depend on the geographical proximity of its members. In order to engage in meaningful activities, the members of the CoP need to share a repertoire i.e. to understand each other in both reificative and participative terms: the set of rules, norms, routines, actions, ways of doing things are all examples of repertoire (1998: 83). It is difficult to define where a CoP starts and where it ends: there are not clear boundaries, but the learning trajectory form peripheral to full participation implies forms of boundaries based on joint learning and negotiation of meaning and leading us back to the notions of:

Peripheality
Legitimacy

(1998: 101) mentioned at the beginning of the log.

Learning defines localities

It is possible to define a geography of practice where: “relations of proximity and distance may facilitate or hinder learning” (1998: 130). Practice has a location in time and space because it exists in specific communities with members that engage in mutual engagement. It is learning that configures the localities, not the other way around, thus shaping the geography of practice. This could be a way of addressing the issue about the definition of situated learning in context of online education where rapidly changing situations may affect the feeling of belonging to the community. “The complex interaction between the local and the global” where engagement does not mean participation and vice versa is a way of dealing with the problem. Wenger continues arguing that: “One kind of complexity replaces another, one kind of limitation is overcome at the cost of introducing another” (1998: 132). I consider the issue of locality for communities of practice a very interesting aspect as far as the level of analysis covered by the CoP is concerned: neither a specific interaction, nor a whole nation, culture nor city can be viewed as a CoP. The former would be given too importance overlooking broader communities in time and among people. The latter would miss “crucial discontinuities among the various localities where relevant learning takes place” (1998: 125). But how can a CoP be defined? Not by its members, according to Wenger, who offers instead a list of characteristics that indicate the existence of a CoP such as “shared ways of engaging in doing things together; mutually defining identities; local lore, shared stories, inside jokes, knowing laughter; a shared discourse reflecting a certain perspective on the world” etc. (1998: 125-126). The fact that CoP cannot be reified implies that it is difficult to seize their form, their real shape. And indeed CoP “are about content – about learning as a living experience of negotiating meaning – not about form” (1998: 229). The theoretical framework provided by the CoP can be a valuable tool to analyze the negotiation of meaning in a learner community and the dynamics occurring when moving from peripheral to full participation. Nevertheless I argue that using the CoP as a tool to design for learning in school settings can turn out to be a less successful matter. Considering a group of learner in school arenas as a CoI a priori, means to reify it, to create it artificially at the table, getting as alienating as some school syllabi has become for the teachers as well as the students, depicting a form that does not really exist.

Hornberger, N. H. (ed.) 2003. Continua of Biliteracy. An ecological framework for educational policy, research and practice in multilingual settings. Clevedon: Multilingual matters

The aim of the book is to describe a framework for understanding biliteracy and provides the reader with a series of empirical studies dealing with bilingual education and bilingualism that uses the continua of biliteracy framework. But what does the term biliteracy mean? It is the result of the connection between literacy and bilingualism, to be literate in two languages. This means that notions of native-speakerness, second and foreign language acquisition as well as notions of power and empowerment are addressed in this book whose purpose is also to grant the children with a less powerful L1 and struggling with L2 learning a voice (see also reading log on Rickard Jonsson) and agency to actors and practices that “have traditionally been the less powerful and of the continua” (2003: 38). The fact that the actors in the empirical studies presented in the review are often children who are becoming bilingual is very tangible and makes it difficult to engage in the study of this work without becoming emotionally involved. This book has also a clear political agenda addressing language policies and educational reforms in USA and South America. The notion of continuum offered in the continua of biliteracy framework is to be considered in terms of:

Context of biliteracy
Development of individual biliteracy (about individuals communicative repertoire and language transfer, addressing issues of L1 and L2 acquisition)
Media of biliteracy (about how individuals become bilingual)

The continua develop in both directions along three axes as they were defining the sides of a cube. If we take the context of biliteracy as an example, we can see that the continua in it develop attending to the following aspects:

Micro –--------- -----------macro
Oral ------------------------literate
Monolingual -------------bilingual

The important aspect that characterized the concept of continuum for an understanding of biliteracy is that the different features, or dichotomies, represent the extremes of each continuum but it is possible to discern infinite points between the two and “it is equally elucidating to focus on the common features and on the distinguishing features along any continuum” (2003: 5). The main point made by the authors, as I see it, is to question the view of language learning and acquisition in bilingual settings as following a pre-defined path with a certain language of instruction (L1 or L2) or preferring to start with oral proficiency to move on to writing and so on as if these skills were lying in separate segment of our brain (it is rather striking that at the end of the 1990s there are still language teacher engaging in this methods, as much as it is terrible to read about a teacher saying to a pupil who has not spoken Spanish since the age of four “I don’t know why you forgot it” considering her a native speaker of Spanish in the Spanish class (2003: 153)). The concept of continuum opens up for an understanding of bilingualism and biliteracy in all their complexity. The nested systems of continua in context, development and media show that the possibility of intersection in the infinite points along the continuum are to be considered not as a point in itself, but in connection with the other continua. This means that it is no longer an option to consider language learning as a system that dictates its own rules. It is the learning situation, the context of language use the deciding factor (2003: 18). I found especially interesting the issues about language transfer and interference (also this is a vestige from cognitivism and language learning) addressed in the review (2003: 19). Interlanguage and transfer as well as errors in L2 are not enemies to be eliminated but rather they are evidence of learning, the clues to the process of language acquisition (see also the notion of bilingual lexical interillumination in St John (2010)).

Power relations in the continua model

It is also important to return to issues about power and agency, mentioned at the beginning of the log: “Agency and voice are […] central to empowerment”, since an agent stops accepting the status quo in society and start exercising some sort of power (2003: 40-41). The status quo in educational policy and practice is, according to the authors “an implicit privileging of one end of the continua over the other such that one end of each continuum is associated with more power than the other” (2003: 38). For example, the oral feature is considered traditionally less powerful that written, oral less powerful than literate and so on. In order to disturb this order of things and grant the pupils in bilingual settings an agency and a voice, some of the language teacher presented in the research chose to use their discourse in order to take the distance from the hegemonic formal education practice, gaining control of “oral, bilingual, micro-level interactional context to do so” (2003: 44).

Multiliteracy

To be literate does not end in the capability to read and write: individuals are also literate in the sense that they use and make sense of other communication channels and media such as audio, video, visual or other semiotic systems. The term “multiliteracies” (2003: 49) refers to this multiplicity of competence in human beings. Drawing form the research of the New London Group, the authors illustrates what a pedagogy of multiliteracies is about: “it is designing in the sense of making/taking meaning form available designs to create new transformed designs […]. Available designs includes grammar […] and orders of discourse, and we redesign these in the same way we make/take meaning from text/discourses to create new texts/discourses” (2003: 49). I interpret this as the effort of teachers and learners to facilitate discourse using the media that they have at hand. It can be a whiteboard, or a paper, gestures, or different communication channels in a virtual environment: if we are able to detect all of some of the possibilities to communicate afforded by the environment, does it mean that we can define ourselves as multiliterate?

Literature (besides Wenger and Hornberger)

Bliss, J., Säljö, R. 1999. The Human-Technological Dialectic. In Bliss, J., Säljö, R. (ed.) Learning Sites: Social and Technological Resources for Learning. Oxford: Pergamon Haythornthwaite, C. Kazmer, M.M. 2004. Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education: Research and Practice. New York: P. Lang
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. 1991. Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Linell, P. 2009. Rethinking Language, Mind and World Dialogically. Interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making, Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing
St John, O. 2010. Bilingual lexical interillumination in the foreign language classroom. Language, Culture and Curriculum. Vol. 23, No. 3, November 2010, 199–218

Giulia Messina Dahlberg 22:51, 15 March 2011 (UTC)