Aaron: Wenger describes identity as our ability and our inability to shape the meanings that define our communities and our forms of belonging (p.145). This includes our practices, our languages, our artifacts, our actions, our statements, and our world views which reflect our social relations that make up our identity. I like how Wenger defines identity as a relation between the local and the global. I think this aspect of identity can be tied to teaching because when we teach we sometimes are engaging our students to pursue an enterprise or a common goal but we are also encouraging them to view their engagement on a much broader scale by viewing the whole picture. Wenger also makes a good point that we produce our identities through the practices we engage in, but we also define ourselves through the practices that we do not engage in. (p.164). While he states that it is impossible that we could identify ourselves with everyone and everything we meet, failure to engage and participate in activities could have an effect on our identity. Wenger lists six sources of participation and non-participation through which define our identities. They are: 1) how we locate ourselves in a social landscape, 2) what we care about and what we neglect, 3) what we attempt to know and understand and what we choose to ignore, 4) with whom we seek connections and whom we avoid, 5) how we engage and direct our energies, 6) how we attempt to steer our trajectories.
I believe the first three aspects can either make or break, and by break I mean destroy, our identity. If all teachers at the school I was to teach at are required to participate actively in their school community by helping out with school functions and I choose not to participate in the functions, how does that affect my identity? Since I am neglecting to participate in the functions will fellow teachers view me differently? Will they view me as someone who doesn’t care about the school and its functions? How does this affect me? Perhaps when we are involved with a community and we are shaping our identity through our interactions with our community we need to step back and view our identity through the eyes of someone on the outside or as Wenger calls it, imagination. Through imagination we can redefine our identity and take on new practices and enterprises that can reshape our identity.
Nicole: I appreciate the way in which Wenger’s book, as it progresses, describes the elements of community of practice to further our understandings and our established definitions from earlier in the module. For example, the geographic observation that we made, that an individual’s proximity was not necessary to belong to a certain community, was affirmed: “Neither is geographic proximity sufficient to develop a practice” (1998, p. 74). In addition to confirming our understandings, Wenger also offers additional layers. For example, in this section he establishes that in participation, mutual relationships and engagement do not have to be homogeneous or something that is readily agreed upon. “Disagreement, challenges, and competition can all be forms of participation” (1998, p. 77). This works toward answering our class question, what does it take to be a participant in a community?
Wenger’s idea of discontinuity, even in reifications, and the relationships between older and newer generations is important. The idea that changes in practice occur, just like changes in members of a community occur, prompts readers to see community as something living and breathing, constantly changing and evolving. I think that this is important because it broadens the idea of what a community might be, eliminating formal or rigidly established groups or organizations from the mix. I also think the idea of discontinuity answers the question of why people always think that the current decade or period of time is worse than the last or why old-timers (to use Wenger’s term) say that the world is much more corrupt now than when they were younger. Is this assumption merely a product of the old-timers’ practices being pushed out because new practices are necessary for the community’s survival?
The idea of discontinuity prompts me to think about how new-comers also deal with their participation in a community. Wenger’s idea of legitimate peripheral participation (1998, p. 100) was especially curious to me. The difficulty noted in the data processing firm from the “classroom” to the execution of the job (p. 98) mirrors the transformation of pre-service teachers from student to educator. This is a phenomenon that I, as a pre-service supervisor, witness first hand. Pre-service teachers are just beginning to learn the true ways of practice of the community of educators – from lesson planning to interacting with administrative members, much of what they learn in their pre-service experience, even things that they don’t realize are as important as they are (for example, what to wear) fall into the category of legitimate peripheral participation. Their identities are in flux because they are bridging the worlds of student and teacher. In terms of identity, I wonder what that makes me… a broker (Wenger, 1998, p. 110)?
Michelle: Two of the things in the Wenger reading for this week that really stood out to me were the discussion of the formation of identity through participation and the notion of brokering. Wenger talks about identity in terms of participation in Chapter 3. One statement that he made that I found very interesting was: “Our identities become anchored in each other and what we do together. As a result, it is not easy to become a radically new person in the same community of practice. Conversely, it is not easy to transform oneself without the support of a community” (p. 89). In thinking more about this, I believe that I agree with Wenger. We certainly can have very different identities in our different communities of practice, but it really is difficult to totally change our established identity within one community of practice. For example, if I were to change my identity from teacher educator to gang member (certainly a radical change) within the community of my PhD program, I am pretty sure that I would no longer be welcome as a member of that community of practice. The radical change in identity might necessitate a move on my part from one community of practice to another where my new identity would be accepted and valued. Wenger does state, however, that relationships within communities of practice can be conflicting as well as harmonious and competitive as well as cooperative, so I wonder if a change in identity really would necessitate that I leave my original community of practice. Perhaps a less radical change would allow me to stay within the community, but move me to its periphery.
Wenger’s discussion of brokering in Chapter 4 was also extremely interesting to me because I actually feel like this is a role that I fit into, to some extent, in my current situation. As we all know, we can participate in more than one community at once and, according to Wenger, “our experience of multimembership always has the potential of creating various forms of continuity among them” (p. 105). I am currently both teacher and student at once- participating in both communities of practice within the same institution. Wenger describes brokering as “the use of multimembership to transfer some element of one practice into another” (p. 109). This semester I am co-teaching a class for pre-service teachers with my advisor and I feel that I am brokering my identity of teacher with my identity of student, combining the two and using one to influence the other at different times. This brokering, I believe, allows my students to identify more closely with me than they do with the “official” teacher of the course (my advisor). I am able to bring elements of being a student into my practice of being a teacher and the students respond positively to this by coming to me first to ask questions or for advice related to a class assignment. I am not, however, a student in their class. I am also not the instructor of record for the course, so I experience the phenomenon that Wenger mentions of belonging at the same time to both practices and neither (p. 109). This is sometimes a difficult position to be in because I am not seen by the students as the final “authority figure” of the course, nor am I seen as their peer. I am trying to figure out how to operate effectively in that gray area and bridge the two communities, both for my students and for myself. I realize that my students will also begin to go through this same process as they transition from solely students into students who are also teaching (during field experiences) and then into being solely teachers. As a broker I can (hopefully) help them through this process and make the transition somewhat smooth for them.
Sydney: Wenger focuses on identity as a mutual constitution between individuals and collectivities (p. 146). Our identity not only shapes our communities and our forms of belonging but also is the shaped by belonging to a social community. It is a two way street. Up to this point, I understood that “belonging to a community” in terms of identity construction requires a member of a community to be actively paticipating in and to have a strong bond among the members, however, my understanding changed when Wenger brought up that non-participation is as much a source of identity as participation (p. 164). From my experience, even though I belong to a new community as a Penn State student in the U.S., I don’t feel “truly” engaged in and participated in this community. I still feel much distance between where I am from and where I am. Thus, I kept wondering if I am a real member of this community and my identity is shaped by this community even though I feel I don’t much participate here. As a way to answer the question that keeps bothering me, Wenger describes that boundary relations between multimembership can bring the coexisting identities of participation and non-participation (p. 168). That is, being in one community implies being outside in other community. This might cause non-participation as compromise and it is also a defining constituent of participation. Wenger’s notion of identity clarifies that identity is constructed through our ongoing negotiated experience of being members in communities by both participation and non-participation in interrelated ways.
Synthesis
The point of convergence among all of our responses is the importance of identity and how it allows us to negotiate our memberships within our communities. Aaron and Sydney point to the idea that identity shapes the way in which we participate in a community. They also note Wenger’s assertion that identities can be shaped by non-participation in a community, as well as by participation. Michelle and Nicole focus on the idea of how members can bridge more than one identity and community membership (i.e. teacher educator and student). Both conversations add to the dialogue of identity as seminal to communities of practice. Might we suggest that the discontinuity inherent in a community’s practice mirrors the transformation that the identity of the community’s members experience? In other words, just like a community’s practice is fluid, so are the members’ identities. Identities can be changed at any time by the amount of participation or non-participation a member puts forward into their community. Wenger states that at times it is appropriate to step back from a community and take a look at how we fit into that community from the outside through imagination. Imagination allows us to redefine our identity and take on new practices and enterprises that can reshape our identity. This transformation and reshaping of identity then becomes part of the process of reification within a community.