First off, great video! For some reason it’s always easier for me to understand a message when it’s in some other format other than standard text. While watching your video I started to dig up part of my pre-teaching experience. When I was working on my pre-teaching I often ate lunch with my mentor teacher and other members of my school’s faculty. The first couple lunches were a little rough and I found it hard to join in with the discussions of the fellow teachers. It even seemed like several teachers had a clique going where they would just talk amongst themselves and hardly interact with anyone else. To get myself involved in with teachers I started to explain why I wanted to teach instead of working as a meteorologist to them. Several teachers gave me a look like “why are you here?” but others opened up to my response. My responses to the teachers started to bring out the reasons why they decided to teach. This sharing of responses would continue each day and eventually I started to find myself being welcomed into their community to the point when I was ending my pre-service teaching several of the teachers would crack jokes with me (where the joke would even be on me or something) and included me in conversations like I was one of them. This is something I did not expect to see during my pre-teaching career. I thought I would be just this college student eating with a bunch of teachers who have much more experience than I do with me sitting at the bottom of the totem poll. However, through interactions with the teachers and participation in several school functions such as assemblies, I found the teachers accepted me as one of their own and I fit right into their community. I established my own identity amongst the teachers that they became to know. I was able to share my beliefs about teaching and learn about beliefs of the other teachers as well. By learning their beliefs, I was able to sharpen my beliefs about teaching including the methods that I plan on using to teach.
Thanks so much for making this video. It hands-down beats paragraphs for me.
The connection between flair and identity caught my interest. The manager of the Tchotchke’s set rules on flair. He was trying to create an experience for the customers. The managers said that the flair was an opportunity for employees the express themselves. To relate this back to Macluhan, the flair is the message. The content of the flair didn’t matter. Joanna found flair to be humiliating and demotivating. Do teachers fall into this pattern, attempting to give students an outlet to express themselves, only to find the outlet itself carry’s its own expression of identity that may run contrary to the student’s own conception of his or her identity. danah boyd wrote about how the choice of social network (facebook or myspace) alone carried with it a statement on identity.
MATTHEW J HEFFRONsays
It was interesting to see a video post instead of the usual text this week. The idea of flair as your identity was something different. I often wonder about what some people are thinking about me, don’t care what some people think about me, and want to change people’s opinion of me all at the same time. It is so confusing sometimes why we choose to act certain ways or wear our “flair” around certain people. Why do people develop a need to adapt to the situation and when does this change occur?
Aaron – I think that your pre-teaching experience reflects Wenger’s ideas about how a community of practice is something that is constantly changing over time and being constantly being renegotiated, and also that practice is a shared history of learning.
In other words,communities of practice produce their membership in the same way that they come about in the first place They share their competence with new generations through a version of the same process by which they develop. (p102)
The teachers in that lunchroom probably remembered that they were in your shoes at some point, and that acceptance into the teacher community was an important step in their own development. They may have also recognized that their identity within that community, by nature of the community, was to welcome you in and ensure the next generation of teacher was properly prepared.
Wenger also talks about generational discontinuities (p99) and the idea that as you engage in an older generation in the context of practice, like you were in the lunchroom, that this is essential to learning. Again, maybe the teachers were teaching you a social lesson about how teachers act around each other, as a critical step in entering that community of practice one day.
MEGAN KOHLERsays
First off – this was a fantastic video!! I absolutely loved how you pulled it all together and made it so relevant to our course readings. This was such a great way to describe the concepts of identity and community. Information is usually much more easily understood when applied to an example, and this was a great one.
I also liked the comparison of Identity to flair. I think this can be further explored by the concept of the digital footprint we leave on the web. Do we contribute enough for others to have a clear understanding of who we are and what we are about? Are the applications we choose to use considered our web flair? Is it beneficial for us to participate in a ton of applications to increase our ‘web flair’ or is it our level of interaction with those apps that more clearly defines our identity?
DOLORES M BODERsays
While working on this video, looking at the readings and sharing ideas with my team members, I started to think about the role that flair plays in the various senarios we find ourselves in. Why DO we have different flair for different situations? I think this comes back to the question that I posed to Brad a few weeks ago: Do we use technology because we enjoy it or because we want to remain apart of a particular community? If knowledge is socially constructed then aren’t we forced to learn how to interact with the community in the “latest, coolest” way in order to continue learning?
@Aaron: Your comments about your pre-teaching experience reminds me of when I am the “new” person at a job or when the place I work for hires a “new” person. The new person is expected to put a lot of effort into fitting in and assimilating themselves into the new community. This is very relateable to how Wenger described communities of practice as not being “islands of intimacy”. We may have to work together to complete a task but we don’t have to be friends to do it.
AARON D BILBY says
First off, great video! For some reason it’s always easier for me to understand a message when it’s in some other format other than standard text. While watching your video I started to dig up part of my pre-teaching experience. When I was working on my pre-teaching I often ate lunch with my mentor teacher and other members of my school’s faculty. The first couple lunches were a little rough and I found it hard to join in with the discussions of the fellow teachers. It even seemed like several teachers had a clique going where they would just talk amongst themselves and hardly interact with anyone else. To get myself involved in with teachers I started to explain why I wanted to teach instead of working as a meteorologist to them. Several teachers gave me a look like “why are you here?” but others opened up to my response. My responses to the teachers started to bring out the reasons why they decided to teach. This sharing of responses would continue each day and eventually I started to find myself being welcomed into their community to the point when I was ending my pre-service teaching several of the teachers would crack jokes with me (where the joke would even be on me or something) and included me in conversations like I was one of them. This is something I did not expect to see during my pre-teaching career. I thought I would be just this college student eating with a bunch of teachers who have much more experience than I do with me sitting at the bottom of the totem poll. However, through interactions with the teachers and participation in several school functions such as assemblies, I found the teachers accepted me as one of their own and I fit right into their community. I established my own identity amongst the teachers that they became to know. I was able to share my beliefs about teaching and learn about beliefs of the other teachers as well. By learning their beliefs, I was able to sharpen my beliefs about teaching including the methods that I plan on using to teach.
Brad Kozlek says
Thanks so much for making this video. It hands-down beats paragraphs for me.
The connection between flair and identity caught my interest. The manager of the Tchotchke’s set rules on flair. He was trying to create an experience for the customers. The managers said that the flair was an opportunity for employees the express themselves. To relate this back to Macluhan, the flair is the message. The content of the flair didn’t matter. Joanna found flair to be humiliating and demotivating. Do teachers fall into this pattern, attempting to give students an outlet to express themselves, only to find the outlet itself carry’s its own expression of identity that may run contrary to the student’s own conception of his or her identity. danah boyd wrote about how the choice of social network (facebook or myspace) alone carried with it a statement on identity.
MATTHEW J HEFFRON says
It was interesting to see a video post instead of the usual text this week. The idea of flair as your identity was something different. I often wonder about what some people are thinking about me, don’t care what some people think about me, and want to change people’s opinion of me all at the same time. It is so confusing sometimes why we choose to act certain ways or wear our “flair” around certain people. Why do people develop a need to adapt to the situation and when does this change occur?
Chris Millet says
Aaron – I think that your pre-teaching experience reflects Wenger’s ideas about how a community of practice is something that is constantly changing over time and being constantly being renegotiated, and also that practice is a shared history of learning.
The teachers in that lunchroom probably remembered that they were in your shoes at some point, and that acceptance into the teacher community was an important step in their own development. They may have also recognized that their identity within that community, by nature of the community, was to welcome you in and ensure the next generation of teacher was properly prepared.
Wenger also talks about generational discontinuities (p99) and the idea that as you engage in an older generation in the context of practice, like you were in the lunchroom, that this is essential to learning. Again, maybe the teachers were teaching you a social lesson about how teachers act around each other, as a critical step in entering that community of practice one day.
MEGAN KOHLER says
First off – this was a fantastic video!! I absolutely loved how you pulled it all together and made it so relevant to our course readings. This was such a great way to describe the concepts of identity and community. Information is usually much more easily understood when applied to an example, and this was a great one.
I also liked the comparison of Identity to flair. I think this can be further explored by the concept of the digital footprint we leave on the web. Do we contribute enough for others to have a clear understanding of who we are and what we are about? Are the applications we choose to use considered our web flair? Is it beneficial for us to participate in a ton of applications to increase our ‘web flair’ or is it our level of interaction with those apps that more clearly defines our identity?
DOLORES M BODER says
While working on this video, looking at the readings and sharing ideas with my team members, I started to think about the role that flair plays in the various senarios we find ourselves in. Why DO we have different flair for different situations? I think this comes back to the question that I posed to Brad a few weeks ago: Do we use technology because we enjoy it or because we want to remain apart of a particular community? If knowledge is socially constructed then aren’t we forced to learn how to interact with the community in the “latest, coolest” way in order to continue learning?
@Aaron: Your comments about your pre-teaching experience reminds me of when I am the “new” person at a job or when the place I work for hires a “new” person. The new person is expected to put a lot of effort into fitting in and assimilating themselves into the new community. This is very relateable to how Wenger described communities of practice as not being “islands of intimacy”. We may have to work together to complete a task but we don’t have to be friends to do it.