Our group decided to post individual thoughts and a synthesis this week.
MICHELLE:
One thing that was interesting to me in the reading for this week was the idea of participation/non-participation. Our group has talked about this before, but this quote really stood out to me this time: “The mix of participation and non-participation that shapes our identities has to do with communities in which we become invested, but it also has to do with our ability to shape the meanings that define these communities.” (p. 188). It is again this cyclical relationship between community and identity. My community shapes my identity and my identity shapes my community. At this point I wonder if it is ever possible (or even desirable) to separate the two. Does a change in my identity necessitate a change in my community? Does a change in my community necessitate a change in my identity? Hmm…
The discussion of learning communities was also really interesting to me. Because he believes that learning entails both a process and a place, Wenger seems to be saying that it is a process of becoming (transforming our identities) within a community of practice, which he says is a “privileged locus for the acquisition of knowledge” (p. 214). I am struggling a bit with what Wenger means by “privileged” here. Is he saying that communities of practice are the best (or at least better) places for learning? If so, I wonder if this is true (that COPs are privileged) given the fact that it is possible for me to learn things on my own. Does my learning improve or change in some way because I do it within a community of practice? Can I learn just as well outside of one? Obviously the process would be different, but would it (learning outside of a COP) be any less effective? This makes me think about our discussion of open education and students who do online courses or independent study classes. Is the quality of their learning different than the quality of learning of students who do so in a “traditional” classroom setting?
Finally, on p. 217 Wenger says that “our communities must have a place for us that does justice to the transformations of identity that reflection and excursions can produce.” When I think about this in terms of teaching, it reminds me that as teachers we need to help our students reflect on their learning so that they can better understand themselves. We also need to help them step outside of themselves and take different perspectives (this is how I interpret excursion) so that they can better understand others. We need to provide communities in which our students are safe to “try on” the new identities that come about as the result of the learning that is taking place. Wenger says that learning transforms who we are (which I think is totally true- I am certainly not the same person that I was when I started my PhD program in August) and we need to be mindful that our students are actually changing as a result of what they are taking in. We are not simply filling empty vessels with knowledge; we are impacting, in one way or another, who our students are (or at least how they perceive themselves to be).
AARON:
On page 211 Wenger states “Working with the economy of meaning can be a way to preserve the community by sharing ownership of meaning. For instance, involving everyone in a decision complicates the process of arriving at that decision and may bring into the open all kinds of disagreements. Yet this sharing of ownership of meaning may well result in a deeper commitment to the community”. This quote really stuck out to me because I wonder how common is this example in the real world. How many of us like making decisions, especially tough ones? What about decisions made by school boards? Should they include everyone in the district community including the general public to offer input into the decision or should they make the decision behind closed doors? Granted by bringing in the “public” (and by “public” I really want to say community members but I don’t want to offer any confusion here) one would expect more disagreement as stated above, but it would also strengthen the school board’s position in the whole community.
Then on page 212 Wenger explains why we form communities. “We form communities not because we fall short of an ideal of individualism or freedom, but because identification is at the very core of the social nature of our identities and so we define even our individualism and our freedom in that context. On the other hand, communities give rise to economies of meaning not because we are evil, self-interested, or short-sighted, but because negotiability – and thus contestability – is at the very core of the social nature of our meanings and so we construct even our shared values in that contest.”
With these two quotes I then move into the learning community which I feel ties these quotes together with (page 219) “A learning community confronts structural issues of identification and negotiability both internally and externally. A learning community is therefore fundamentally involved in social reconfiguration: its own internally as well as its position within broader configurations” (page 220).
NICOLE:
In this last section of the book, Wenger attends to the definition of participation, specifically dealing with non-participation. It is clear that the idea of difference has a large affect on how community involvement helps form identity: “We not only produce our identities through practices we engage in, but we also define ourselves through practices we do not engage in” (p. 164). Communities as a whole emphasize our abilities to construct identity through “relations of belonging or not belonging.” It is within difference that communities and identities are constructed. The idea of difference here remind me of the works of constructionists like Foucalt and the idea that meaning is relational, that we understand a word or concept not for what it is, but for what it is not. According to Stuart Hall, “If you couldn’t differentiate between Red and Green, you couldn’t use one to mean ‘Stop’ and the other to mean ‘Go'” (Hall, Representation). We can also connect the concept to Gee. For example, I know I’m not a gang member because I belong to a Discourse of …
Another area of Wenger’s argument reminiscent of Foucault is his idea of power. Wenger views matters of power “in terms of the negotiation of meaning and the formation of identities – that is, as a property of social communities” (p. 189). My interpretation of Foucalt is that he understood the same negotiation of meaning was inherent in social practices. Though meaning, for Foucalt, came from small d discourse, which deemphasized the role of the participants (to use Wenger’s term) in actively constructing that meaning. Wenger, in contrast, asserted that power was a social concept created by a community.
The concept that there are types of communities beyond communities of practice seems like a concrete connection to our discussion of the bad driver comes into play (p. 181). Just because a large number of people like the same television show does not make that group a community of practice, according to Wenger. With this in mind, does the term “bad driver” refer to a community of practice? Probably not. Does it refer to a different type of community? Perhaps. As Wenger says, “Belonging to such a community can contribute to the identities of those involved, even if it does not involve the joint development of a shared practice” (p. 182).
Maybe I missed this in the reading, but one question that I have in particular is how do Engagement, Imagination, and Alignment concretely differ from participation? Wenger referred to them as “modes of belonging” (p. 172) – how do they go beyond just different ways of participating?
SYDNEY:
The modes of belonging -engagement, imagination, and alignment- are the important ingredients of understanding how communities are constituted. When focusing on the mechanism of community formation, the various combination of these three ingredients explains the variety of community types. The changing relations between these three elements over time analyzes the transformations of these communities (p. 183).
I found it interesting that the modes of belonging- engagement, imagination, and alignment- are also important elements of learning. The three factors that explain the construction of communities also apply to the dynamics of learning. A community of practice can be a learning community enlightening the fact that a community provides the place for “the acquisition of knowledge” and “the creation of knowledge” (p. 214). Wenger mentions combining the modes of belonging, saying that the three elements anchor learning “in practice yet make it broad, creative and effective in the wider world” (p. 217). Such combinations allow “a learning community to move in various ways between participation and non-participation in order to create a richer context for learning” (p. 217). I think that community provides an opportunity of becoming members within a community by giving context for developing new understanding, negotiating between new meanings and identity, and transforming identity accordingly. It seems to me that multimembership provides more learning sources.
SYNTHESIS:
Many of the ideas about community mentioned in our responses above can be related to the current hot topic of the 2010 US Census. Here is a video in which non-participation is being encouraged:
*Does the rationale behind why this guy doesn’t want to participate in the census mean that he isn’t part of a community of political citizens?
*What does it do to a community when some members encourage others into willing non-participation?
*To what level are dissidents still members of the original community? Does their extreme non-participation shift their membership in some way?
On the opposite side, here is a video that is encouraging participation from a particular segment of the population (Thai)
*We wonder what impact this ad (and others like it for other communities) actually has on the members of the community. Does it really make them decide to participate if they had previously decided not to? Does it sway someone who might previously have been ambivalent?
*If a person chooses non-participation in this situation is he/she viewed as somehow hurting the community because his/her participation would (might?) bring some benefit to the community?
Brad Kozlek says
Non-participation in the census is an important part of participation in certain communities, I would think. I feel the guy in the video is not non-participating as much as he is strongly participating in an anti-census community.
So much political discussion that happens in this country depends on knowledge of specific use of certain words. I have in the past spent a lot of time watching talking head screaming match shows, reading political blogs, and commentary from other sources. For better or worse I don’t do this anymore. Still though, when I might see a politician or columnist on TV, I tend to be able to tell very quickly if they are right or left based on how they use language, and which kind of loaded phrases they are using. At the same time, other people I know are not able to tell which side a person is on easily, as they do not have the experience with hearing these phrases. I have observed this many times. I guess you need to be engaged in observing political “debate” to have the ability at their disposal to easily decode the signals being sent by participants they they use to classify themselves.
DOLORES M BODER says
I think that non-participation shows a great disinterest in the community that you are…not participating in…(?) if that makes sense. We have all been forced to “be a part of” a community that we had no desire to be a part of, especially in education. Students have very little say in what classes they take until they get to college, and even then there are general education requirements. Is non-participation a backlash of forced participation?