CODA II: Learning Communities

Because learning transforms who we are and what we can do, it is an experience of identity. It is not just an accumulation of skills and information, but a process of becoming--to become a certain person or, conversely, to avoid becoming a certain person. (215)

Even the learning that we do entirely by ourselves eventually contributes to making us into a specific kind of person. We accumulate skills and information, not in the abstract as ends in themselves, but in the service of an identity. It is in that formation of an identity that learning can become a source of meaningfulness and of personal and social energy. (215)

(for Brad...it's all in the service of developing an identity of an EMS educator-- contrast the American Popular Culture course with the oral presentation class and his orientation towards these two courses and perhaps also his orientation towards that writing class--he didn't see it as in the service of his identity, but, instead, as forcing him to confront an earlier identity which he did not particular like or want to confront).

To support learning is not only to support the process of acquiring knowledge, but also to offer a place where new ways of knowing can be realized in the form of such an identity. If someone fails to learn as expected, it may therefore be necessary to consider, in addition to possible problems with the process, the lack of such a place as well as the competition of other places. In order to redirect learning, it may be necessary to offer learners alternative forms of participation that are as much a source of identity as they are finding elsewhere. (215)

As a trajectory, an identity must incorporate past and future. Learning communities will become places of identity to the extent they make trajectories possible--that is, to the extent they offer a past and a future that can be experienced as a personal trajectory (215)

A community can strengthen the identity of participation of its members in two related ways:

1. By incorporating its members' pasts into its history -- that is, by letting what they have been, what they have done, and what they know contribute to the constitution of its practice

2. by opening trajectories of participation that place engagement in its practice in the context of a valued future (215)

The potentially difficult work of reconciliation can be facilitated by communities that endeavor to encompass, within their own practice, an increasing portion of the nexus of multimembership of their members. ... In other words, the work of reconciliation can be integrated in the community's enterprise and thus, to some extent, become part of a shared learning practice. Such communities will not only gain the allegiance of their members, they will also enrich their own practices. (216)

identities of participation

If learning involves the ability to negotiate new meanings and become a new person, then it also involves new relations of identification and negotiability, new forms of membership and ownership of meaning, and thus changing positions within communities and economies of meaning. (219)

letting go of one's identity is both a loss and a liberation (219)

Access to information without negotiability serves only to intensify the alienating effects of non-participation. (220).

What makes information knowledge -- what makes it empowering -- is the way in which it can be integrated within an identity of participation. When information does not build up to an identity of participation, it remains alien, literal, fragmented, unnegotiable. It is not just that it is disconnected from other pieces of relevant information, but that it fails to translate into a way of being in the world coherent enough to be enacted in practice. (220)

...to know in practice is to have a certain identity so that information gains the coherence of a form of participation. (220)