Communities of Practice (notes and questions)

As studies have shown, the vast majority of adult students participate in some form of work. This is both one of their defining characteristics and also a characteristic which distinguishes adults from many traditional-age students.

• What kinds of professional communities of practice do NSC study participants participate in?
• What identities within such communities do NSC study participants inhabit?
• What role does writing play and what written genres do NSC study participants produce within their communities of practice?

BIG PICTURE QUESTION: What are the implications of adult students' participation in professional "communities of practice" (Wenger 1999) for those who teach writing to adults?

1. Adult students identities, as shaped by their participation in workplace communities of practice may, at times, conflict with the novice or novitiate identity demanded of them in school.
2. 
   

Two factors shaping Tony's participation:

1. His status as a veteran or old-timer in his community of practice and perhaps discomfort with the novice position necessitated by participation the COP at GSC.

2. His past struggles with education and literacy instruction.

Can I use Tony as the vehicle for talking about these two things? To organize the chapters around his experience and to use his experience as suggestive of the two questions we might ask about adults as we work with them. I feel like I'm moving far away from writing/literacy...

I'm feeling, more and more, like this distinction between students-who-work and employees-who-study is a meaningful one in the sense that students who work--take Sarah Knox, perhaps have less defined roles within their workplaces and therefore their identities are less calcified. They are, in some ways, more like traditional age students in their willingness to assume the identity of newcomer or novice in the academic context.

But for employees-who-study, the negotiation seems a bit more complex--I'm thinking of Joe and Tony here, in particular. Their identities as old-timers are more established, the transition to novice is going to take a good deal more negotiation and perhaps even struggle.

So,

students who work = newcomers, workplace identities less entrenched

employees who study = oldtimers, workplace identities more entrenched

Another thought...what I have a good deal of data on in his composing of the entitlement generation essay. This is a specific kind of academic discourse and I need to situate that, I think. Liberal arts. Humanities. Writing as reflection. There are a number of issues that I can discuss/analyze via this essay if I can have this essay stand in as a typical form of academic discourse:

genre knowledge

desires

identity

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...the primary focus of this theory is on learning as social participation. Participation here refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities. Participating in a playground clique or in a work team, for instance, is both a kind of action and a form of belonging. Such participation shapes not only what we do, but also who we are and how we interpret what we do. (4)

Identity: a way of talking about how learning changes who we are and creates personal histories of becoming in the context of our communities. (5)

I am intrigued by this notion of TRAJECTORY (Chapter 6: Identity in Practice) as a lens for thinking about where adult students are...what is the nature of the trajectory they are on professionally and how does this shape their expectations or what they bring to school?