Moving Toward a Group Identity: WPA Professionalization from the 1940s to the 1970s

Heckathorn, Amy. "Moving Toward a Group Identity: WPA Professionalization from the 1940s to the 1970s." In Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline (Eds. Barbara L'Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo). West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. 191-219.

Two eras of WPA History

• Early Era (1940-63): when WPAs began to publicly identify the individual problems confronting professionalization as writing program administration surfaced in relation to discussions of teaching composition
• Transitional Era (1964-79): when WPAs gained more public responsibility and acknowledged and began to form a group identity to address the problems hindering professionalization (192)

Interesting Timeline Stuff (1970s)

• 1972: Freshman English News founded (first journal aimed at WPAs and FYW instructors)
• 1976-77, the majority of ads (sixteen of twenty) specified that WPAs should have composition as a primary area of study. Thus, although still rarely detailing the complexity of administrative duties, the actual job descriptions for WPAs reflected the growing professional identity of composition scholarship and writing program administration. (202)
• 1977/79: Writing Program Administrators Newsletter and then Journal founded
• 1977: The WPA Council founded (see p. 208-09)

Modes of Belonging, Participation, and Identification (Wenger)

Key Terms:

1. Modes of Belonging
2. Identity


Modes of Belonging

[Our] identities as workers are affected by the picture [we] build of [our] position. (173)

Identity formation…

Wenger suggests that in order to make sense of identity formation, we must consider three distinct modes of belonging:

• Engagement: active involvement in mutual processes of negotiation of meaning
• Imagination: creating images of the world and seeing connections through time and space by extrapolating from our own experience.
• Alignment: coordinating our energy and activities in order to fit within broader structures and contribute to broader enterprises. (174)

Though engagement, imagination, and alignment are distinct modes of belonging, they are not mutually exclusive. A given community can be constituted by all three in various proportions. And the variety of these combinations results in communities with distinct qualities.

One mode of belonging may affect another (183)

…relations between engagement, imagination, and alignment are not fixed over time (183)

Because each mode involves trade-offs, it is not useful to think of one mode as better than the others in terms of potential for learning and identity. In fact, most of what we do involves a combination of engagement, imagination, and alignment, though more emphasis on one or the other gives a distinct quality to our actions and their meanings. One reason for distinguishing among engagement, imagination, and alignment is that they require different conditions and kinds of work. (183-84)

Because engagement, imagination, and alignment each have different but complementary strengths and weaknesses, they work best in combination. (187)

Engagement

Is it the most basic mode of belonging? Membership is based on mutual engagement in a community of practice.

“Being included in what matters” (74)

Through engagement, participants do not necessarily understand the world, each other’s experiences, or their shared enterprise more accurately. Mutual engagement merely creates a shared reality in which to act and construct an identity. Imagination is another process for creating such a reality (177)

He claims that engagement, as a mode of belonging, has a “bounded character”—meaning, I think, that there are limits to ones ability to engage (?)

Engagement “affords the power to negotiate our enterprises and thus to shape the context in which we can construct and experience an identity of competence. (175)

Engagement can be narrow. The understanding inherent in shared practice is not necessarily one that gives members broad access to the histories of relations with other practices that shape their own practice. Through engagement, competence can become so transparent, locally ingrained, and socially efficacious that it becomes insular: nothing else, no other viewpoint, can even register, let alone create a disturbance or a discontinuity that would spur the history of practice onward. (175)

The Work of Engagement

[engagement] requires the ability to take part in meaningful activities and interactions, in the production of sharable artifacts, in community-building conversations, and in the negoation of new situations. It implies a sustained intensity and relations of mutuality. (184)

In terms of participation, engagement requires access to and interaction with other participants in the course of their own engagement. (184)

Engagement also requires the ability and the legitimacy to make contributions to the pursuit of an enterprise, to the negotiation of meaning, and to the development of a shared practice. (184)

In terms of reification, engagement requires access to the full reificative paraphernalia of practice in the course of its use: symbols, tools, language, documents, and the like. (184-185)

Imagination

My use of the concept of imagination refers to a process of expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves. (176)

Imagination is an important component of our experience of the world and our sense of place in it. It can make a big difference for our experience of identity and the potential for learning inherent in our activities. (176)

This brings to mind the story of about the two stonecutters who are asked what they are doing. One responds: “I am cutting this stone in a perfectly square shape.” The other responds, “I am building a cathedral.” Both answers are correct and meaningful, but they reflect different relations to the world. The difference between these answers does not imply that one is a better stonecutter than the other, as far as holding the chisel is concerned. At the level of engagement, they may well be doing exactly the same thing. But it does suggest that their experiences of what they are doing and their sense of self in doing it are rather different. This difference is a function of imagination. (176)

My use of the concept of imagination refers to a process of expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves. Imagination in this sense is looking at an apple seed and seeing a tree. It is playing scales on a piano, and envisioning a concert hall. It is entering a temple and knowing that the ritual you are performing is performed and has been performed by millions throughout the world. (176).

The term imagination is sometimes used to connote personal fantasies, withdrawal from reality, or mistaken as opposed to factual conclusions. My use of the term, however, emphasizes the creative process of producing new “images” and of generating new relations through time and space that become constitutive of the self….imagination involves a different kind of work of the self – one that concerns the production of images of the self and images of the world that transcend engagement. (177)

[imagination] can project our experience beyond the sounding board of mutual engagement.

The creative character of imagination is anchored in social interactions and communal experiences. Imagination in this sense is not just the production of personal fantasies. Far from an individual withdrawal from reality, it is a mode of belonging that always involves the social world to expand the scope of reality and identity. (178)

Through imagination, we can locate ourselves in the world and in history, and include in our identities other meanings, other possibilities, other perspectives. It is through imagination that we recognize our own experience as reflecting broader patterns, connections, and configurations. It is through imagination that we see our own practices as continuing histories that reach far into the past, and it is through imagination that we conceive of new developments, explore alternatives, and envision possible futures…imagination can make us consider our own position with new eyes…it can recast the present and show it as holding unsuspecting possibilities. (178)

Imagination does not necessarily result in a coordination of action. One can imagine what it was like to be a knight, but one does not necessarily adopt the code of chivalry for oneself. (179)

The Work of Imagination

Imagination requires the ability to disengage – to move back and look at our engagement through the eyes of an ousider. It requires the ability to explore, take risks, and create unlikely connections. It demands some degree of playfulness. (185)

Imagination requires the ability to dislocate participation and reification in order to reinvent ourselves, our enterprises, our practices, and our communities. (185)

Alignment

Like imagination, alignment is a mode of belonging that is not confined to mutual engagement. (178)

Through alignment, we become part of something big because we do what it takes to play our part. What alignment brings into the picture is a scope of action writ large, of coordinated enterprises on a large scale, not inherent in engagement or in imagination. (179)

Of claims processors, Wenger writes, “Claims processors can easily imagine that a large number of people do similar work under similar conditions, but they do not translate this understanding into action. They are not unionized and express no interest in being so; their professional identity does not congeal into any kind of global or political activism beyond their local engagement in work. (179)

Neither engagement in shared practice nor imagination entails alignment and, in turn, alignment does not entail mutual engagement or imagination. (179)

…imagination can change both our understanding of alignment and our ability to control it—because imagination helps build a picture of how our part fits—but this is different from viewing alignment and imagination as equivalent, or as implying or subsuming each other. (180)

Because alignment concerns directing and controlling energy, it likewise concerns power: the power over one’s own energy to exercise alignment and the power to inspire and demand alignment. (180).

Alignment “expands the scope of our effects on the world.”
Alignment can “amplify our power and our sense of the possible.” (180)

…how alignment is secured (183)

The Work of Alignment

Alignment requires the ability to coordinate perspectives and actions in order to direct energies to a common purpose. (186)

…alignment requires the ability to communicate purpose, needs, methods, and criteria. (186)

Identification

Identification: “The process through which modes of belonging become constitutive of our identities by creating bonds or distinctions in which we become invested” (191)

Identification has the following characteristics:

• It is both participative and reificative – reificactive in the sense that we are identified “as” something or someone – a category, a description, a role (paramedic) and participative in the sense that we identify “with” something or someone (191).
• It is both something we do to ourselves and something we do to each other. We identify with a community and, conversely, are recognized as a member of a community. We think of ourselves in terms of labels – I am a grown-up, an introvert, an opera lover – and, conversely, we are labeled by others as a good or bad pupil, a terrific or terrible teacher, a popular student or a weirdo.
• Identification can be both positive and negative in the sense that it includes relations that shape what we are and what we are not. It includes what we enjoy being and what we dread. It engenders identities of both participation and non-participation. (191)

Identification is not merely a relation between people, but between participants and the constituents of their social existence, which includes other participants, social configurations, categories, enterprises, actions, artifacts, and so forth. (192)

Identification through engagement

In the context of engagement, identification takes place in the doing; hence, the development of competence, the negotiation of a trajectory, and the work of reconciliation across boundaries are not necessarily self-conscious. (193)

The process of identity formation can remain largely transparent because our identities can develop by being engaged in action without being themselves the focus of attention. (193)

Identification through imagination

Imagination is thus an important source of identification, one that takes the process beyond engagement in a variety of ways. Indeed, beyond engagement, identification depends on the kind of picture of the world and of ourselves we can build. It depends on the connections we can envision across history and across the social landscape. Through these connections, identification expands through time and space, and our identities take on new dimensions. (194)

Imagination can yield a sense of affinity, and thus an identity of participation, but it can also result in a reaction of dissociation and a consequent identity of non-participation. (195)

Identity of Participation

Participation: "a complex process that combines doing, talking, thinking, feeling, and belonging. It involves our whole person, including our bodies, minds, emotions, and social relations." (56)

What I take to characterize participation is the possibility of mutual recognition. (56)

In this experience of mutuality, participation is a source of identity. (56)

a defining characteristic of participation is the possibility of developing an "identity of participation," that is, an identity constituted through relations of participation. (56)

Combining Modes of Belonging

Engagement and Imagination

The combination of engagement and imagination results in a reflective practice. Such a practice combines the ability both to engage and to distance -- to identify with an enterprise as well as to view it in context, with the eyes of an outsider. Imagination enables us to adopt other perspectives across boundaries and time, to visit "otherness" and let it speak its own language. It also allows us to include history in our sense of the present and to explore possible futures. (217)

...engagement provides a place for imagination to land, to be negotiated in practice and realized into identities of participation. This process requires an opening of participation that allows imagination to have effects beyond itself so we may learn from it by bringing it back into a form of engagement. (217)

Imagination and Alignment

The combination of imagination and alignment produces the ability to act with respect to a broad and rich picture of the world. We align our activities and we understand why. We have a vision and it helps us situate what we are doing and make it effective. We have a big picture and we do something about it in concert with others. We can therefore embrace that big picture as part of our identity because it reflects the scope of our imagination as well as the scope of effects of our actions. (218)

Engagement and Alignment

The combination of engagement and alignment brings various perspectives together in the process of creating some coordination between them. (218)

Boundaries

Moving from one community of practice to another can demand quite a transformation (103).

the range of related communities of practice (103)

Communities of Practice

Communities of practice cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the world, or understood independently of other practices. (103)

Joining a community of practice involves entering not only its internal configuration but also its relations with the rest of the world. (103)

We can participate in multiple communities of practice at once. (105)

Participation and Non-Participation

Multimembership

I have argued that multimembership is a critical source of learning because it forces an alignment of perspectives in the negotiation of an engaged identity. (218)

Reification

The process by which "aspects of human experience and practice are congealed into fixed forms and given the status of an object" (59).

Trajectories

Identity

Who we are lies in the way we live day to day, not just in what we think or say about ourselves, though that is of course part (but only part) of the way we live. (151)

identity is "produced as a lived experience of participation in specific communities" (151).

An identity, then, is a layering of events of participation and reification by which our experience and its social interpretation inform each other. As we encounter our effects on the world, and develop our relations with others, these layers build upon each other to produce our identity as a very complex interweaving of participative experience and reificative projections. (151)

In the same way that meaning exists in its negotiation, identity exists -- not as an object in and of itself --but in the constant work of negotiating the self. (151)

CHAPTER 10: Learning Architectures

From "Synopsis":

Those who can understand the informal yet structured, experiential yet social, character of learning -- and can translate their insight into designs in the service of learning -- will be the architects of our tomorrow. (225)

Nothing else from this chapter...thoroughly confused.

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)

Applying the Theoretical Framework (Part 1)

See: "Indigenous Interests": Reconciling Literate Identities across Extracurricular and Curricular Contexts" 139-162 in Reinventing Identities in Second Language Writing.

While we view the different perspectives that older students bring as resources, teaching them well will likely require that we rethink our notion of whom we teach and our assumptions about them. Having older students may ultimately affect our assignment-making, class discussions, and dynamics inside and outside the classroom just as having students from a variety of linguistic and ethnic backgrounds often does.
—Beverly Moss and Keith Walters (“Rethinking Diversity” 166)

In addition to the increase in the number of students from diverse ethnic backgrounds who will attend college in the coming years, the average age of students attending college will continue to rise, a tendency already clear in many schools. Consequently, no longer can we expect our first-year writing courses to be made up of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students fresh out of high school. Our older students may include wives, husbands, single parents, military veterans, full-time workers, and part-timers of many sorts… Although we know of no research concerning the ways in which the presence of this population might affect the writing classroom, we know from personal experience that these students have different kinds of goals and different strategies for reaching them than their younger classmates.

--Beverly J. Moss and Keith Walters, “Rethinking Diversity: Axes of Difference in the Writing Classroom” (451)

• Point 1: Adult students are not a monolithic population, what perhaps best defines the adult students in higher education is the diversity within this population.

• Point 2: One way of thinking about this diversity is offered in an NCES study that found two different groups of adults who participate in higher education—employees who study and students who work. These are two different kinds of students who bring different histories and experiences, motivations, and goals to the classroom. One key difference between these two groups is the role of employment or work—whereas students who work often work part-time and pursue their studies on a more full-time basis, employees who study take classes more slowly and are often defined by their relationships to their work.

• Point 3: While both employees who study and students who work participated in the NSC study, I will be focusing primarily on the a single case study of an employee who studies, Tony Vaccaro. I will use Tony’s case as a way of raising questions, generally, about the role of literacy and schooling in the lives of adult students classified as employees-who-study.

• Point 4: Because adult students like Tony did not pursue the “typical” route through post-secondary study and are often positioned as newcomers or outsiders by the institutions in which they enroll in the fact that they must often take first-year writing courses, there may be a tendency to think of such students in terms of what they lack: basic or functional writing skills, confidence in literate abilities, success with academic literacy, a positive orientation towards literacy instruction. They are defined by what they don’t have—a college degree. If we apply the standard model to these students, the linear model where one graduates from high school, pursues higher education, and finds work, it may appear that these students have missed something or are missing something—and that it is, thus, our job to give that something that they do not have to them. We think of them as a glass that needs to be filled.

• Point 5:

So I have these two notions—

Whereas, once, schools were the primary disseminators of literacy, over the course of the twentieth century, Brandt asserts, the number of literacy “sponsors” expanded to the point where Americans’ literacy now develops at the hands of a diverse range of “sponsors.” “A proliferation of sponsors,” Brandt writes, “also means that people who move—sometimes from culture to culture—transport their literacy from one context to another or must adapt and amalgamate practices learned in one sphere to meet the new demands of another sphere” (198).

What I am interested in, in this book, is the movement of students from one literate context to another. Here is where I can connect to Wenger—because what these individuals are really doing is moving from one community of practice to another—each of the five employees who study who participated in this study were embedded to a considerable to degree in their workplace communities of practice. Thus, I am thinking of adult students less as students who are missing something or empty, but rather, as individuals like me or anyone else, negotiating their way between different communities of practice and the literate demands they face in these locations. I now see these students as facing “the challenges faced by all literacy learners.” The problem is somehow the notion that academic literacy precedes other forms of literacy.

Of her research participants’ literacy stories, Brandt writes,

these accounts suggest that what is unprecedented about literacy learning (and teaching) in the current climate is not so much a demand for literacy that seems chronically to outstrip supply, but rather the challenges faced by all literacy learners in a society whose rapid changes are themselves tied up so centrally with literacy and its enterprises” (651).

Literate identity: “one’s sense of oneself as a literate person in the world” (140)

Tony’s literate pursuits at NSC are shaped to a considerable degree by two factors:

1. His previous relationships to literacy activities and academic communities.
2. His current participation in his workplace community of practice

To a considerable degree, his ability to participate in the NSC community of practice were shaped by his earlier experiences of literacy instruction and the sense of himself that he had constructed as a result of those earlier experiences.

It occurs to me that Tony is balancing two conflicting identities. There is the identity of competence that he is able to produce in some instances in the workplace—particularly when he is allowed to employ multimodal composing tools and there is the identity of competence he has assumed by the nature of his status within the field (EMS educator/consultant, paramedic, Training Coordinator within ACME). And then there is the legacy of the identity that he carries from his earlier life, which is one of incompetence and failure and frustration.
Tony is balancing his multimembership.

So, the process of entering into a community of practice—in some cases, the COP is entirely new, one has no experience with or of it. In other cases, one may have experience with it, a history of involvement.

Key Terms: Marginal and Peripheral, boundaries, trajectories

My key term: Histories of participation (Wenger doesn’t really talk about the histories of participation that individuals bring to their participation in communities of practice)

I have argued that we know who we are by what is familiar and by what we can negotiate and make us of, and that we know who we are not by what is unfamiliar, unwieldy, and out of our purview. We not only produce our identities through the practices we engage in, but we also define ourselves through practices we do not engage in. Our identities are constituted not only by what we are but also by what we are not. In other words, non-participation is, in a reverse kind of fashion, as much a source of identity as participation. (164)

Non-participation is an inevitable part of living in a landscape of practices (165)

A coherent identity is of necessity a mixture of being in and being out (165)
TONY: I don’t read novels.

Wenger explains that there are two ways in which participation and non-participation can interact:

• Peripherality: some degree of non-participation is necessary to enable a kind of participation that is less than full. Here, it is the participation aspect that dominates and defines the non-participation as an enabling factor of participation.
• Marginality: a form of non-participation prevents full participation. Here it is the non-participation aspect that dominates and comes to define a restricted form of participation. (165-66)

Peripherality and marginality both involve a mix of participation and non-participation, and the line between them can be subtle. Yet, they produce qualitatively different experiences and identities, so it would be wrong to associate them to closely. (166)

Would I define Tony’s engagement as “a restricted form of participation”? Sort of. I am thinking about that story he tells of being left in the raft while the boat sails away—a powerful metaphor of non-participation or marginality.

The difference between peripherality and marginality must be understood in the context of trajectories that determine the significance of forms of participation. (166)

Whether non-participation becomes peripherality or marginality depends on relations of participation that render non-participation either enabling or problematic. (167)

A range of forms of participation with four main categories:

• Full participation (insider)
• Full non-participation (outsider)
• Peripherality (participation enabled by non-participation, whether it leads to full participation or remains on a peripheral trajectory)
• Marginality (participation restricted by non-participation, whether it leads to non-membership or to a marginal position).

I am thinking about Tony’s story of joining the marines after high school—there was no way he was going to continue with school.

The mix of participation and non-participation through which we define our identities reflects our power as individuals and communities to define and affect our relations to the rest of the world. It shapes such fundamental aspects of our lives as:

1. how we locate ourselves in the 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’m thinking of the contrast in the stories Tony told about his American Pop Culture course and his speech or oral presentation class—how he was drawn to the latter and generally did as little as possible in the former. I’m also drawn to the terms neglect and ignore—thinking about his avoidance of the paper in favor of the PPT presentation and his avoidance of the first-year writing class altogether.

How non-participation in an institutional context can become a defining characteristic of practice. (169)

…the identities of non-participation that they develop with respect to the institution and to the content of their work are an integral part of their identities of participation in their own communities of practice. (172)

CHAPTER 8: Modes of Belonging

Imagination is an important component of our experience of the world and our place in it. It can make a big difference for our experience of identity and the potential for learning inherent in our activities. This brings to mind the story about the two stonecutters who are asked what they are doing. One responds: "I am cutting this stone in a perfectly square shape." The other responds: "I am building a cathedral." Both answers are correct and meaningful, but they reflect different relations to the world. The difference between these answers does not imply that one is a better stonecutter than the other, as far as holding the chisel is concerned. A the level of engagement, they may will be doing exactly the same thing. But it does suggest that their experiences of what they are doing and their sense of self in doing it are rather different. This difference is a function of imagination. As a result, they may be learning very different things from the same activity. (176)

My use of the concept of imagination refers to a process of expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves. (176)

...imagination involves a different kind of work of the self--one that concerns the production of images of the self and images of the world that transcend engagement. (177)

Mutual engagement merely creates a shared reality in which to act and construct an identity. Imagination is another process for creating such a reality. (177)

The creative character of imagination is anchored in social interactions and communal experiences. Imagination in this sense is not jus the production of personal fantasies. Far from an individual withdrawal from reality, it is a mode of belonging that always involves the social world to expand the scope of reality and identity. (178)

Through imagination, we can locate ourselves in the world and in history, and include in our identities other meanings, other possibilities, other perspectives. It is through imagination that we recognize our own experience as reflecting broader patterns, connections, and configurations. It is through imagination that we see our own practices as continuing histories that reach far into the past, and it is through imagination that we conceive of new developments, explore alternatives, and envision possible futures. (178)

The process of alignment bridges time and space to form broader enterprises so that participants become connected through the coordination of their energies, actions, and practices. Through alignment, we become part of something big because we do what it takes to play our part. What alignment brings into the picture is a scope of action writ large, or coordinated enterprises on a large scale, not inherent in engagement or in imagination. (179)

Alignment amplifies the ramifications of our actions by coordinating multiple localities, competencies, and viewpoints. It expands the scope of our effects on the world. We can contribute to producing actions and artifacts that no specialized practice can produce. We can manage levels of scale and complexity that give new dimensions to our belonging. Alignment can thus amplify our power and our sense of the possible. (180)

In fact, most of what we do involves a combination of engagement, imagination, and alignment, though more emphasis on one or the other gives a distinct quality to our actions and their meanings. (183)

• The work of engagement: The work of engagement is basically the work of forming communities of practice. As such, it requires the ability to take part in meaningful activities and interactions, in the production of sharable artifacts, in community-building conversations, and in the negotiation of situations. It implies sustained intensity and relations of mutuality. (184)
• The work of imagination: Imagination requires the ability to disengage--to move back and look at our engagement through the eyes of an outsider. It requires the ability to explore, take risks, and create unlikely connections. (185)

Characteristically, the work of imagination entails such processes as

• defining a trajectory that connects what we are doing to an extended identity, seeing ourselves in new ways.
• documenting historical developments, events, and transitions; reinterpreting histories and trajectories in new terms; using history to see the present as only one of many possibilities and the future as a number of possibilities
• generating scenarios, exploring other ways of doing what we are doing, other possible worlds, and other identities (185

Imagination requires the ability to dislocate participation and reification in order to reinvent ourselves, our enterprises, our practices, and our communities. (185)

• The work of alignment: Alignment requires the ability to coordinate perspectives and actions in order to direct energies to a common purpose. ...alignment requires the ability to communicate purpose, needs, methods, and criteria

Because engagement, imagination, and alignment each have different but complimentary strengths and weaknesses, they work best in combination. ...in fact, by combining them effectively, a community of practice can become a learning community. (187)

...the full reificative paraphernalia of practice in the course of its use: symbols, tools, language, documents, and the like. (184)

CHAPTER 7: Participation and Non-participation

We not only produce our identities through the practices we engage in, but we also define ourselves through practices we do not engage in. Our identities are constituted not only by what we are but also by what we are not. To the extent that we can come in contact with other ways of being, what we are not can even become a larger part of how we define ourselves. For instance, we define ourselves in a small but not insignificant way by our regular contacts with various professionals from whom we receive services. Though we remain mostly non-participants, our service encounters often let us know just enough about their practices to gain some sense of what it is we are not, what we wish we were, what we would not dream of being, or what we are glad not to be. In other words, non-participation is, in a reverse kind of fashion, as much a source of identity as participation. (164)

how non-participation in an institutional context can become a defining characteristic of practice (169).

In other words, the identities of non-participation that they develop with respect to the institution and to the content of their work are an integral part of their identities of participation in their own communities of practice. In dealing with their marginality, they place this complex mixture of participation and non-participation at the core of their practice and their identities as workers (172).

CODA 1: Knowing in Practice

Communities of practice should not be reduced to purely instrumental purposes. They are about knowing, but also about being together, living meaningfully, developing a satisfying identity, and altogether being human. (134)

practice = the capacity to have an experience of meaning

meaning = arises out of a process of negotiation that combines both participation andreification (135)

negotiation of participation and reification = an identity of participation

Competent membership (in a community of practice) includes:

• mutuality of agreement: the ability to engage with other members and respond in kind to their actions, and thus the ability to establish relationships in which this mutuality is the basis for an identity of participation
• accountability to the enterprise: the ability to understand the enterprise of a community of practice deeply enough to take some responsibility for it and contribute to its pursuit and to its ongoing negotiation by the community.
• negotiability of the repertoire: the ability to make use of the repertoire of the practice to engage in it. This requires enough participation (personal or vicarious) in the history of practice to recognize it in the elements of its repertoire. Then it requires the ability--both the capability and the legitimacy--to make this history newly meaningful.

...it is by its very practice--not by other criteria--that a community establishes what it is to be a competent participant, an outsider, or somewhere in between. (137)

To become even a peripheral member of a community of practice, one must do some learning along the three dimensions of competence in practice just listed. (137)

CHAPTER 6: Identity in Practice

Key terms: trajectory, multimembership, reconciliation

There is a profound connection between identity and practice. Developing a practice requires the formation of a community whose members can engage with one another and thus acknowledge each other as participants. As a consequence, practice entails the negotiation of ways of being a person in that context. This negotiation may be silent; participants may not necessarily talk directly about that issue. But whether or not they address the question directly, they deal with it through the way they engage in action with one another and relate to one another. Inevitably, our practices deal with the profound issue of how to be a human being. In this sense, the formation of a community of practice is also the negotiation of identities. (149)

The experience of identity in practice is a way of being in the world. (151)

An identity, then, is a layering of events of participation and reification by which our experience and its social interpretation inform each other. As we encounter our effects on the world and develop our relations with others, these layers build upon each other to produce our identity as a very complex interweaving of participative experience and reificative projections. Bringing the two together through the negotiation of meaning, we construct who we are. In the same way that meaning exists in its negotiation, identity exists--not as an object in and of itself--but in the constant work of negotiating the self. It is in this cascading interplay of participation and reification that our experience of life becomes one of identity, and indeed of human existence and consciousness. (151)

When we are with a community of practice of which we are a full member, we are in familiar territory. We can handle ourselves competently. We experience competence and we are recognized as competent. We know how to engage with others. We understand why they do what they do because we understand the enterprise to which participants are accountable. Moreover, we share the resources they use to communicate and go about their activities.

Mutuality of Engagement: In a community of practice, we learn certain ways of engaging in action with other people. We develop certain expectations about how to interact, how people treat each other and how to work together. We become who we are by being able to play a part in the relations of engagement that constitute our community. Our competence gains its value through its very partiality. As an identity, this translates into a form of individuality defined with respect to a community. It is a certain way of being part of a whole through mutual engagement. For instance, I have reported that among claims processors it is more important to give and receive help than to know everything oneself. This results in a definition of individuality that differs from, say, forms of individuality in certain academic circles, where knowledge is a form of personal power and not knowing is largely construed as a personal deficit. (152)

Accountability to an enterprise: As we invest ourselves in an enterprise, the forms of accountability through which we are able to contribute to that enterprise make us look at the world in certain ways. Being a claims processor, doctor, parent, social worker, salesperson, beggar, folk dancer, or photographer gives us a certain focus. It moves us to understand certain conditions and to consider certain possibilities. As an identity, this translates into a perspective. it does not mean that all members of the community look at the world in the same way. Nonetheless, an identity in this sense manifests as a tendency to come up with certain interpretations, to engage in certain actions, to make certain choices, to value certain experiences--all by virtue of participating in certain enterprises. (152-53)

I have argued that identity in practice arises out of an interplay of participation and reification. As such, it is not an object, but a constant becoming. The work of identity is always going on. Identity is not some primordial core of personality that already exists. Nor is it something acquire at some point in the same way that, at a certain age, we grow a set of permanent teeth. Even though issues of identity as a focus of overt concern may become more salient at certain times than at others, our identity is something we constantly renegotiate during the course of our lives. (153-54)

In the context of communities of practice, there can be various types of trajectories (trajectory: has a momentum of its own in addition to a field of influences):

• Peripheral trajectories
• Inbound trajectories
• Insider trajectories
• Boundary trajectories
• Outbound trajectories (154)

As trajectories, our identities incorporate the past and the future in the very process of negotiating the present (155).

Learning events and forms of participation are thus defined by the current engagement they afford, as well as by their location on a trajectory. (155)

From this perspective, a community of practice is a field of possible trajectories and thus the proposal of an identity.... It is a field of possible pasts and of possible futures, which are all there for participants, not only to witness, hear about, and contemplate, but to engage with. They can interact with old-timers, who offer living examples of possible trajectories. A community of practice is a history collapsed into a present that invites engagement.

learning in practice is negotiating an identity...that identity incorporates the past and the future (157)

Our various forms of participation delineate pieces of a puzzle we put together rather than sharp boundaries between disconnected parts of ourselves. An identity is thus more than just a single trajectory; instead, it should be viewed as a nexus of multimembership. As such a nexus, identity is not a unity but neither is it simply fragmented. (159)

If a nexus of multimembership is more than just a fragmented identity, being one person requires some work to reconcile our different forms of membership. Different practices make competing demands that are difficult to combine into an experience that corresponds to a single identity. (159)

elements of one repertoire may be quite inappropriate, incomprehensible, or even offensive in another community (160)

The work of reconciliation may be the most significant challenge faced by learners who move from one community of practice to another...learning involves more than appropriating new piece of information. Learners must often deal with conflicting forms of individuality and competence as defined in different communities. (160)

proceeding with life--with actions and interactions--entails finding ways to make our various forms of membership coexist, whether the process of reconciliation leads to successful resolutions or is a constant struggle. In other words, by including processes of reconciliation in teh very definition of identity, I am suggesting that the maintenance of an identity across boundaries requires work and, moreover, that the work of integrating our various forms of participation is not just a secondary process. This work is not simply an additional concern for an independently defined identity viewed as a unitary object; rather, it is at the core of what it means to be a person. Multimembership and the work of reconciliation are intrinsic to the very concept of identity. (160-161)

And yet, the work of reconciliation can easily remain invisible because it may not be perceived as part of the enterprise of any community of practice. (161)

Identity in practice...

• Lived
• Negotiated
• Social
• A learning Process
• A nexus
• A local-global interplay (163)

CHAPTER 4: Boundary

moving from one community of practice to another can demand quite a transformation (103)

Communities of practice cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the world, or understood independently of other practices. (103)

We can participate in multiple communities of practice at once. (105)

BROKERING (an interesting way of thinking about the role of teachers of adult students):

I will call this use of multimembership to transfer some element of one practice into another brokering. (109)

Brokers are able to make new connections across communities of practice, enable coordination, and--if they are good brokers--open new possibilities for meaning. Although we all do some brokering, my experience is that certain individuals seem to thrive on being brokers: they love to create connections and engage in "import--export," and so would rather stay at the boundaries of many practices than move to the core of any one practice. (109)

The job of brokering is complex. It involves processes of translation, coordination, and alignment between perspectives. It requires enough legitimacy to influence the development of a practice, mobilize attention, and address conflicting interests. It also requires the ability to link practices by facilitating transactions between them, and to cause learning by introducing into a practice elements of another. Toward this end, brokering provides a participative connection--not because reification is involved, but because what brokers press into service to connect practices is their experience of multimembership and the possibilities for negotiation inherent in participation. (109)

Peripherality is thus an ambiguous position. Practice can be guarded just as it can be made available; membership can seem a daunting prospect just as it can constitute a welcoming invitation; a community of practice can be a fortress just as it can be an open door. Peripherality can be a position where access to a practice is possible, but it can also be a position where outsiders are kept from moving further inward. (120)

CHAPTER 3: Learning

"learning as a characteristic of practice" (86)

The concept of learning is not absent from the claims processing office, but it is used mainly for trainees. And yet, when I posed the question directly to them, claims processors all agreed that they were learning continually. One reason they do not think of their job as learning is that what they learn is their practice. Learning is not reified as an extraneous goal or as a special category of activity or membership. Their practice is not merely a context for learning something else. Engagement in practice--in its unfolding, multidimensional complexity--is both the stage and the object, the road and the destination. What htey learn is not a static subject matter but the very process of being engaged in, and participating in developing, an ongoing practice. (95)

We wanted to point out that the required learning takes place not so much through the reification of a curriculum as through modified forms of participation that are structured to open the practice to nonmembers. (100)

...there is a big difference between a lesson that is about the practice but takes place outside of it, and explanations and stories that are part of the practice and take place within it. (100)

To open up a practice, peripheral participation must provide access to all three dimensions of practice: to mutual engagement with other members, to their actions and their negotiation of the enterprise, and to the repertoire in use. No matter how the peripherality of initial participation is achieved, it must engage newcomers and provide a sense of how the community operates. Note that the curriculum is then the community of practice itself. Teachers, masters, and specific role models can be important, but it is by virtue of their membership in the community as a whole that they can play their roles. (100)

Practice is a shared history of learning that requires some catching up for joining. It is not an object to be handed down from one generation to the next. Practice is an ongoing, social, interactional process and the introduction of newcomers is merely a version of what practice already is. That members interact, do things together, negotiate new meanings, and learn from each other is already inherent in practice--that is how practices evolve. In other words, communities of practice reproduce 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. Special measures may be taken to open up the practice to newcomers, but the process of learning is not essentially different. (102)

CHAPTER 2: Community

Communities of Practice consist of:

1. mutual engagement
2. a joint enterprise
3. a shared repertoire (72-73)

The repertoire of a community of practice includes routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions, or concepts that the community has produced or adopted in the course of its existence, and which have become part of its practice. (83)

CHAPTER 1: Meaning

Practice is, first and foremost, a process by which we can experience the world and our engagement with it as meaningful. (51)

Participation refers to a process of taking part and also to the relations with others taht reflect this process. It suggests both action and connection. In this book, I will use the term participation to describe the social experience of living in the world in terms of membership in social communities and active involvement in social enterprises. Participation in this sense is both personal and social. It is a complex process that combines doing, talking, thinking, feeling, and belonging. It involves our whole person, including our bodies, minds, emotions, and social relations (55)

participation is source of identity. (56)

...a defining characteristic of participation is the possibility of developing an "identity of participation," that is, an identity constituted through relations of participation. (56)

...as a constituent of meaning, participation is broader than mere engagement in practice. Claims processors are not claims processors just while they work in the office. Of course, that time of intense engagement with their work and with one another is especially significant. But they do not cease to be claims processors at five o'clock. Their participation is not something they simply turn off when they leave. Its effects on their experience are not restricted to the specific context of their engagement. It is a part of who they are that they always carry with them and that will surface if, for instance, they themselves happen to go to the doctor, fill out an insurance form, or call a customer service center. In this sense, participation goes beyond direct engagement in specific activities with specific people. It places the negotiation of meaning in the context of our forms of membership in various communities. It is a constituent of our identities. As such, participation is not something we turn on and off. (57)

INTRO 1

Communities of Practice: "a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise." (45)

practice includes both the explicit and the tacit. It includes what is said and what is left unsaid; what is represented and what is assumed. It includes the language, tools, documents, images, symbols, well-defined roles, specified criteria, codified procedures, regulations, and contracts that various practices make explicit for a variety of purposes. But it also includes all the implicit relations, tacit conventions, subtle cues, untold rules of thumb, recognizable intuitions, specific perceptions, well-tuned sensitivities, embodied understandings, underlying assumptions, and shared world views. Most of these may never be articulated, yet they are unmistakable signs of membership in communities of practice and are crucial to the success of their enterprise. (47)

Practice as learning (Chapter 3): I will end by talking about the learning by which newcomers can join the community and thus further its practice. (49)

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

---

...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?