Shannon Carter, Assistant Professor of English
Director
of the
http://faculty.tamuc.edu/scarter
mailto:shannon_carter@tamuc.edu
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Before reading the following essay, read yourself: 1. Speculate for a moment. Have you ever heard the term “community of practice” before? If so, in what context? If not, what do you think a “community of practice” might be? 2. What does the term “community” make you think of? 3. What might that have to do with literacy in and/or beyond school? |
What’s a Community of Practice?
Learning to read and write for college is not really about memorizing rules. Instead, it’s about understanding and being able to emulate the rules that constitute literate behavior within a particular group—often called a “discourse community.” What is a discourse community? In her collection of previously published essays Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness (1992), Patricia Bizzell defines a “discourse community as a group of people who share certain language using practices.” She continues: “These practices can be seen as conventionalized in two ways. Stylistic conventions regulate social interactions both within the group and in its dealings with outsiders. . . . Also, canonical knowledge regulates world views of group members and how they interpret experience” (222). Discourse communities then regulate not only how one should interact within the associated social spaces (stylistic conventions) but what the subject of such interactions can profitably be (canonical knowledge). For our purposes, however, “communities of practice” seem more appropriate than “discourse communities” because the former stresses literacy as an activity rather than a state of being (via membership or ability to meet universal standards).
“Communities of practice” are relations of people who have in common a “shared competence and mutual interest in a given practice” (Choi 143), be that repairing Xerox machines (see Orr 1996 and Brown and Duguid 1991), recovering from alcoholism (see Lave and Wenger, 1990), writing as a college student in a history class, or countless other activities in which a person may be involved. The concept first emerged in Lave and Wenger study of the ways in which various communities of practice teach newcomers the practices valued and reproduced in those communities (midwives, meat cutters, tailors, and recovering alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous). According to Lave and Wenger, a “community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and world over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice.” The term “impl[ies] participation in an activity system about which participants share understandings concerning what they are doing and what that means in their lives and for their communities” (98).
My brother is a musician and a video game enthusiast; thus, his literate practices cover multiple communities of practice, such as (1) an electronic music community, which includes the user-guide for his keyboard and other music equipment, the software designer’s explanation about the functions of the programs he purchased to compose and produce his music, the ad copy for this merchandize, the forums he frequents to discuss current electronic music and share clips, and so on; (2) a video game community which includes the others involved in his experiences with multi-player games like Everquest II and Warcraft, the various documents users produce to assist other players (“Frequently Asked Questions,” “Walkthroughs,” “Cheats”), and so on. The list is almost infinite.
Another way to think of a “community of practice” is in terms of what James Paul Gee calls “affinity groups”:
People in an affinity group can recognize others as more or less “insiders” to the group. They may not see many people in the group face-to-face, but when they interact with someone on the Internet or read something about the domain, they can recognize certain ways of thinking, writing, valuing, and believing as well as the typical sorts of social practices associated with a given semiotic domain. This is to view the domain externally. (What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning, 27)
In other words, according to Gee, literate members of a particular affinity group (read “community of practice”) can identify one another in ways non-members cannot. Only other highly literate connoisseurs of wine, for example, know the difference between a person who understands wine and a person who is merely faking it. Unless the difference is very obvious (perhaps the “faker” is trying to pass off Strawberry Hill or Blue Nun as “fine” wine), I can’t tell because I am not a member of that affinity group. Only those who are can identify those who are not.
What those literate members are “reading” in order to distinguish other literate members from those attempting to behave as members is what Gee refers to as the “external design grammar.” That is, “the principles and patterns in terms of what one can recognize as what is and is not acceptable or typical social practice and identity in response to the affinity group associated with a semiotic domain.” According to Gee, “you know, consciously or unconsciously, the external design grammar of [a particular] semiotic domain” if you answer “yes” to questions like these:
Do you know what counts as thinking, acting, interacting, and valuing like someone who is into “modernist architecture” [or wine or first-person-shooter games or web design or neuroscience]? Can you recognize the sorts of identities people take on when they are in their domain? Can you recognize what counts as valued social practices to the members of the affinity group associated with the semiotic domain of modernist architecture [or wine or first-person shooter games or web design or surfing or neuroscience] and what counts as behaving appropriately in these social practices? (30)
I am reminded of a high school classmate of mine who successfully adopted three very different identities in as many years--a new one for each year he was in high school: 10th grade he was “punk” (with quite an impressive Mohawk, sometimes green, sometimes blue); in 11th-grade he became a surfer; his senior year he transformed into what we called back then a “kicker,” a cowboy of sorts. Each year he’d “hang out” with the appropriate friends (affinity group/community of practice), wear the appropriate clothing, and even change his body language to fit the group. Even the way he spoke changed: from “hardcore” as a punk (as in, “That’s f***king hardcore, man!”) to “bra” as a surfer (for “brother,” perhaps, as in “What’s up, bra’? Heard the surf report this morning! Let’s cut”) to “fixin’” as a kicker (“I’m fixin’ ta’ git outta here”). Each identity shift was seamless--at least it appeared to be. In other words, Mike had developed high levels of rhetorical dexterity. He wasn’t an outsider in any group he chose to join, at least not that I could see. However while his move into a new group each fall looked seamless, it couldn’t have been entirely so because these groups certainly did not bear much crossover (conflicting literacies at the core value systems shaping each subgroup).
Still, Mike was able to read and embody not only the “external design grammar” of each group, but also what Gee calls the “internal design grammar.” “Internal design grammar” refers to the “principles and patterns in terms of what one can recognize what is and is not acceptable or typical content in a semiotic domain” (or “community of practice”). Knowledge of the “internal design grammar” of a particular community of practice can be confirmed when one can answer “yes” to these questions: “Do you know what counts as a modernist piece of architecture” (or fine wine or a “choice” ocean wave, etc.)? “What sorts of buildings count as typical or atypical of modernist architecture?” What sorts of music counts as typical or atypical punk? What sorts of wines (from which regions) are wine connoisseurs likely to find most valuable (or least) and for what reasons? “Do you understand what counts and what doesn’t count as a possible piece of content in theoretical linguistics?” in composition studies? In neuroscience?
The “internal design grammar” involved in Mike’s various identity shifts is a bit harder for me to determine, especially given my own lack of literacy in these semiotic domains. However, we may assume that as a surfer he not only had to know how to surf, but how to dress, walk, talk, and perform like a surfer (the external design grammar); he also had to know and appreciate the music that surfers typically listen to (and why), the films they were likely to see, the equipment (and brand names) they were likely to find most valuable for their various surfing activities, and so on (the internal design grammar--the content). As a punk, he would also need to know what sorts of music was typically considered most valuable to members of this affinity group (and why), the films most typical of this semiotic domain (community of practice), the short history of punk rock music and the key players, the philosophical principles (of anarchy, etc) underlying the punk rock movement, and other similar content.
At least from a distance, it seemed that Mike had developed a productive knowledge of the internal and external design grammars making up these various cliques--so much so that he was able to move from punk to surf to cowboy rather swiftly and without incident. He seemed to know, instinctively, how to recognize the points of contact and dissonance among these different groups; music (punk, country), clothing (combat boots, cowboy boots), hair style, and language drew these groups together and kept these groups apart. Mike knew how to tell the difference and take advantage of the similarities.
However, I can only imagine that his rapid identity shifts were less simplistic than they seemed. The boundaries between various high school cliques are rather sharp and pronounced; the borders guarded rather openly; outsiders (fakes, “posers”) identified quickly and conspicuously. Because the boundaries were so clearly drawn, Mike knew when he had changed groups and so he was able to pick up the appropriate lens (the philosophical principles and value sets by which the affinity group functions) necessary for him to view those groups outside the boundaries of his own as other members would.
Such identity shifts are much more problematic when we are dealing with moves from home to school to church to work rather than from one high school clique to another, especially when those moves are complicated by race, class, and all the sociohistorical and material circumstances that surround these identity shifts. Literacy is profoundly tied up with identity. According to James Paul Gee, “semiotic domains encourage people new to them to take on and play with new identities (51, emphasis mine). “By a semiotic domain,” Gee means, “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings.” Examples of semiotic domains include
cellular biology, postmodern literary criticism, first-person-shooter video games, high-fashion advertisements, Roman Catholic theology, modernist painting, mid-wifery, rap music, wine connoisseurshipBthrough a nearly endless, motley, and ever changing list. (18)
In keeping with the social function of language, then, Gee urges us to “think first in terms of what I call semiotic domains and only then get to literacy in the more traditional terms of print literacy (17). Thus, he continues,
If we think first in terms of semiotic domains and not in terms of reading and writing as traditionally conceived, we can say that people are (or are not) literate (partially or fully) in a domain if they can recognize (the equivalent of “reading”) and/or produce (the equivalent of “writing”) meanings in the domain. (19)
Those literate in “cellular biology . . . first-person-shooter video games, high-fashion advertisements, Roman Catholic theology, modernist painting,” and “wine connoisseurship,” for example, make up several different communities of practice--communities that include other cellular biologists or players of first-person-shooter games or connoisseurs of wine. Because I wish to emphasize the social function of literacy, I hope you will continue to think of the people involved in these various communities of practice rather than just the literate strategies they employ; thus, developing new literacies in new communities of practice means, as Gee explains, “taking on and playing with new identities. . . . All learning in all semiotic domains requires identity work. It requires taking on a new identity and forming bridges from one’s old identities to the new one (51, emphasis in original).
The wine connoisseur, then, who wishes to develop new literacies as a cellular biologist must take on the identity of a cellular biologist. The person highly literate as a designer and consumer of high-fashion advertisements who wishes to learn how to play first-person-shooter games must take on the identity of the shooter. In order to be taken seriously as a surfer by the other surfers around him, Mike had to leave his punk persona behind and take on the identity of the surfer. At times the new identity differs so little from the old one that learning these new literacies is no more complicated than learning new strategies based on the old ones. Other times the difference between the old identity and the new one is so profound that one must discard the previous identity entirely in order to adopt the new one and/or decide against learning the new literacy altogether. In no small way, the communities of practice with which you most identity determine the way you approach any literate act, and without developing rhetorical dexterity--a meta-awareness of the points of contact and points of dissonance between these two developing literacies--such associations make learning new literacies improbable or at least so jarring that it is difficult to pull through. That’s why we are asking you to dig into what you already know very well, making use of these familiar literacies to learn new ones.
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Now that you’ve read, what do you think? These questions are intended to generate discussion based on your reading of the short essay “What is a Community of Practice?” which should also assist you in generating WA3.
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Works Cited
Bizzell, Patricia. Academic Discourses and Critical
Consciousness. U of
Choi, Mina. “Communities of Practice: An Alternative Learning Model for Knowledge Creation.” British Journal of Educational Technology. 37.1 (2006): 143-146.
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About
Literacy and Learning.
Palgrave,
2003.
Lave,
Jean and Etienne Wenger. Situated
Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.