Blog 7

 First I will like to thank everyone for reading and commenting on my blogs. Your comments were always welcomed and thought provoking. Thank you.

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Blog 7: 

My identity: Who am I? When I reread my blogs, I realized that currently at this stage in my life I am getting my identity though my family, my parents, my siblings, my in-laws, my husband and my daughter.  When I was in my mid to late 20’s, I was getting it from co-workers and my job.  In my early 20’s, I was getting it though University. In my teens, it was through music, art and friends. As a child, my parents were my biggest influences. Now, I am wondering who or what will be shaping my identity when I am 50 or even 75.

When fist reading Bracher’s book, Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generality, and Social Transformation, his statement regarding identity as “the most basic human need and thus the ultimate motive underlying all human behavior” (Bracher, 2006, p.3) was a little strange. I never thought of someone’s identity in that way. When Bracher related it to teaching, I thought the statement only applied to students that we would be teaching. As I read more of his book, I began to realize that the first identity that I really needed to be concerned about was my own.

Your identity is a reflection of your journey through life. It comes from your experiences, your likes and your social relationships.  Various influences affect our identities as we mature as a person. These influences begin at birth and carries through until death. Some identities change over time with gradual influence, whiles others it may happen quickly originating from a life defining moment, like an illness or death of a loved one. Each of the three authors that we studied, Tomesselo, Wenger and Bracher, all has theories of identity and its impact on learning. I believe that all of their theories do apply but it depends on the stage of personal development that a person is at that time.

Tomasselo's book, “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition”, he talks about the ratchet effect and cultural transmission (Tomasello, 1999 Page 4) as behaviors in which humans learn and build on their knowledge. This is very true in our early stages of life.  As children as we look to our parents and caregivers to teach us many of the things we need to know in order to survive. They play a large part in influencing our first identities.

Wenger’s book, “Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity”, he introduces us to a new type social/cultural group, Communities of Practice, where we share knowledge based on common interests. As we become older, we begin to get involved in communities of practice based on what subjects interest us. While in elementary and junior high our biggest influencers are friends and peer social groups. While in High School much of our communities of practices become about our interests such as music, social media and friends. Wenger talks about how we gain much of our identity from the individuals that we share a common interest with in these communities of practice. Here we are learning about our identities with in each of these community groups and our identity is changing as we learn.

Bracher wants us to go one step further with understanding our identities then either Tomasselo's or Wenger. Bracher wants us to do some self-exploration. He wants us to understand not only where students are coming from but also as teachers, where we have been. He proposes many self-exploration questions to us in chapter ten so that we can get to know the person that we really are. By knowing who we are then we are better prepared for all the different types of students we will have, the different types of learning situations we will confront and the many outside constraints that we often face in teaching.

By knowing who you are and following your instincts, you can preserve your own identity, your own beliefs and your own interests. When I first had my daughter, the amount of advice I was getting from books, friends and family was extremely overwhelming. I was not prepared for how this advice began to make me feel. The advice that I was getting from closest friends and family began to feel like attacks. Everyone had an opinion and everyone had to share it. I stopped answering the phone because I did not want to hear what I was doing wrong. I was on the phone with my father one day talking about how I was feeling. He gave me the best advice he said, “When it comes to children, check your ego at the door.” What he went on to explain was that everything that everyone was saying was just that, advice. It was my own ego and insecurities regarding my identity as a mom that was making me feel like I was being attacked. He reminded me that I was a great new mom and I did not have to follow anyone’s advice. I should listen to the advice and then trust my own instincts to do what was best for my daughter and me.

Tomasselo, Wenger, and Bracher have one common theme running through all of their books, that is the importance of social interactions with in the context of teaching and learning. Relationships are the key factor to understand both positive and negative teaching/learning experiences. My conclusion for this blog is that we all need reminding to trust in what we know about ourselves and follow our instincts. When things change and we face learning obstacles, it is our identity and how well we know ourselves that well get us through it.

References:

Bracher, Mark. (2006). Radical Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan

Wenger, E. (2008). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press: New York, New York

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

The Affective, The Imaginative and The Linguistic

 

I jump in and out of the elevator. I snap the room’s door behind me. I examine the room, it will do. I briefly look out at the busy world as I draw the curtains. The lights are low. The bed is soft.  The only sounds are my breathing and the occasional footsteps in the hall. It has been sometime since I have been alone like this, when was I last alone like this? I have wanted this for so long that I am not sure what to do, where do I begin?  I quickly put on some comfortable clothes; you can’t beat jogging pants and a sweater.  I sit on the edge of the bed and I pick up the phone and state, “I am here.”  I impatiently walk around the room as I wait. Shortly after the call, there is a knock on the door. Even though I was expecting it, my heart leaps. I rush do the door and smile. Waiting for me is a Fred Flintstone sized plate of cheese-covered nachos with a six-pack of Sleemans Honey Brown. I thank room service and eagerly shoo them away. I delightfully sit on the bed with my treasures. The sound of the air escaping from the bottle of Honey Brown makes me gasp. I put the bottle to my lips; nothing has tasted so fine. I take a sip, and shut my eyes thinking, “This is my time, so enjoy it!” I turn on the TV, find my favorite science fiction channel, and devour the platter of nachos on my lap.  Right now, I am just Sherry who loves beer, nachos and sci-fi. Tomorrow I will go back to my real world of being a mom, sister, wife, daughter, and friend.

This is my current fantasy. I would love to obtain some “me-time”. This was not always my fantasy; they use to be a bit more exciting. When I was 12 it was to meet Joe MacInytre from New Kids on the Block, then it my late teens it was to meet Nirvana. My point is that fantasies change, as do identities. People have experiences and memories that shape their identities. The more experiences we have the more our desires and identities changes.

Bracher talks of 3 registers of identity; the affective, the imaginative and the linguistic or symbolic. These three registers combine together with our life experiences to form our identity. According to Bracher, (Radical Pedagogy, Pg 13) the affective register refers what is real in our character. Bracher states that it is most often, where our identity that relates to our core-self resides (Bracher Pg 14). My mother lost her mother when she was 12. This pain from her loss has established a fear of losing loved ones that has shaped her identity. This fear falls into the affected register; it is what is real to her. It often manifests itself in simple everyday things. When I was first living away from home, my mom would get very upset if she know I was out after dark, even if after dark was 5:30pm.

The imaginative register according to Bracher (Radical Pedagogy, Pg 14) refers to what we believe to be true about our identity. My mothers fear has lead her to imagine or see situations in a context of a future possible loss. She often sees or imagines the remote possibility of something bad happening not the probability of it. For example, if any of her children are traveling, it physically makes her sick with worry. She is sick until she knows we have made it safely to our destination.

Bracher’s third register (Radical Pedagogy, Pg 15) is the linguistic or verbal codes. Through labeling of ones own attributes, we understand who we are supposed to be or who we are not supposed to be. These labels are not only placed on our identity by ourselves but also from external sources, especially from a person with a lot of influence or an experience with a strong emotional connection. My mother has labeled herself not as a good mother but as better mother then most mothers because of her overprotectiveness. She is aware of her overprotectiveness but has come to be proud of her enhanced physical security that she has placed on her children. To her, it is the right thing to do and all parents should be doing it.

My mother’s overprotectiveness has changed over the years. As she grew and changed as person, her identity changed as well. I think people can change their core identities and their beliefs though experience and learning. What are difficult to change are ones habits. My mom no longer gets sick when we travel but we still need to call her as soon as we get to our destination or we will get an earful. My mother was also far more rigid and protective with her first child then her last child. I was her first child and I have defiantly picked up many of her overprotective ways. It is not that I fear a loss but more because I find it hard not to be any other way, her habits have become my habits.

Bracher, M. (2006). Radical pedagogy: Identity, generativity, and social transformation. New York: Palgrave.

Blog 5: Emergent Learning and Identity

BWenger talks about education (Wenger, Chapter 12) he refers to many “trades –offs” with in a community of practice. These “trade-off” exists between the components that make up a community of practice, components like: Participation-Reification, Designed-Emergent Learning, Identification-Negotiability and Local-Global Communities. When is comes to understanding their relationship to one another other, it is important not to see them as two extremes with in a community of practice, but as a required balance between each other. Professor Plumb gave an example in class where he compared this balance to a slider control on a stereo, where members with in a community can adjust each component.

The link between the designed and the emergent, in reference to education, is the link between teaching and learning. (Wenger, Chapter 12)  The designed refers to teaching in a structured sense with specific goals in mind and the emergent aspect is what the learner is actually interested in learning.  There needs to be a balance between these two aspects in a learning environment. Too much structure in teaching can cause one to become disinterested in a community of practice. While an emergent environment can play to the interests of the individual keeping them engaged. The relationship that I would like to discuss is that of the Designed-Emergent relationship and how it connects to our sense of belonging within a community of practice.

When do you feel like you are a part of a group or even this class? Is it by showing up to class? Is it by asking questions in class? Is it by interacting with the teacher after class? Is it by positive feedback from other students? When does one feel apart of a community of practice? New situations can make people feel unsure of their place in a new community of practice. It is often hard to know who or what to identify with. When I first thought of identities with in the context of a community of practice, I thought that I had the identity first and I brought it to the community, but what I actually had was a curiosity.

Wenger talks about emergent learners and how they could be on the peripheral of a community of practice and then move in. This is found in many classrooms. When we fist start a new class, we can have people who are engaged and eager to learn from the time the first class starts. While for others, it may take time to feel accepted and comfortable in class, therefore taking a longer time to feel a sense of identity or belonging.

We gain our identities from a community of practice when we can identify with the information that is being shared. If we do not understand the material that we are learning then we are not engaged, therefore we will not identity with the community of practice. I felt this way when I first became a mom. I had little confidence in some things and relied on my mom to show me how to do most things. My lack of confidence, made me reluctant to think of myself as a mother. One thing that I could not do very well was burping my baby. My mom shared her burping technique with me and encouraged me to keep trying. As I became more confident in burping my baby, I also became more confident in being a mother. Soon, I began to identify myself with being a mom; I also began to enthusiastically show my burping technique to everyone.

The above example, though simple, shows how I was nervous about doing a new task and wanted to stay on the outside or peripheral of that community but trough exchanging information with my mom I was able to emerge with good burping skills. There were many things, which I needed help with as a new mom. My teacher, my mom, had a goal in mind of what she wanted to teach me but she did not set out with a task oriented curriculum where we would do diaper changing drills and Olympic timed bottle feedings. She waited patiently, for me to ask for help on things that I thought was important. Through this emergent style of learning, I was able to learn new things about being a mom, when I was ready to learn them. When knowledge is delivered with in a meaningful context, knowledge transfer is much easier and more likely to stay with the individual.

As I learned in reading Wenger, what is often the case is that your identity establishes itself from what you are learning within the group. We can begin to identify with a group or community of practice quicker if that group can play to our own emerging interests or curiosities. This coupled with positive reinforcement leads to a learner that is engaged and quickly identify with the community of practice.

Wenger, E (1998). Communities of Practice Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press.

Does your mom dance?

Sherry Fraser

In my last blog, I discussed some positive aspects of community’s of practice regarding large institutions and research. In this blog, I would like to address communities of practice on a more individual level, dealing with children and families.

After watching Crash, it made me want to examine Wenger’s, communities of practice in a different approach. Wenger explained communities of practice, as a way to learn by doing. The “doing” takes place in a community with shared ideas and shared interest. Wenger’s aspects of communities of practice are very neat, clean and precise. By labeling and defining learning processes, Wenger models the social interactions that are apart of knowledge transfer. Wegner’s modeling is much like the way a computer-scientist would model an information process to build a web-application but Wegner models learning, in a community of practice.

Dr. Plumb adds another element to communities of practice, and that is the fact they are “hot blooded” in other words the people within a communities of practice have emotions, desires, bias, differences, as well as shared interests. People do not always behave as systemically as in Wenger’s models. Dr. Plumb implies that communities of practice are not just learning in the sense of the acquiring of knowledge but learning through the exchange of meaning between social economic groups, like we saw in the movie Crash.

In the movie Crash, most learning opportunities seemed to happen at the boundaries of different communities of practice groups. Boundary interactions offer the most potential to learn a different point of view then one’s own or to change the community entirely. When we continuously surround ourselves by people that are similar to our own self, then it becomes difficult for us to see anything else but our own reflection.

When I was in grade 1, I remember coming from school and telling my mom about a girl in class that was dressed funny and some of us other girls were laughing at her. My mom explained to me that the girl had lost her mother and it was just her dad raising her and her sister. She added that, these girls did not have a mom to help them get ready for school in the morning and therefore it might be a litter bit harder to pick out nice clothes to wear but what was important was that despite not having their mom the girls were making it to school everyday.  I felt very bad about the way I acted that day, I still feel bad about it. I thought that all kids, had two parents and I felt it was my right to make fun of someone if they were dressed funny. I was wrong.  It was this boundary interaction between my community of practice and hers that I was able to learn and understand that not every family is the same and that I need to treat other people like people, not objects for my amusement.

When Wegner talks about boundary objects and reification, it reminds me of the way children view the people in their own communities of practice or family. Reification in the process when were we treat something that is an abstraction, as a concrete object to establish a meaning for that object that suites the communities needs. Wenger states that is the process of reification, which produces boundary objects. Wenger describes examples of boundary objects as documents, terms, concepts and other exchanges of information.  The objectifying of abstract ideas happens all the time, across cultures and in our own families.

We are continuously objectifying people all around us from entertainers, to politicians, to teachers, to classmates and to family. We do this to establish their meaning to us in our own personal community of practice. For example, when we think of the word “mom”, what do we think? Do we think of them as a person with a name? Do they have friends? Do they like to dance? Do they have a favorite color? How about the word “Dad”, do they have a name? Do they get scared sometimes? Do they get sad? We all have been born to parents but as a young child, we only see them as objects that are there to serve our needs. Parents are there to protect us, to help us, to pick us up, to rub our belly when we are sick, and to love us. They are objects to young children, very important and loved objects, but still objects. As children get older and develop, they begin to understand that their parents are people too. That they do like to dance, they can cry, they can get scared, they can even tell dirty a joke, and that their parents have feelings the same as them.

Children objectify much about their world, but as they grow and learn their ideas about their communities of practice change. It is this process of learning and growing that is important when it comes to Life Long Learning Processes. As teachers, we need to always be learners, always willing to grown and change just as we did as children.

References:

Wenger, E (1998). Communities of Practice Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press.

Some Modern Inventions through Communities of Practice

Some Modern Inventions through Communities of Practice

In this Blog I will discuss some positive examples of Communities of Practice in modern day. First I will briefly define Wegners Community of practice and then highlight some examples from everyday life, concluding with some examples of modern inventions.

Wegners idea of Communities of practice builds on Tomasello's ideas of “the ratchet effect”. They both make the same statement, that it is social interaction between humans that is the driving force behind learning. Tomasello used the term “the ratchet effect” as a metaphor to describe the ability of a humans to pass on, and improve on their own knowledge. Vegner describes a community of practice as a place where people can learn trough participation by sharing knowledge about the same subject.

In E. Wegner book, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, a good community of practice has all members sharing a desire for for the same subject (domain), where they can partake in joint activities (the community) on a continual basis (the practice). When we are apart of this group, we feel excited, we feel like we belong, we feel like they understand us and share our interest. These are all elements that make up a good community of practice.

We can all remember being in groups, where members were excited about the same things, and were eager to listen to one another. When you were a kid, a community of practice was a club with secret handshakes and playhouses in the woods. When you were a teenager it was bonding over boy-bands and hair trends. When you are in your early twenties is was about dating and drinking with friends. As we develop, our communities of practice groups continuously change as we learn from them and they change us. Throughout our lives we have woven ourselves through different learning groups (COP) based on our current needs and desires.

Instead of learning taking place in a more traditional sense where we acquire our knowledge from a source that is often one way communication, learning in a community of patrice is much more situated. Learning here takes place in the same environment where it is practiced and social relationships are formed. Communities of Patrice are established when people come together to problem solve, request information, seeking expertise, and meetings. These are a few examples taken from Wenger's website. (Wenger's Website June, 2006)

It is through a “Community of Practice” where an outcome can be much larger then the sum of it's parts. The idea of coming together to create something bigger then yourself is fascinating. Some examples of it in our everyday life range from getting married, adopting children, going to University or Collage, and volunteering with a community group. These are some simple examples of a everyday community of practices where our human desire to socially interact with one other to produce something that we can't achieve by ourselves.

Research institutes are often places when people can come together to share knowledge that leads to some amazing solutions to everyday problems. Some examples in modern history of when we had collaborative research that led to some amazing inventions are inventions that were discovered through NASA research.

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was started in 1958. Its plan was not only to explore space but to have it's research benefit all society. This community of practice has joined forces with various companies to produced new products from its ongoing space research. These solutions ranged from improving health care, creating communication satellites and creating some really cool sneakers. As NASA researchers continue to solve problem in space, they are solving problems on earth.

Some examples of the inventions that used NASA technologies are:

	Product Name	Need	Nasa Related	Why it works
	Invisible Braces	To help teengers everywhere to have a social life.	The product, TPA, that the braces are made from, was orginally used to protect the infrared antennae of heat-seeking missile trackers.	It discovered that TPA would be strong enough to withstand use and is translucent, making it a prime material for invisible braces.
	Scratch-resistant Lenses	To stop glasses from being scratched when dropped or mishandled  especially by toddlers.	NASA needed a special coating to protect space equipment, particularly astronaut helmet visors.	Sunglasses manufacturer Companies licensed the NASA technology for its products.
	Memory Foam	Better sleep and to prevent bed sores in people that were bedridden in hospitals.	Temper foam was created for use in NASA aircraft seats to lessen impact during landings providing  shock absorbency.	Doctors can customize the foam to support patients while reducing the pressure on certain parts of the body to ward off bedsores.
	Ear Thermometer	A need to reduce the amount of time nurses spend taking temperatures.	The company Diatek took advantage of NASA's previous advancements in measuring the temperature of stars with infrared technology.	In 1991, infrared thermometers that you place into your ears use the same technology.
	Shoe Insoles	Better shoes for atheles.	Today's athletic shoes have borrowed the technology of the moon boots that first took that leap.The space suit designed for the Apollo missions included specially-made boots that put a spring in astronaut's steps while providing ventilation	Athletic shoe companies have taken this technology and adopted it to construct better shoes that lessen the impact on your feet and legs.