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.