3.4.1 Communities of Practice
Communities of practice is a term in sociocultural theory first introduced by Lave and Wenger (1991), which implies that participants within the range of an activity community share similar understandings.The shared understandings affect their actions that occur in daily life and the community in which they are.In a learning context, for example, when a student attains specific beliefs and behaviour in the way of sharing a concern or a goal in a group, he or she will change from the initial role as a newcomer and become the core member through collective interaction in the group (Wenger, 1998).In order to reach the core culture of the learning community, the student needs to observe and imitate other group members’ behaviour or learn jargon in that community, and to gradually shape his or her own behaviour according to the community’s standard.
Participation in learning is a fundamental and integral part of disciplinary practices performed and negotiated in a community of discipline.Lave and Wenger (1991) distinguish between two participations:peripherality, which is concerned with a positive learning process in which new learners change from peripheral roles to competent members through their full interaction with more experienced members in a community, and marginality, which is defined as a negative process where a (non-)participating mediating experience prevents learners’ full participation in that community.Wenger (1998) argues that, ‘members whose contributions are never adopted develop an identity of nonparticipation that progressively marginalizes them’ (p.203).
However, learning for newcomers in particular is a complex process involving not only the acts of participation but also how far the newcomers can or cannot engage more competently to solve problems and build knowledge in and through interaction.With this concern, Wenger (1998) proposes three sources of communicative competence:namely, mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire.According to him, individuals will develop competence through their engagement in practice, sharing the tasks in the community, and engagement in negotiating the meaning and the repertoire.Thus competent members have:
‘mutuality of engagement: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 enoughparticipation (personal or vicarious) in the history of a 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.’ (p.137)
This dynamic process of being competent members requires the participants to discover ways of engaging with other members and establishing interpersonal relationships, to understand the enterprise of a community of practice and show responsibility, and to develop a repertoire and a discourse in the community.In this study, the examination on engagement in both social and individual dimensions helps me to argue that the dynamic construction of Chinese students’ disciplinary identities is not a natural and biological competence development process, but the consequence of meaningful negotiation in context.