3.4.2 Three Modes of Belonging in Community
The above-mentioned engagement and negotiation in participation imply a developmental process of community belonging in disciplinary experience.Learning is a process that reforms both one’s mental system and participation through social practices and the subsequent identities.Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that identity development is central to new learners’ learning trajectories in the communities of practice.The dynamic construction of identities is thus an important idea to learning experience in sociocultural theory, by connecting learners’ socialisation to their individuality in the community.
Wenger (1998) argues that simple understanding of learners’ positive and negative participation in practice is not enough to figure out how they construct identity in a social, cultural and historical constructed context.When students enter a new institutional or disciplinary context, for instance, they need to commit their learning behaviour to the institutional or disciplinary structures and requirements, in order to position themselves in a broader social environment in the future.They will consequently imagine or predict how their future life will look like by aligning themselves in the context through participation in activities.Of course, the heterogeneous individual students unavoidably enact out their roles in differentiated processes of negotiation as to the belonging of different orders.
Wenger (1998) proposes three specific modes of belonging to examine identity construction, that is, engagement, imagination and alignment, by looking at the multiple dimensions of participation in a community over time (see Figure 3.5).
Figure 3.5 Modes of belonging (from Wenger, 1998, p.174)
Engagement, as discussed in the previous subsection, is a source of identity, involving participation in activities and negotiation of meaning in a current shared practice.Imagination, on the contrary, extends individuals’ experience and creates reality beyond the boundaries of present time and space, because it is ‘the creative process of producing new “images” and of generating new relations through time and space that become constitutive of the self’ (Wenger, 1998, p.177).In spite of the fact that imagination can be ‘disconnected and ineffective’ and ‘detaches our identity and leaves us in a state of unrootedness’, alignment can function as a bridge of time and space to ‘form broader enterprises so that participants become connected through the coordination of their energies, actions, and practices’ (Wenger, 1998, p.179).These three modes encompass different aspects of practice and kinds of work.Wenger classifies them into the kind of ‘work of belonging’ to associate with each mode (cf.Wenger, 1998, pp.184-186).
There is a growing body of sociocultural work which has adopted Wenger’s communities of practice model for investigating how learners negotiate their identities in the context of second/foreign language acquisition (Dagenais, 2003; Kanno, 2003; Norton, 1995, 2000; Pavlenko, 2002; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004; Pavlenko & Norton, 2007).This has not yet been applied in a detailed account of identities construction in a transnational context and the use of disciplinary discourse.In this study, imagination, engagement and alignment are used as complementary explanation dimensions to measure how disciplinary identities are constructed in the range of individual and social participation and negotiation.