Key Terms
- Identity: “‘a way of being in the world and not equivalent to a self-image’… It is work in progress shaped by individual and collective efforts to create coherence, ‘to thread together successive forms of participation in the definition of self” (308).
- Communities of practice: “‘created over time by the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise,’ provide, ‘collective learning’…; their aim is ultimately to provide a ‘process by which we can experience the world and out engagement with it as meaningful’” (309). Also, “to be inside, to write in, one community of practice is necessarily to be outside of another, [and] the two communities of practice have boundaries the ‘define them as much of their core” (310). “These boundary locations are exactly where new knowledge is produced ad where, as Wenger argues, ‘new interplays of experiences and competence’ occur; in other words, they are ‘the likely locus of the production of radically new knowledge’” (331).
- Genre: “not merely texts that share some formal features; they are shared expectations among some group(s) of people…ways of recognizing and predicting how certain tools, in certain typified – typical, recurring – conditions, may be used to help participants act together purposefully” (317). Genres “constrain and limit, by they can also be potential spaces for identity transformation and learning: ‘we need to argue also for the potentialities of genre for creating spaces for forming and realizing new versions of self as one discovers new motives and transforms the self in response to these new communicative needs and opportunities’” (319).