Communities of Practice Learning, Meaning, and Identity

There is a profound connection between identity and practice. Developing a practice requires the formation of a community whose members can engage with one another and thus acknowledge each other as participants. As a consequence, practice entails the negotiation of ways of being a person in that context. This negotiation may be silent; participants may not necessarily talk directly about that issue. But whether or not they address the question directly, they deal with it through the way they engage in action with one another and relate to one another. Inevitably, our practices deal with the profound issue of how to be a human being. In this sense, the formation of a community of practice is also the negotiation of identities.

The parallels between practice and identity are summarized in Figure 6.1. To highlight them in this chapter, I will (as I did in Coda I) go through the themes of Part I, chapter by chapter, but recast them in terms of identity. This exercise will yield the following characterizations.

1. • Identity as negotiated experience. We define who we are by the ways we experience our selves through participation as well as by the ways we and others reify our selves.

2. • Identity as community membership. We define who we are by the familiar and the unfamiliar.

3. • Identity as learning trajectory. We define who we are by where we have been and where we are going.

4. • Identity as nexus of multimembership. We define who we are by the ways we reconcile our various forms of membership into one identity.

5. • Identity as a relation between the local and the global. We define who we are by negotiating local ways of belonging to broader constellations and manifesting broader styles and discourses.