Communities of Practice CoP

What we are in our active communityProfessional Development Mario Alberto Sandoval SanchezDue: Friday October the 26th.

Gloria del Rocio Ibarguen Ramon

As most teenagers who are seeking to forge an identity will act, live and defend the

way they dress, what they like and their demeanor. Needless to say further down

the road as life hands them new experiences they look back and recognize what

they were thinking, the clothes, hair, taste in music, friends and wrong choices can

only make them blush or feel ashamed. You can say that they chose to be that way

but how much influence did they have in the way they acted? Can I say that if they

were in a different environment could they have acted a completely different way?

It can be said that even not choosing to follow the common demeanor would be

made because of the direct contact they had with people who acted or behaved in

a way that might not be favorable to one’s preferences. The simple fact that the

community where someone lives can be marquee in way they react whether

favorable or not.

As a professors it can also be said that inside our community of teachers we can

help each other learn through good or bad experiences, and most important grow

and expand. Most of us teachers rely on our material and knowledge to get through

a class, yet we see from other co-workers how to implement new techniques,

approaches, experiences like being aware of good students or even low-

performing groups. Sometimes a teacher can be very vocal with their experiences

in a class and co-workers tend to understand and help each other find a solution or

help alleviate any issues with grammar topics or students’ conduct. These day to

day situations everyone has gone through, at some point, everyone has always

relied on help and assistance from others. This can be taken into consideration as

a Community of Practice.

According to Etienne Wenger (2006),Communities of practice are groups of people

who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it

better as they interact regularly. As we go to work and practice our everyday labor

we share with our co-workers our experiences and also issues with the material,

school events, payments, and even classrooms. Why do we share these

experiences? Simple, our day to day experiences; these experiences are the same

for our co-workers, they in-turn understand and sympathize our learning

experiences or help us understand that our troubles are common or easy to fix.

There are times when we truly do not know what to do in given situations and it is

easier to ask a co-worker to help us make a proper decision dealing with the given

issue. To be fair with what a community of practice is, we usually consider that a

community consists of a neighborhood, this not necessarily true in a CoP. We need

three crucial characteristics to define what a community of practice is; one of them

is The domain.

The domain: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could belong to the same network as someone and never know it.) The domain is not necessarily something recognized as "expertise" outside the community. A youth gang may have developed all sorts of ways of dealing with their domain: surviving on the street and maintaining some kind of identity they can live with. They value their collective competence and learn from each other, even though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their expertise. Wenger (2006)

According to Wenger (2006) the domain is not just where you practice your

everyday life but an area where interest are shared. As English teachers we can

say that those moments when we share experiences or tips for learning and our

jargon is being misunderstood by non-teachers we are in our COP. This has

happened before for me, 4 months ago I was talking to my coordinator about how

students did learn because their lack of interest and that no matter how salient the

information was if they did not perceive through noticing in a psycholinguistics

learning process. We were both aware of our experience with the group and also

our chosen words, I would not talk this way with a friend or parents because they

would be able to respond to enrich the conversation. As a practitioner of a teaching

profession and grad school student, having correlated endeavors make me a

member of two communities. Another crucial characteristic is the community itself.

The community: In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together. The claims processors in a large insurance company or students in American high schools may have much in common, yet unless they interact and learn together, they do not form a community of practice. But members of a community of practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis. The Impressionists, for instance, used to meet in cafes and studios to discuss the style of painting

they were inventing together. These interactions were essential to making them a community of practice even though they often painted alone. Wenger (2006)

It is safe to say that the community differs from the domain in the fact that the

community is the members, or the people who interact in common activities for a

variety of purposes. There has to be interaction between the members of the

community even if they do not interact on a day to day basis. For example, my ex-

high school classmates who follow the NFL on a daily basis created a Fantasy

league. The league is game where actual football players are chosen through a

draft, you must construct a team from the players that you draft then once you

have built a league with ten people you wait for real NFL games and the way the

players performed will give you points and the team with the most points wins the

league. What is curious is that I live here in Veracruz and my ex-classmates live in

Los Angeles, CA. We get to interact and chat on-line and as the NFL season

progresses we communicate with each other for the league's sake we talk about

football stuff and also important information to help me chose the player that is the

most suitable each given week. So what is done is only by us as a group there are

more leagues of people who admire the game of football, but we can also imagine

that there are more things that are practiced and this brings us to the third and final

crucial characteristic needed in a community and it is the actual activity or what is

known as Practice.

The practice: A community of practice is not merely a community of interest--people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights, but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. The development of a shared practice may be more or less self-conscious. The "windshield wipers" engineers at an auto manufacturer make a concerted effort to collect and document the tricks and lessons they have learned into a knowledge base. By contrast, nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients. Still, in the course of all these conversations, they have developed a set of stories and cases that have become a shared repertoire for their practice. Wenger (2006).

According to Wenger (2006), we look at the detailed idea of being inside of a

community and the moment we share ideas and experiences we are interacting in

a working environment known to be a community of practice. The main focus the

concept and characteristics of the practice is to take into account the simple fact

that we are capable of learning in any part of our life from anybody. It can be said

that to me the best piece of advice given to me as a teenager was never said by a

friend relative or professor inside my community of daily interaction, but from a

renowned gang member.

I clearly remember the day I was waiting in line at a convenience store and some

random guy taps me with a carton of beer and looks at me angrily, so I decide to

ignore him and he taps me once more, as I turn around to look at him he tells me in

a conflictive demeanor “ what up”. I initially thought he wanted to start a fight with

me but he just wanted to catch my attention because my mother was his barber

and he told how much he respected my mother. As we engaged in a friendly

conversation I told him that I was a little stressed out over money and he told me

with a confident tone, “today you have a hundred dollars and tomorrow you don’t,

so why worry over something that you’re not going to have tomorrow” I can say this

piece of advice has been with me ever since, I think anyone can take this as

helpful, but how can this be helpful in my community of practice? It is safe to say

that we can only practice inside of our community if we maintain a core of

knowledge that is either helpful or resourceful. As I continue to be in a football

fantasy league in maintain my jargon and insights of new info that I learn through

football programs, sports news and websites as a core for my knowledge that will

be displaced inside a given domain in an area of interest named community where

we develop, share and maintain this football knowledge.

I think that the majority of us unconsciously create certain circle or communities to

keep an essence of what we are, for example, it quite common for people to

maintain their professional career as far away from their personal life as they can. I

like to think that people can be more than one dimensional like looking for people

with the same interest as you who might not be practitioners of your professional

community. For example, when I was in high school I used to play football and my

best friends who were into the trendiest fashions did not share my taste in fashion

and music. So I had to hang out with people outside my circle of teammates, I had

to find people who liked rock music and liked to go to live concerts and none of my

teammates ever enjoyed those things. So I had to look for people who did, and the

best thing about these friends was they never talked about football and I really

enjoyed that. I like to think that even if we are in an ideal community of practice, we

can most definitely look for other things and communities that can deal with other

expectations and learning experiences. I love to learn about new music and enjoy

older music so I have to look for people who lived that music and understand all

the nuances that create a new learning experience for me.

Reference

Wenger, Etienne. "Communities of practice." Etienne Wenger home page. N.p.,

n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2012. <http://www.ewenger.com/theory/>.