Teacher Learning in a Community of Practice: A Case Study of ...

3.3.2.4 Learning
Practice has to be understood in its 'temporal' dimension (Wenger 1998). Some
communities ofpractice could exist over many years while others could be short-lived
but are "intense enough to generate indigenous practice and transform the identities of
those involved" (ibid.:86). Such communities arise in the face ofcrises where people
come together to deal with a situation. The development ofpractice entails a matter of
sustaining enough mutual engagement to share some significant learning.
"(C)ommunities ofpractice can (therefore) be thought ofas shared histories oflearning"
(ibid.). Practices evolve as shared histories oflearning, an ongoing process of
participation and reification intertwined over time. Forms ofparticipation and reification
continually converge and diverge. They come into contact and affect each other in
moments ofnegotiation ofmeaning.
Participants, in the process ofsustaining a practice, become invested in what they do as
well as in each other and their shared history. Their identities become "anchored in each
other" (Wenger 1998:89) and what they do together. While a participant may not find it
easy to become a radically new person in a community ofpractice, it is also not easy for a
participant to transform herselfwithout the support of the community.
Because a community ofpractice is a system ofinterrelated forms ofparticipation,
discontinuities are not an uncommon phenomenon. When newcomers join a community
ofpractice, discontinuities may spread through many levels and relations shift in a
'cascading process'. "Relative new-corners become relative old-timers" (Wenger
1998:94). New identities are forged from new perspectives having either an unsettling or
an encouraging effect on participants. This process could reveal progress, which may
have remained, previously unnoticed. Participants (old-timers) suddenly see all that they
have learned because they are now in a position to help other participants (new-corners).
These shifts also create new demands as participants (old-timers) are suddenly being
looked up to and are expected to know more than they are sure they do.
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