Mike and Leigh,
Thanks for the responses. Leigh, I will try to track down the info about
Wenger's article. Mike, I certainly agree with you about the features of
durability and resiliency as being important to the analysis (although in my
area there are terrible budget cuts which are making quite a few community
centers shut their doors -- so much for durability in the face of bad
political decisions). But it's the analysis of WHAT that I'm struggling with.
I'm not observing anything that I've set up in terms of the culture of the
organization. My study is not experimental in the least. So, it's not an
easy thing to determine how to slice it -- it being (I'm assuming) multiple
and overlapping communities of practices. There is certainly, after much
observation, interviews, etc. "deep knowledgeability" (Lave, 1992) about much
at the site, and I'm thinking that I have have to do some backtracking to
determine what the valued knowledge is structured around. Does this make
sense? Sometimes it doesn't to me. But, I'm still kind of swept up in the
process, so I'm going to give myself some slack. The "cultural practices of
exclusion" that you mentioned, at my site, are very powerful, and work
strongly in both directions, that is, keeping people from the site out of the
mainstream (university, government, etc.) and, at the other end, keeping
people out for a lot of other reasons that I can't begin to describe here.
Certainly my entry into the settings wasn't a joy ride, although I'm glad I'm
there now. Anyway, thanks a lot again for the suggestions.
Sara Hill
w>===== Original Message From xmca@weber.ucsd.edu =====
>Hi Sara-- I think our work on the 5thdimension at the boys aned
>girls club might prove interesting in figuring out how to separate,
>even analytically, communities of practice from the spaces they
>inhabit. What I see are shifting aliances and forcefields within
>the community center, but INCREDIBLE durability of the basic
>structures including local cultural practices of exclusion. But
>the context of the Club has changed radically over the years, and
>I find that one can experience incredible opportunities to study
>how organizations/people change over time while remaining the same.
>mike
Vanderbilt University &
Partnership for After School Education
New York, N.Y.
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