Genvieve,
I'm shocked that I see my name all over the listserve, kind of like a bad
dream for me. Like I'm naked!
My research questions were originally the following:
1. How does the selected site constitute a community of practice?
2. What are the opportunities for learning in the community of practice?
3. What is the valued knowledge in the community of practice?
Of course, I go into a lot of detail about the questions in the dissertation
proposal. I wanted to address questions of how the notion community of
practice is an appropriate construct with which to observe and analyze
activity at a community based organization (my site). I wanted identify what
might be some problems in applying the construct of community of practice to
this setting, and what might be some alternative interpretations or frameworks
which may be useful in understanding activity and participation in this
context.
>
>I've been mapping out communities of practice and
>activity systems in my head for quite some time,
>and thus am quite interested in any other such
>expeditions. But I need focus. Research questions
>often help me find it ...
The problem with mappying communities of practice when it comes to an actual
research setting is that I'm finding it's a lot more complicated than I
thought. How does one delimit? To determine where one COP starts and another
ends? What about people who identify/belong to multiple COPs that cross
contexts? How do we inventory all the COPs we belong to? I'm sure if I tried
this I might miss something. This overlapping notion is problemmatic. What
happens when COPs are nested, for example, hierarchically? Then, I keep
thinking I'm making it all too static, it's not a thing, dammit.
>
>and on another tangent, so history = progress, eh?
>
>I remember my French lit professor (Susi Kao???)
>explaining quite patiently about that one day,
>how the march of history was going to take care
>of our problems until, ooops, history was suddenly
>made fragile by the Atomic bomb. We were discussing
>Sartre, the guy who wrote 'La condition humaine,'
>others. Another gem from her was her nailing down how
>in 'La condition humaine' the Asian was 'la foule',
>the crowd, a kind of anonymous backdrop. All the
>action was left to Europeans. Europeans were human,
>Asians were the crowd.
>
>For me, history is more akin to a chorus of ghosts,
>like the one in _Beloved_. And from Paul, I once
>got the insight that we spend a lot of time chasing
>ghosts, even in California, the land without Memory.
I'm not sure what to make of this tangent. Is it connected to anything I've
written? It's interesting, though.
Sara
>Genevieve
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Vanderbilt University &
Partnership for After School Education
New York, N.Y.
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