Ricardo wrote:
>
>It seems to us - Portuguese speakers - that the expression "commonalities
>of practice(s)" - particularlly the word "commonality" -can go beyond the
>meaning usually given to "community" since the last one always carries a
>sense of neighbourhood or the idea of living at a same town square or in
>the same place. Let me try to make it much clear: In a certain classroom,
>for example, I can find students who do not live even in the city where
>the school is offered to. These things can be much more observed in the
>very country side of Brasil but it can also happen in big cities which
>had incorporated small towns around, like S„o Paulo, Salvador - and I
>suppose NY, LA etc. Or non-presencial pedagogical interventions, like
>XMCA.
i like the idea of commonalities as an operational description of the
practice for this list-serve - i have vague memories of discussions on
xmca about whether or not we were a community of practice - and it
strikes me that we're closer to a group with some commonalities of
practice - although in English, a community can be a group bounded by
common practices with membership beyond a specific geographic locale. and
i've noticed that a synonym for community in Roget's 21st century
thesaurus is the word commonality.
>
>
>I do not know if something like "this" - how these words sound - occurs
>with the English language. Does it happen?
>
well, in English both words have the same latin root - different
suffixes. i think that a community is understood to have communalities,
but there can be communalities between people without having a community -
leastwise, so it seems to me.
i just saw the movie "Dog town and the z boys" - a documentary
unexpectedly closer to an ethnography, i found - and it is certainly a
primo example of how within a physically bounded neighborhood a
commonality of practices gave rise to a community of practice.
Bill Baroway! check it out! skateboarders fabuloso!
phillip
>
* * * * * * * *
* *
The English noun "identity" comes, ultimately, from the
Latin adverb "identidem", which means "repeatedly."
The Latin has exactly the same rhythm as the English,
buh-BUM-buh-BUM - a simple iamb, repeated; and
"identidem" is, in fact, nothing more than a
reduplication of the word "idem", "the same":
"idem(et)idem". "Same(and) same". The same,
repeated. It is a word that does exactly what
it means.
from "The Elusive Embrace" by Daniel
Mendelsohn.
phillip white
university of colorado at denver
denver, colorado
phillip_white@ceo.cudenver.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 27 2002 - 08:02:49 PDT