Language, identity and wooden boards; can practice theory account for eryc?
Hilary
Haworth
Language,
identity and wooden boards; can practice theory account for eryc?
Introduction:
past and present definitions
Is
eryc a community of practice?
A
problematic model for identity construction?
A
problematic model for linguistic practice?
Introduction: past and present definitions
It is about local meanings, and an individual’s management of their identity.
Davies, 2005
If it is when ideas are put to work that real meanings are negotiated, then the meaning of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s concept of communities of practice is still very much under construction. Definitions of communities of practice (CoPs) and legitimate peripheral participation in Situated learning are certainly not held out to be complete. The concept is admitted to be an ‘intuitive notion’ (Lave and Wenger;1991); specifically, an analysis of unequal power relations is admitted to be missing.
However, the concept was intended to be more than a “counterfactual idealization” in Habermas’ phrase: the objective was to drive a stake into the ground so that the various accounts of ‘situated’ and ‘authentic’ learning, and Lave and Wenger’s own statement that “agent, activity and the world mutually constitute each other”, could be moved forward into “a specific analytic approach”.
In short, it was a model for illuminating the processes of learning and teaching, rather than of language learning or the construction of identity , and in this essay I examine some of the problems of translation implicit there. Following the models provided by Bucholtz (1999) and Eckert (1980) I look at examples of adolescent talk (albeit on-line talk). I am particularly interested in how communities of practice can be used to illuminate ‘subcultural’ identities, as the community I am looking at are contributors to an on-line forum on skateboarding called eryc.co.uk.
Originally, the concept of the community of practice was not offered as an instrumentalist technique for teachers. Far from it. Despite the fact that now communities of practice are being identified in education institutions where direct, active teaching is the norm (Crook,2002) for Lave and Wenger much learning was seen as unintentional, rather than directly taught. And although now instructional designers and tutors talk of the ‘creation’ or ‘design’ of communities of practice (Wegerif,1998; Mentis et al,2001), in the original formulation in Situated Learning, communities of practice were unobtrusively observed in their effects.
Since Lave and Wenger’s original analysis there has been no shortage of volunteers to develop and deepen their concept. Lave and Wenger originally looked at small-scale, localised learning activities of marginalized apprenticeships in Vai and Gola (Contu and Willmott; 2000). They are linked - through Vygotsky - with traditions in Marxist analysis. Bucholtz (1999) used the concept to explore gender issues and Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1995) examined issues of adolescent resistance cultures. Now, organisations such as IBM, Shell and SRI International champion communities of practice, and Wenger is bracketed with business gurus such as Senge and Schön (wikipedia, 2005). This deployment of their theories in the worlds of business and elite higher education moves their meanings well away from their start point.
Is eryc a community of practice?
A community of practice has three constitutive features, as defined by one the concept’s original authors, Wenger (1998):
1. mutual engagement
2. a joint enterprise
3. a shared repertoire
Eryc is an on-line forum that in my view can justifiably be called a community of practice on these terms. We can dispense with the need for geographical proximity in short order; what is important is engagement and endeavour and the practices these give rise to. Virtual communities of practice are as problematic as others to define and analyse, but they are certainly acknowledged to exist (see for example Hildreth et al 2000). As with all communities of practice, there are questions around how much and what type of engagement is necessary to maintain the community (Davies, 2005). In this case, certain central members of the eryc forum contribute several times a day to around six different ‘threads’; on a news item such as the hiring of a prominent skater by reebok ten different users posted responses within 24 hours. These are levels of contribution and engagement that any on-line distance learning course would be pleased to achieve.
The nature of a joint enterprise within eryc is interesting. Forum contributors are sharing more than an interest – they are complicit in creating a complex set of meanings for skating and skaters and producing an artifact that reflects that. As for Wenger’s example of medical claims processors: “the enterprise … includes all the energy they spend … not only in making claims processing possible in practice, but also in making the place habitable for themselves. Their daily practice, with its mixture of submission and assertion, is a complex, collectively negotiated response to what they understand to be their situation,” (Wenger, 1998). [PN1]
The shared repertoire consists of text in the form of articles or forum postings, pseudonyms, formatting options and graphics. Signifying systems at work within eryc include dress codes (discussion of various highstreet brands of trainer etc), language (in rejection of the “txt” style); pseudonym choice and image (each contributor’s postings are accompanied by the photo or cartoon graphic set up when the pseudonym is created). Political ideas and positions from wider social contexts also form part of the repertoire, as I shall show when I examine issues of engagement in more detail below.
A problematic model for identity construction?
Current models of communities of practice centre on knowledge accumulation, not identity construction:
They are focused on a domain of knowledge and over time accumulate expertise in this domain. They develop their shared practice by interacting around problems, solutions, and insights, and building a common store of knowledge.
Wenger, 2001
Bethan Davies (2005) sees this as a seriously damaging factor, suggesting the model is inappropriate to analyses of language and identity.
However, if we can admit the possibility that the community of practice includes not just deliberately developed skills and information, but a set of stances and accommodations developed as part of the learning process, then the role of learning in constructing identity is clearer. Kirkup (2002) draws on Castells (1997) to show that learning and identity are really inseparable. Wenger (1998) agrees that identity is co-created with learning, as individuals become more ‘participating’, in a negotiated process of ‘learning as becoming’. As Bucholtz (1999) argues, the community of practice model exceeds the power of the speech community model precisely because the latter treats the individual identity as ‘static’ and cannot account for change or multiplicity.
Social network theory, like community of practice theory, is concerned with the links between individuals, and allows for a ‘gradable’ concept of membership in that individuals can be more or less integrated into the network. However the focus is still on linguistic practices to the exclusion of other social practice (Holmes and Meyerhoff, 1999)
The idea of identity as being formed on ‘a learning trajectory’ (Kirkup, 2002) is a useful one for the analysis of eryc. Wenger (2000) now defines three participative ‘options’ (‘inward’, ‘outward’ and ‘orbital’, making no commitment to full membership). Eryc contributors’ paths could be productively mapped in these terms: many will join out of interest in news items, as a result of searching out specific branded products, or to share tips and stories: an inward trajectory could pass through participating in some of the opinion-based or overtly political discussions on local and global issues and on to contributing articles. Equally well, the community of practice model suits pseudonymity and the potentiality for multiplicity of identities this offers; eryc members play somewhere along the continuum that runs from pure anonymity and ‘true’, named identity; their pseudonyms, though untraceable to real-world persons, may have well-established reputations, even notoriety, in the virtual domain. The analysis must be done at the level of practice, not with reference to externally known roles or personalities.
Davies’ critique of the work of Bucholtz, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, then, undermines the power of the community of practice model to analyse anything but learning communities. I feel it is the associated view of learning as ‘an experience of identity’ and vice versa (Wenger, 1998) that gives the model its power when looking at the eryc subculture. Even on its own terms, Davies’ critique rather underplays the subtlety of Wenger’s own formulation of the mechanisms of participation and exclusion at work in a community of practice.
Wenger’s 1998 formulation of community of practice theory allows for the negotiation of membership through several signifying systems at several levels or modes (Fig 1). I have mapped observed behaviours on eryc to his three modes of identification or belonging:
· Active engagement
· Imaginative engagement with community ideas
· Alignment with community aims
Figure 1: Social ecology of identity negotiation in the eryc community
|
Modes of belonging |
Identities of
participation |
Identities of
non-participation |
|
Engagement |
Sociability of majority of exchanges Frequent short postings of agreement or acknowledgement |
Low frequency of contributions Postings ignored “Bobba”-ed contributions[1] Contributions removed by moderators Silence (no contributions) |
|
Imagination |
Vicarious experience of successful tricks News items from elsewhere summarized in forum where a shared response is clearly anticipated (eg to police, resident or council opposition to street skaters) Making ideological connections to other subcultures and communities including ·
‘youth’: “basically we just need to keep
challenging the system and the conformity its demanding of us just for being
youth” (skatenow619, ·
anti-corporatism: “skating is becoming ever closer
to football”, Wigs, ·
ecological: “let’s not forget that cars cause
pollution” (supertom, |
When a news posting was clearly incomprehensible to some but transparent to others, ‘dis-preferred’ responses were repaired (cf Bucholtz, 1999) Disagreement over tactics: “If we didn’t keep on
disobeying cops we wouldn’t have the image, and wouldn’t get constant hassle
of cops” (kasai, |
|
Alignment |
Persuasive articles on language, style and netiquette Campaigning for more permissive attitudes to street skating; Lobbying for better skate parks |
‘Deviant’ Challenges on rational/factual grounds Submission or withdrawal from debate |
A problematic model for linguistic practice?
If identity construction can be shown to be central to communities of practice then can they be equally valid as a model for linguistic practice?
Essentially at issue here is the object of enquiry. Put (over) simply, socio-linguistics draws on social information to explain linguistic data, and the study of identity - or specific aspects of identity such as gender – uses linguistic data to illuminate social phenomena (Bucholtz, 1999).
Table 1: Speech communities and CoPs
|
Speech community |
Community of practice |
|
Language as central Other forms of mutual engagement…are marginalized or ignored (Bucholtz,
1999) |
Language as one form of social practice The community of practice …reincorporates language into the physical self (Bucholtz, 1999) |
|
Labov’s ‘shared norms’ maps phonological variables to membership of certain groups (Eckert, 1980) |
Communities of practice share ‘evaluation of meanings created by that variation’ (Davies, 2005) |
|
Global categories imposed on individuals |
Membership maintained locally through social negotiations |
|
Emphasis on patterns of variation |
Emphasis on members’ own perceptions of variation |
|
Valorisation of ‘good’ or ‘central’ examples, devaluation of those at the margins of the community (Bucholtz, 1999) |
Valorisation of the learning to be gained at the periphery (Lave and Wenger, 1991) |
|
Plays down the power of agency |
Plays up the power of the ‘brokers’ at the borders |
|
Focuses on “what speakers share” (Bucholtz, 1999) |
Focuses on processes of apprenticeship and change |
|
Unable to look at interactions between groups |
Sees identity as ‘a point of intersection of many forms of membership’ (Kirkup, 2002) |
If practice theory is to
illuminate language use in eryc, it can do so best at the levels of lexicon and
discourse (see Figure 2), although attempts are made to convey members’
phonological expression as well. Their
linguistic practices serve to mark eryc members as articulate but not overly
trendy in their expression, viewing language as a tool of communication but
enjoying occasional episodes of verbal punning, and as using more British
English than American English, probably in line with their anti-globalisation,
anti-corporation stance. Just as Eckert
and McConnell-Ginet (1995) showed that Burnout communities participated at different
rates in the
Figure 2: Linguistic practices in the eryc community
|
Linguistic level |
Positive practices |
Negative practices |
|
Phonology |
Some exaggerated transliterations for expressive effect eg. “Huuuuumour?!” |
Parody of black English (‘mon’) |
|
Syntax |
Some non standard syntactic forms (eg, word on that) Enjoyment of inventive use of syntax: “that is a massive
sentence! Heheheee….” (glayzenbee, |
Resistance of ‘txt’ and ‘leetspeak’: “it said something
along the lines of "lol! dat paper was sooo funny! ne way omg..."
etc etc. That is all I remember of it, but who the hell actually writes
ne thing, or omg on paper?!” (skatemate, |
|
Lexicon |
Use of some current ‘youth’ slang. Balance of Anglo-saxon and Latinate forms Use of emoticons |
Avoidance of sit com Americanisms. |
|
Discourse |
Orientation to humour and verbal inventiveness Personal accounts Use of appeals to shared understandings/experiences/ emotions |
Avoidance of formal, passive forms Limited use of persuasive reasoning |
It is accepted that in the performance of identity within a CoP, factors other than linguistic ones are at play. Bucholtz (1999) argues that “non-linguistic social practices and language should be approached in analogous ways”. And Davies (2005) summarises, ‘practice theory aims to valorise all social actions equally.’ Just as Eckert (1980) produced an ethnographic study of jean width, so in eryc the dividing line between styles of skating shoe are hotly argued and clearly politicized. Every posting is accompanied by a photograph or graphic, eg:
The semiotics of these are perhaps more varied than the language practices themselves. Just as Bucholtz’s analysis of Bay City High draws a lot of its power from its conversation analysis, and Eckert’s analysis of Belten High its richness from its ethnographic study (Davies, 2005), the study of these graphics and animations could draw on a social semiotic approach (Iedema, 2001) to explicate the ideation, orientation and organization of each one. While these different approaches add to the community of practice method, they should be seen not as bolstering a weakened model (as Davies does) but as taking advantage of its flexibility, allowing sociolinguists to work at several levels from the macro levels of identity and gender to the micro ones of Jocks and Burnouts.
Conclusion
Situated Learning introduced the idea of communities with several legitimate ‘ways of belonging’ (Lave and Wenger;1991). Since then, themes of non-hierarchical, interdependent, egalitarian structures have been prevalent, for example in contrasting CoPs with ‘teams’ (Hildreth et al,2000). Wegerif (1998) suggests communities of practice can offer naturally consensual, interdependent, egalitarian environments. Strictly speaking, CoPs were not originally claimed to be thus. This is not just because experts and old-timers are the primary scaffolders of novices – that learners need teachers more than the other way round. Lave and Wenger are clear that in the real world, unequal access to CoPs is a fact of life:
Hegemony over resources for learning and alienation from full participation are inherent in the shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality of participation in its historical realizations
Lave and Wenger;1991
In fact, this tension at the heart of a community of practice is the strength of the model. It is in using techniques and approaches from the broad church of socio-linguistic analysis to unpick those fraught and fought over ways of ‘belonging’ that the approach has its real power.
Word count 2555
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