Week11+questions

The community of practice Wenger uses in her vignettes are the claims processors at the medical insurance company. These claims processors when through training to become processors, but then learned tricks and shortcuts on the floor. With this in mind, what is the community of practice we wish to have in our classrooms? It seems as if the teaching/learning the claims processors went through to become processors is more like the mathematics classroom learning than the actual practice of those processors. (JE, 3/29).

The way that you describe this Jonathan (above) makes me think about preservice teachers. The training they receive from our programs at WMU is not the entirety of what they need or teaching; most of the "real learning" will take place in their own classrooms [feel free to argue with me on this point]. With respect to your first question on the community of practice desirable for our classrooms, if our students are preservice teachers then to me it is desirable to have experiences in our WMU community that span several communities -- the mathematical community at large (global), school classroom communities (k-12), and collegial communities (WMU). Maybe then we are participating in the "boundaries" of each of these communities... (NF, 3/29).

How is situated learning different from the incidental learning of the PEA (roughly 1920s / 1930s)? We all "know" from the history that the work of the PEA lead to a serious decline in school mathematics throughout the 20s and 30s. What important differences are there between incidental learning (I learn the mathematics I need while I work on some project) and situated learning (I learn the mathematics I need while I work on some project)? (RK, 3/29)

"In the abstract, anything can be known and the rest is ignorance. But in a complex world in which we must find a liveable identity, ignorance is never simply ignorance and knowing is not just a matter of information. In practice, understanding is always straddling the known and the unknown in a subtle dance of the self" (bottom of page 41). I am not sure what my question is, but I feel like a tremendous amount of what the author was trying to communicate is wrapped up in that quote, and I am not sure I understand it properly. (JDS 3/29)

Does a community of practice need to have all the characteristics (p. 77) to function properly? Some of these will make communities unproductive given time constraints (classroom communities). How can these be combined for optimum productivity of a classroom community? How much of disagreements can be viewed as productive and how much of conformity can be viewed as unproductive? (NA)

In a classroom situation where will brokers come from to meet newcomers at the boundary (chapter 4)? (NA)

Is it fair to say that teachers have the task of brokering in the classroom? Doesn't our job (as teachers) involve participating in the classroom of students but we aren't really members of it, and we participate in the community of "knowledge-disseminators" but we aren't really members of it either? I know my question is not as clear as I would like it to be, but hopefully someone can help me clarify this. (JH 3/30)

I agree with Jonathon's statement about the claims processors as metaphors for students or for pre-service teachers (as Nicole mentioned -- I agree with her comment about teachers' "learning on the job"). How can we use the reading for this week to improve our students' experiences in our classroom communities? It seems that there is something concrete that we can take away from this. CZ 3/30