Serendipitous discovery: I was eating lunch at my desk while the kiddos were out in the schoolyard. I was surfing through some blogmarks I’ve got on the work computer when I saw Learning, Technology and Collaboration: A Journey of the Self on Stepen Downes’ site. I’m always interested in ‘journeys of the self’ since I think they are the only journeys that ever make a difference. I was very happy to discover that this post was a summary of notes taken on a talk by Etienne Wenger on communities of practice at ALT-C in Manchester. Considering that my last post was about Wenger (posted on Sept. 11, just 3 days after Downes’) I read with interest.

From the comments section I followed a link to a pdf file of Wenger’s presentation, and a link to ewenger.com. I read a lot of his work a few years ago, and during the last couple of days I’ve been going through my notes to review because I’ve been wanting to explore the implications of communities of practice for classroom teachers.

These links have given me a more current web-based source to consult. I look forward to reading through what’s there, and would like to thank Stephen Downes and Seb Schmoller for sharing that material. The most significant part of Downes’ notes for me was this passage:

Existing in the world is a way of transforming what you know, of transforming who you are. It allowed us to place the making of meaning at the center of the analysis, in terms of ways of becoming a member, of hoping to become a member, to start talking about the world as a learning curriculum.

This completely resonated with me because it speaks to the intersection of meaning and identity, which I see as the critical piece in being able to facilitate school learning as transformational experience for both students and teachers. I want to emphasize that I think that we as teachers need to be open to learning from our practice. I believe that, too often, I close doors and miss opportunities that might have proven fruitful if only I’d been willing to step back from my agenda and consider the possibilites offered by alternate readings of the school text.