Wenger ch 6 & 7

Well, it has been a long day. I just got home and I'm tired, so my comments will be brief and probably simplistic.

While I will not say that fully comprehend everything here, I was not troubled by anything he said about identity. I liked the one line at the beginning that said "the concept of identity serves as a pivot between the social and the individual, so that each can be talked about in terms of the other." I think that this was an aptly stated reason for why we need to define identity. Through all my reading, I stopped to think about my identity and I was easily able to see how all the influence and "interconnectedness" that he talks about have indeed played a role for me (some more than other, but I think that is the point). The most interesting topic to me was trajectories and how they apply to identity and learning. From page 155: "Understanding something new is not just a local act of learning. Rather, each is an event on a trajectory through which they give meaning to their engagement in practice in terms of the identity they are developing." Trajectories provide the context for learning and the development identity. If we encounter something that does not lie on one of many trajectories that constitute the nexus, or perhaps provide a potential tangent trajectory to pursue, that event will provide little 'affordance' for learning and and influence on identity. I think that think concept is paramount to trying to help students learn. That is to find a way to position our teaching along the trajectories of our students.

That's it for now.