The role of writing in building community is an important topic. This book moves us through that process by describing the journey into the fold of a particular writing community. While it may be helpful to describe community membership as a typical journ

Writing in a Community of Practice: Composing Membership in Inkshed

By Miriam E. Horne

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2012 Miriam E. Horne
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4669-4192-2

Contents

Acknowledgements.................................................viiIntroduction.....................................................ix1. Writing and Community: Making Connections.....................12. Identity: Parts That Make the Whole...........................223. Writing Tentatively: Into the Periphery.......................504. Sharing Texts: Moving Beyond the Edges........................855. Full Participation: A Public Presence.........................1156. Membership: Lessons Learned...................................147References.......................................................165Appendix A Inkshed Timeline......................................175Appendix B Inkshed Conferences...................................177Appendix C Design................................................179

Chapter One

Writing and Community: Making Connections

It's already dark outside on this chilly October day. I watch my classmates struggle in the door wet with the rain that darkens Montreal's skies. I sit at a table near the back of what serves as a dining room during the day. I pretend to be busy reading, hoping that I look more in place than I actually feel. Monday evenings, my first semester as a graduate student in McGill's Faculty of Education, I attend Anthony Paré's course on Writing Across the Curriculum. Fresh out of my undergraduate program I am surrounded by people who are older than me, have been teaching for years, and seem to know exactly why they're here and what they want to do. I, on the other hand, feel like an interloper. As other students join my table, I smile and say hello, but I don't engage any further than that. If I open my mouth too much, the other graduate students might find out how much I don't know. They might realize that I'm not really good enough to join the academic community.

After three weeks of this course, I have, I think, perfected my façade. I do the readings for the class well ahead of time. I read each assigned article with a critical eye, finding any weakness, finding whatever the author may have left out, finding the problems. When I arrive in class, as I have this evening, I pretend to be reading something scholarly—something that will make me look smart. When we start our small group discussions, I contribute as little as possible, and limit myself to specific criticisms of the text itself—I don't dare stretch ideas beyond that. In the large class discussions that Anthony brings together for the last part of class, I listen, but I stay silent.

Finally, Anthony arrives, shakes the rain off his jacket, and prepares to get the class started. He has decided that since we're a large class, we will be more comfortable meeting at Thomson House—the graduate student building. We sit in the basement where the restaurant is, and make ourselves comfortable around the large dining room tables. Of course, feeling as insecure as I do as a new graduate student, we could be meeting anywhere and I'd still feel uncomfortable.

"So what I'd like to start with tonight," Anthony begins, "is some writing. Take a few minutes and free write about one or both of the articles you read for this evening."

Oh crap. I have to write. I am unsure how to proceed. I am unsure what to say. I worry about writing the right thing, about writing something significant. I take a deep breath, put pen to paper and being to writing, trying, as I go, to sound as articulate and educated as possible.

After a few painful minutes, I finish with what I think are appropriately academic concerns and put my pen down. Too late, I realize that others are still writing. I worry that they have more to say than I do—that once again, I won't measure up. I wonder if I'm going to have to hand this in and hope desperately that Anthony is not actually going to read it. After only a moment of my further fretting, however, Anthony stands and asks for our attention. I find myself silently pleading with him not to ask us to hand them in. I don't know if my ideas are good enough. "Now," says Anthony, "I'd like you to pass your paper two people to your right."

My heart pounds. My stomach churns. I wonder if I have heard correctly. I wonder if he might be crazy.

"Then as you read the text make a line in the margin beside anything that stands out to you, beside anything that resonates with you or you think others would benefit from. Once you've finished, keep passing to the right until you've read all the freewrites at your table."

I feel panic gripping me. I am sure that if other people read this, I will be exposed for the fraud that I am. I kick myself for sitting at the back of the room and wish that I were sitting by the door at the front so I could make an escape to the bathroom.

Despite the strength of my angst, everyone seems to be complying with Anthony's request. The papers are starting to move around the table. I can't help but notice, however, that others look uncomfortable as well. The woman next to me mutters an apology as she hands hers over. Maybe, I think, I'm not the only one who feels uncomfortable. I begin to read.

I finish reading the first paragraph and glance around to see who the author might be. Clearly, she has had far more teaching experience than I have. I realize it's much easier to critique someone who is far away and faceless. I realize that if she is as uncomfortable as I am, then I need to be more sensitive in how I respond. I do as Anthony suggests, and I draw a line in the margin beside her first paragraph. I think there is something of value in here that is interesting to think about—I realize I don't have to come up with a criticism, just think about what she has said.

As I take the next text that is waiting at my elbow, I glance up to see where my text is. Someone across the table is reading it. I note, with relief, that she is not laughing, that she is even drawing a line beside something I have written.

The activity continues. I continue to read, sensitive to those writers who are sitting with me. When my page finally makes its way back to me, I am amazed to see that parts of it have several lines in the margin beside it; I am amazed that someone has valued my input; I am amazed that no one has laughed at me. Perhaps, I muse, there is a place for me in this community after all. As I leave class later that evening, I find myself walking out with two of the women at my table, talking with them, and for the first time, feeling like maybe I do belong.

Belonging, membership—these are powerful concepts that drive and shape human identity. They are wrapped up not just in communities but in individual strengths and insecurities as well. The preceding vignette draws on personal experience to describe and introduce some of the angst and tension that sometimes accompanies joining a new community—more specifically, academia. While the angst and tension may not be a surprise (even if we rarely talk about it overtly), the role that writing had in facilitating membership in academia may be. It was not until after that challenging writing experience described in the opening vignette that I began to feel like I belonged either in that graduate class or in academia at all. What happened that evening that changed how I felt? What part did my insecurities play in participation? What happened that allowed me to be part of the community and not feel so fraudulent? What does it mean to identify with and belong to a community? What was it about writing and the immediacy of sharing that writing that changed my perspective of my classmates and my feelings of fitting in? What is the role of writing in creating/developing a membership in a community?

The questions that this vignette introduces are the same questions that I sought to answer in this book because, while much work has been done that examines community membership and that connects writing to its social setting or community, little attention has been paid to how being able to carry out that writing practice actually facilitates membership in that social setting or community or the sometimes painful human element that accompanies membership. Take, for example, the work of Wenger (1998) who carefully described the ways that groups of people come together through common interests that lead to shared practices to form what he called communities of practice (CoPs). The theory behind CoPs, as I explain in more detail further in this chapter, provides a useful way of understanding how people come together through common practices to form units we call communities. By drawing on the practices in which people engage, Wenger explored functionality, learning and human engagement. However, despite his attention to practice, he did not explicitly address the role of language in general or writing more specifically as a driving practice in forming community (Barton & Hamilton, 2005). Similarly, despite exploring identity and learning within these communities and despite detailed and insightful descriptions of the workplace, Wenger did not explicitly address the human experience of participation or personal angsts, or predispositions that might impact participation.

Genre theorists such as Miller (1984), Freadman (1994), Schryer (1994), Paré (2002) and Artemeva (2006) had different views. For example, Miller (1984), with her notion of genre as "typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations" (p. 159), reconceptualized thinking about writing to locate it within its social structures and to recognize the dynamic interconnection between writing and social setting. As a result, we have benefitted from a vast body of research that examines a wide variety of text types and the communities in which they were generated—for example, Schryer (1994) and medicine, Medway (2002) and architecture, and Paré (2002) and social work to name a few. However, while their works make essential contributions to understanding writing practices, there is much less attention to how these practices contribute to the human experience of the process of learning to write within a community or the human cost of participating in a genre. What is the lived significance of carrying out writing tasks? In other words, how do people learn these writing practices and what are the experiences associated with that learning? How does one know if one has learned successfully? What are the consequences on community membership of not mastering the writing practice? Furthermore, how does that affect the individual?

In order to explore the relationship between writing and community membership, I draw on the experience of a five-year ethnographic study in which I examined the writing practices of an academic community that not only studied and researched and taught writing as a socially mediated and contextualized act, but also practiced it as a heuristic and dialogic activity amongst its members. Although I focus on one specific academic community, I believe that much of the experience I describe will resonate with readers who have experiences joining other academic communities. To this end, I have utilized descriptive vignettes (as I did in the opening of this chapter) to recreate some of the human issues less talked about but equally important in joining an academic community. By presenting issues in this way, I draw on notions from qualitative research that recreate situations in the form of stories to broaden perspectives.

Over the course of five years, I not only studied the practices of but also became a member of the Canadian Association for the Study of Language and Learning (CASLL). This community, which emerged in the early 1980s out of a need for Canadian scholars to connect and work with each other, has filled an important role in Canadian writing studies. For over twenty-five years it hosted annual conferences, and continues to publish a newsletter, host a listserv and publish work important to writing studies. CASLL continues to be a recognized institution in Canadian writing studies. It is currently undergoing change to find the most appropriate ways to meet the needs of its members.

CASLL is known less formally and more commonly as Inkshed. When I refer, in the body of this text, to Inkshed with an "I," I am referring to the CASLL community. The community takes this nickname from a writing activity called inkshedding—an activity in which participants respond in writing to a common prompt and then share what they have written with each other, and an activity which, when written with a small "i," refers to the activity, not the community.

Inkshedding, I learned after the fact, was the writing activity that Anthony took us through that October evening in class, the one I described at the beginning of this chapter. As Anthony had us do, participants at annual Inkshed conferences responded to common prompts (conference presentations or sessions rather than the readings we were doing as graduate students), then shared these written responses and underlined, marked-up or otherwise highlighted in others' writings any passages that seemed significant. At conferences, an editorial committee then collected all the responses, selected the sections that had been most highlighted, typed them, copied them, and distributed these thoughts to all participants in order to enhance discussions and ideas. This process happened over and over again during a four-day, annual conference.

From that first evening in which I was introduced to inkshedding and in the subsequent years of becoming an Inkshed member, I observed relationships between writing, community membership and identity. This book draws on my experiences in the Inkshed community to explore the process of community membership and the role that writing has in that process. My journey of membership provides insights into the often overlooked personal process of membership. Despite theories that explicate the experience, there has been little attention to the lived-through experience of both the angst and joy of negotiating human relationships. This book is an attempt to articulate and highlight that experience.

My experience with inkshedding and the Inkshed community embodies two fundamental and interconnected perspectives that help to explicate the experience of learning to inkshed and learning to belong to an academic community and, therefore, to address the role of writing in community membership. First, writing is a social act—an idea that draws on theories of social constructionism and recognizes the importance of social context and human interaction in the production of written texts. Second, communities are shaped and determined by their practices, and in academia, writing is an essential practice. Understanding communities through their practices resonates with theories developed by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) who described what they called communities of practice (CoPs). These two notions are important because, when understood together, they help to make sense of the experiences and activities that contribute to membership in the various communities in which individuals participate, and, as I will illustrate in this book, these practices shape and form identities.

Writing as a Social Act

When I say that writing is a social act, I align myself with the ideas of scholars such as LeFevre (1987), Berlin (1988), Bizzell (1983), and Dias, Freedman, Medway and Paré (1999). Dias et al. articulated their stance by arguing that:

The contexts of writing not only influence it (facilitating it or frustrating it or nudging it in a particular direction) but are integral to it. The context is not simply the contingent circumstances within which we happen to switch on the writing motor. Writing is not a module that we bring along and plug into any situation we find ourselves in. Rather, the context constitutes the situation that defines the activity of writing; to write is to address the situation by means of textual production. (Dias et al., 1999, p. 17)

Proponents of this position understand that writing is not simply an isolated, multi-step process through which a writer ends up with a structurally, linguistically, and content-appropriate text. Rather, writing is a socially mediated act. It is dependent on specific social and rhetorical situations. No writer works in isolation, but, to write successfully, is subject to the values, attitudes and demands of the context in which she writes. Writing is imbued with connotations that carry forward into social interactions. Understanding the implications of context is important in writing studies as a reminder that writing "is not a discrete clearly definable skill learned once and for all" (Dias et al., 1999, p. 9). Rather, it is "the outcome of continuing collaboration, of interactions that involve other people and other texts" (p. 10).

Thus, when Anthony first guided us through the uncomfortable writing task that I described at the beginning of this book, he was setting up a situation in which the social context was immediately relevant and meaningful. It made a difference whether we wrote or not. The social context—the small group of graduate students responding to the same text—gave us a meaningful context in which to share productive interactions through writing.

This social contextualization of writing finds its foundations in the work of social constructionists. Work by Kuhn (1970), Geertz (1973), and Rorty (1979) laid a foundation for understanding basic social theories of knowledge, community, and language. Social constructionist theorists argue that knowledge is created when experts within communities use common language to describe and draw conclusions about what they see. As the majority of a community agrees on the interpretation of observations, knowledge is created and established. Our small group of graduate students was tapping into the expertise of experts in the field and as a microcommunity went through the process of interpreting and creating understanding together through our writing.

(Continues...)

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