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Learning, Knowledge and Human Development MOOC’s Updates

My Feminist Community of Practice

The idea of communities of practice, espoused by Etienne Wenger, comprises groups of people who share some degree of expertise in an interest or craft. The community, often informally, decides what competence is necessary to be a full member of the group. Competence may be more obvious if a craft yields a finished product, such as a working machine. Some people participate in the group who are not (yet) full members and they learn from interacting with the community what the rules and expectations are. Sometimes group members explicitly tell them and other times they pick it up from observation. The community ideals and understanding of competency can change over time, most likely as the membership changes.

One community of practice to which I belong is an online feminist Facebook group. I am a woman of words, so I am most aware of the language aspects. Intersectional feminism, of which we are a part, has a specific vocabulary. I knew much of the vocabulary before I joined the group, but not all of it.

There are also words and phrases we do not use out of respect for marginalized communities. I was aware of most of these with regard to race and ethnicity before joining the group, but there are some words to which people in the disabled community object of which I was not aware. I had to be told a few times not to use certain words or phrases and I did not always receive the correction gracefully.

I also, in at least one instance, made the “rookie mistake” of going off on a tangent (centering my own issue) instead of concentrating on the subject at hand. No one in the group called me out* for this aspect of my transgression in this case, but I realized later, to my horror, what I had done. In this way, I demonstrated I was not yet competent, but was still on the periphery of the community.

*To call someone out is to draw that person's attention to an error that person has made which contributes to the marginalization of another person or community.

Here is a Youtube video, “Introduction to communities of practice,” (Wenger-Trayner, 2015)