Teacher Learning in a Community of Practice: A Case Study of ...

object to something that in reality is not an object conveys a sense ofmistaken "solidity,
ofprojected concreteness" (Wenger 1998:62).
Participation and reification are both distinct and complementary. They cannot be
considered in isolation but come as a pair. They form a unity in their duality. To
understand one, it is necessary to understand the other and to enable one it is necessary to
enable the other. Processes ofparticipation and reification can be woven so tightly that
the distinction between them seems almost blurred. The negotiation ofmeaning moulds
participation and reification so effortlessly that meaning seems to have its own "unitary,
self-contained existence" (ibid.:63).
An advantage ofviewing the negotiation ofmeaning as a being a dual process of
participation and reification, is that it could lead to trade-offs involved in the
comp1ementarity ofparticipation and reification. The question is, how is the production
ofmeaning distributed. What is reified and what is left to participation and reification
should be in proportions that enable them to complement each other and compensate for
each other's shortcomings. The continuity ofmeaning is likely to become a problem in
practice iftoo much reliance is placed on one at the expense ofthe other. Wenger notes:
Ifparticipation prevails - if most ofwhat matters is left unreified - then there may not be
enough material to anchor the specificities of coordination and to cover diverging
assumptions. Ifreification prevails - ifeverything is reified, but with little opportunity
for shared experience and interactive negotiation - then there may not be enough overlap
in participation to recover a coordinated, relevant, or generative meaning (1998:65).
Through the negotiation ofmeaning, it is the interplay ofparticipation and reification that
makes people and things what they are.
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