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

necessary to learn what they needed to learn in order to make decisions that fully engaged
their own knowledge base.
The dilemma ofmaking available too much ofmaterial to teachers at workshops to
appease teachers' need for 'handouts', (worksheets, booklets, packages and lesson plans
etc.) versus the need for teachers to participate in the practice of the community can be
analysed in terms ofWenger's concepts of 'participation' and 'reification'. It was about
striking a balance between creating opportunities for teachers' active engagement with
materials, and the development oftheir own materials and simply 'spoon feeding'
teaching material for use by teachers. Teachers in their quest to make meaning of
economic phenomena needed some material to start from, but also needed to engage with
the material and develop their own material instead ofsimply 'receiving' and using what
someone else had developed.
Negotiation ofmeaning had to be viewed as a being a dual process ofparticipation and
reification (Wenger 1998). It leads to trade-offs involved in the complementarity of
participation and reification. Meaning was likely to become a problem in practice if too
much reliance was placed on one at the expense ofthe other. Ifparticipation prevailed,
that is, ifmost ofwhat matters was left unreified, then there may not have been enough
material to anchor the specificities ofcoordination and to cover diverging assumptions. If
reification prevailed, ifeverything was reified, but with little opportunity for shared
experience and interactive negotiation, then there may not have been enough overlap in
participation to recover a coordinated, relevant, or generative meaning.
7.4.3 Brokering
While teachers belonged to the TEMS community, they were also affiliated to other
communities. Cindy was the co-ordinator ofthe TEMS project, member ofthe
Mathematics committee and the head ofthe Languages committee in her region. Mary
and Debbie were members ofboth the Mathematics and the Languages committee. John
was the regional Mathematics co-ordinator and a member ofthe Languages committee.
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