Resultados de la construcción de la comunidad de práctica (CoP)

This concept of developing knowledge and skill for some future point fits with an idea from one of the researchers that Wenger refers to – Bourdieu and his notion of habitus. Developing habitus as defined by Bourdieu (1977) is recognised by Wenger (Lave and Wenger, 1991) as an influence on their understanding of how communities of practice construct learning and affect the participants. In Bourdieu’s words, habitus is “…acquired, socially constituted dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1990, p.13) with Bourdieu firmly focused on the notion of owning and reproducing cultural capital whereas Wenger focused more on access to and reproduction of more than simply capital. Instead, Wenger looked specifically at the generation of new knowledge and the reproduction of learning and new knowledge. The term habitus itself is Aristotelian and Bourdieu

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appropriates it to describe a specific set of dispositions. Dispositions are both inculcated and structured according to Bourdieu (1977), in other words, they are learned through repeated mundane processes of training, but also reflect the context through which they were learned. This can lead to homogeneity across individuals from similar backgrounds. It is clear to see just how this notion of habitus works alongside the notion of communities of practice as participants also participate in repeated low level interactions, ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991), within a situated context of boundaries which frame the community of practice. The key notion for this study is that Bourdieu sees habitus as transposable and indeed helpful in ‘markets’ within which the participant has to operate “…habitus itself

characterised by a particular degree of sensitivity to the tension in the market, or in other words, it is the anticipation of profits” (Bourdieu and Thompson, 1991, p.81). Nor is this habitus precisely pursued. Indeed, Bourdieu set out his notion that habitus does not require strategic direction, it “…takes the form of sequences that are objectively guided toward a certain end, without necessarily being the product either of a conscious strategy or a mechanical determination” (Bourdieu, 1990, p.90). Bourdieu’s original usage of habitus was as a vehicle for exploration into the notion and power of cultural capital and its reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977). This aspect of Bourdieu’s work, the effect of cultural capital on class and privilege, is not the focus of this study into pre-service teachers’ use of private social media interactions. Indeed, the very notion of habitus has been described as “ambiguous and overloaded” (Nash, 1990, p.446). Yet

examining Bourdieu’s notion that an academic qualification alone is not the sum total of one’s knowledge means habitus remains a valid notion. “Academic qualifications are a weak currency and possess all their value only within the limits of the academic market” (Bourdieu, 1977, p.505). This separation of that which is learned through the academic course and then additional knowledge or skill over and above the course is what concerns this study. Identifying exactly what that additional knowledge or skill is can be challenging. Sullivan (2002) suggests that habitus, being a construct, is of no use to empirical researchers looking to directly or indirectly observe quantifiable behaviour. However, just because something is not directly observable it does not necessarily lead that such a thing is not in existence. By removing the emphasis of Bourdieu’s on

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cultural capital and exploration of class divisions from the concept of habitus, one can then reapply the notion to pre-service teachers who are not just accessing a credential, but further unquantified knowledge or practice which may or may not form part of that credential or have a relationship with that credential through the existence of a community that relies upon the credential for existence. In other words, in Wenger’s words, the core enterprise (Wenger, 1998). Reshaping Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is not new. For example, Mutch (2003) suggests a response is to “reject habitus in Bourdieu’s sense” (Mutch, 2003, p.393) whilst retaining the “emphasis on tacit acquisition and durable existence” (ibid.). His research suggested that communities of practice can contain conflicting and diverse group members reflecting evolving recruitment patterns and that habitus is thus less about reproduction of power, but about the way knowledge is shared through the community. This conceptual idea fits with the way Wenger has used this theory in his work on communities of practice.

For the pre-service teacher operating within a community of practice, this notion of habitus has two applications. The first is that the habitus they have built up through using private social networking prior to entering teacher education can be seen as the repeated low level interactions and thus pre-service teachers without notion or ‘conscious strategy’ will seek to continue to use private social media interactions in the same way that they always have to help them access the ‘market’ of teaching (Hall and McGinity, 2015). The second notion is that with habitus being transposable, such private social media interactions may reveal themselves to be, consciously or otherwise, contributing to the ability of a pre-service teacher to enter the market of teaching and to move from school to school. The introduction to Bourdieu’s collection of essays, ‘Language and Symbolic Power’, captures this effectively.

“The habitus also provides individuals with a sense of how to act and respond in the course of their daily lives. It ‘orients’ their actions and inclinations without strictly determining them. It gives them a ‘feel for the game’, a sense of what is appropriate in the circumstances and what is not.”

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Looking at pre-service teachers through this lens of Bourdieu’s work highlights how their “…actions are shaped by the values and expectation of the fields in which they work” (Dwyer, 2015, p.95). Through this process, the pre-service teachers can begin building a teacher identity or concept of self which contains the habitus needed to move from school placement to school placement both during their pre-service teacher education course and during their career. Whilst the pre-service teachers may not know exactly what it is they are building and what future challenges they are building this habitus for, their efforts can still contribute to a transposable habitus and enable them as a community of practice to work towards this habitus as part of the core enterprise of becoming qualified teachers.

3.3 Teacher Identity and Teacher Professionalism