Title of the paper:

Acts of brokering in a community of practiceName of the author:

He AneAffiliation:

Department of English, The Hong Kong Institute ofEducation

This presentation reports a study which aimed at understanding the discourse of amulti-party „community of practice‟, focusing specifically on the brokering acts and thecircumstances of the brokering in a school-based professional development activity.
Broker is a term coined from business, a person who facilitates mutual accommodation
between different interest parties (Ng, He & Loong, 2004). A language broker in thisstudy was defined as a person who mediated the process of decision-making andfacilitated learning by bridging large knowledge-gaps regarding the subject matter andschool context between the school teachers and teacher educators.
Two research questions were asked in the study: 1) how did the broker participate
in the decision-making process?; and 2) what was the sequential enactment of brokering
during the negotiation of decisions among the participants? To answer the questions, themeeting notes of this school-based professional development activity were transcribedand used as the data.
The learning community in question contained five members – they were two
tertiary language teacher educators, two primary teachers of English, and one
representative of the English department of the school. Because of the dynamics of theinternal relationship within a community of practice and/or dispositions to learning(Hodkinson et al, 2004) resulting from participants‟ different life and work histories(Hughes, Jewson & Unwin, 2007), inequalities of power become inevitable. Such an
asymmetrical power relationship in this „community‟ led to the emergence of the broker.
The study revealed that during the group meetings, the power control was exercised
mostly by the teacher educators through initiation of exchanges, nomination of topics,and closing down of an episode with a shift of topics or acceptance of a response fromthe teachers; while the two teachers positioned themselves mainly as respondents, whorarely initiated turns or topics except for those questions or statements raised within thecontent framework of the teacher educators‟ turns. As such, the two teachers‟

1participation reinforced their position in the production of the discourse in the learningcommunity. In contrast to her colleagues, the department representative took a different
approach as a third party or the „broker‟ in the negotiation. She presented her own
perspectives and ideas through her own initiation of turns; joined the discussion at thetime of her own choice; addressed the issues in the subtext and consequently brought tothe surface the assumptions covert in other participants‟ utterances, which resulted in thedecisions/consensus among the participants. By bridging the knowledge gap between theteacher educators and teachers, the emergence of the broker, in effect, redressed thepower imbalance in this social practice and hence paved the ground for learning in thecommunity.
The study also revealed that the enactment of broking extended beyond a basic
unit of exchange in three turns by three different parties. It comprised longer
chunks/segments of discourse among different parties, beginning with an utterance raisedby one of the brokerees who signaled a problematic situation/scenario in need of asolution, and ending with an utterance supplied by the broker, providing a solution or
part-solution, with several parties contributing to the discussion.
The findings suggest that learning would not automatically occur simply because
participants come together as a team. The “mutual engagement, a joint enterprise and ashared repertoire” (Wenger, 1998) is a cluster of dynamic concepts, which can, therefore,
only be achieved through consistent negotiation, mediation and facilitation by highly
engaged community members in the process of participation. A broker plays anindispensable role in such negotiation when there is a big knowledge gap among themembers of a learning community.
Reference list
Hodkinson, P., Hodkinson, H., Evans, K., Kersh, N., Fuller, A., Unwin, L. and Senker, P.
(2004). The significance of individual biography in workplace learning. Studies inthe Education of Adults, 36 (1), 6-24.
Hughes, J. Jewson, N., Unwin, L. (2007). (Eds.). Communities of Practice: criticalperspectives. Routledge, London.
Ng, S. H., He, A.P., Loong, C. (2004). Tri-generational family conversations:communication accommodation and brokering. British Journal of Social
Psychology, 43, 449-464.
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