The three interrelated modes of belonging are engagement, imagination, and alignment. Engagement is the common work the new member of a community and veteran members. Imagination is using your mind to imagine a world changed by your work. It can be aligned with what will really happen, or be completely different from the true outcome. Alignment is the bridge between the other two. Alignment shifts our imaginative scenario to the engaged scenario. This can be a good or bad thing depending on the original imaginative idea and the true alignment of the work. When I was hired at the bank I work at I didn’t understand my role completely and had to imagine what being a bank teller would be like behind the scenes. When I started running my own window and began to understand the scope of my engagement with customers and coworkers I had to align myself accordingly. I had imagined a lot more phone calls and responsibility, but the work proved otherwise. At first I fought it, asking for more responsibility; but, as time went on I realized that the added responsibility didn’t translate to respect or income. I slowly crawled back into my role as a peon, accepting my place in the discourse community. The Civil Engineering Department’s rules of engagement are simple. I am a student, I learn from the professor. That’s well and good except for the students’ self-image isn’t one of a lump of clay. I came in to the discourse community expecting to contribute more in and out of the classroom than I do. I learned that what I had imagined to be the CE department is slightly off. The courses are focused more on conceptual work than hands on. With concepts there is only one right answer, but in the real world there is more than one way to get things done.
I found it interesting what you said about the alignment aspect of Wardle's article. I also thought it was a combination of the engagement and imaginative points she made, but I didn't link the idea of a job-like environment to her explanation. I completely agree with you. But to further what you're saying, I think it's our human nature to interpret something new as a job and convince ourselves "we might not be good enough for the task." Then, when it hits us, we want more because what we convinced ourselves is not nearly the task we thought it would be- and we know we can handle more. However, if there is no reason for further engagement (perhaps you're content with making the fries due to a low salary or you know you won't be there long) we settle in and disappear in it's discourse community.
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