This chapter explores some of the ways in which the student teachers in the HCT B.Ed. programme formed a community of practice and the implications this had for them as teachers. The communities of practice framework recognizes the way we learn through participation in social practices; but it also acknowledges that the community whose practices we are learning has a reciprocal, and potentially transformative, effect upon us as individuals. Thus as we participate in and utilize the discourses and practices that embody the subject or content knowledge of the community, we are reconstituted as individual subjects, or to put it in more human terms, we grow and develop as we learn through joining in with others in socially valued enterprises.

In Chapter 1, communities of practice were defined in terms of mutual engagement in a joint enterprise involving a shared repertoire of discourse, with three modes of belonging: engagement, imagination and alignment, which we recognized as broadly congruent with the figurative, authored and positional identities, also outlined in Chapter 1. In this chapter we explore data from the student teachers, reflecting the formation of an evolving community of practice in terms of the three modes of belonging. In terms of engagement, we examine evolving forms of mutual engagement, developing understanding of the enterprise at hand and developing repertoires of styles and discourses. In terms of alignment, we look at matters of locality and the evolving community of practice's relation to other communities in their 'constellation', as well as exploring boundaries and border practices. In terms of imagination, we look at self-consciousness, reflection and creation as ways in which members continually reinvent their community of practice.

One of the fascinating aspects of the development of the HCT B.Ed. programme is that we are witnessing the evolution of a community of practice where none previously existed.