57participant brings to the interactive space in which the dialogue takes place, you end
up with something that actually none of those participants could have individually
thought of. It’s like someone comes in with an idea but because of some other idea
that’s added by someone else, actually something completely different from either
of those two different ideas ends up being created, which, I suppose, is what rela-
tional agency and mutual appropriation are about: the idea that ‘the whole is more
than the sum of its parts’.
Debbie
I think the literature on communities of practice talks about the community creating
products or artefacts that can be shared. The development of products is a process
that is identified as occurring as the community of practice begins to mature (Wenger
et al., 2002 ). I wonder whether this notion of product or artefact development has
similarities to what you’re saying Helen – that notion of actually capturing the pro-
cess or the dialogue that different participants bring together to create products that
no one person could actually achieve on their own. I think there is an undertone in
the community of practice literature focused around the time when the community
seeks to organise their knowledge. I feel that there is strength in the term cogenera-
tivity because it really encompasses the collective work of the participants that
might occur at any point rather than during the maturing phase of the community of
practice. I also feel the term has a more everyday meaning that would connect with
teachers and preservice teachers. Although we are mostly exploring conceptual
ideas in this chapter, I wonder whether cogenerativity offers a term that is much
more easily understood by participants in all different parts of the initial teacher
education world. I know that teachers and preservice teachers were challenged by
the meaning of community of practice during my project.
Helen
I’m also thinking that the difference is about the dialectical idea of process and
product. Relational agency is perhaps more about the participants’ capacity to con-
tribute to the process, while the idea of communities of practice focuses more on the
product or artefact. Cogenerativity might be conceived dialectically as process and
product since, in thinking about the concept, these two aspects are inseparable:
you’re creating a product through the course of creating the process. So maybe
rather than it necessarily being different from the concepts in the other literature, it’s
a more encompassing term that incorporates those other ideas as elements or aspects
of what we’re coming to see as cogenerativity. As a concept itself, it too is more than
the sum of those other parts.
4 Exploring Cogenerativity in Initial Teacher Education School-University...