Identity

I am fascinated by the way identity plays such an integral part of our professional and personal lives. I relate it to all the learning about ethnography during my MA and how your research depends on if you can become a legitimate member of the community you are studying. With respect to this, I think it is important for survival within professional CoPs to recognize the need to understand your identity within that group in order maintain your position and the respect of the other members. So, for my work CoPs I waiver between an administrative role and a less formal, technician type role. With regard to the Cohort group, my identity is less formal and I feel like I have greater latitude as well. It is not a threatening environment and allows for more experimentation and flexibility. However, that being said, it is still somewhat formalized due to the context of schooling and the respect for the professionalism among the group. As we are mostly within the education environment, it is important to maintain a certain level of integrity among peers. On this continuum, there is a marked difference between the informal communities, such as other horse enthusiasts that I spend time with. That is a completely informal identity that is highly forgiving. In think in all these contexts, I remain the same person with essentially the same traits and identity within the groups is not really an altercation of my personality, rather it is a filter with regard to what types of behavior, dress, etc. are appropriate as I move between CoPs. So, overall I feel like identity can be a very strong word. I would like to think it is more about appropriate behavior within a given context. I think the shifts in our identity or behavior happen almost seamlessly as we feel out the overall attitudes, expectations, and needs of a given group and then establish ourselves among a group. However, even as we condition our behavior and learn other group norms, strengths and weaknesses within out personality remain. That, in the end is what allows us to feel an integral part of a group or allows us to recognize when we need to exit a group.