Dialogue in Multilingual and Multimodal Communities

The Community of Practice (CofP; Wenger 1998) model of social learning has recently been a preferred lense for investigating professional practice in education. This chapter focuses on the experiences and resultant beliefs and practices of a group of teachers from a range of backgrounds (local, national, international) engaged in a highly diverse community of practice. Data were collected through a mixed focus group, interviews and written responses at a university in Southern China, where local, regional, mainland, autonomous territory and overseas Chinese, as well as native, non-native, second-generation and third-culture international teachers live, work and socialize. I argue that the study of CofPs needs to draw more on the diversity of its constituent members rather than focus on commonly-shared features.