Inventors, copycats, and everyone else: The emergence of shared resources and practices as defining aspects of classroom communities

Abstract To evaluate the usefulness of the notion of community of practice in classroom settings, I conducted an ethnography of an emerging culture. In this exploratory study, I was particularly interested in finding student descriptions that allow researchers to recognize classroom communities. Based on the detailed analysis of videotaped student‐student interactions and ethnographic observations in a grade 4/5 classroom studying a unit on civil engineering, this article documents how the collectively available knowledge of a classroom community was transformed as resources and practices were adopted by more and more members. Students' disputes about who had come up with an idea first and students' admission to do something “because everyone else is doing it” both signaled the presence of a shared resource or practice. Many resources were readily adopted in a student‐centered process. The adoption of engineering discourse practices, on the other hand, were teacher‐centered and associated with considerable effort. Implications are drawn for the organization of classroom environments that encourage the emergence of shared resources and practices. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.