At the core of these different visions of learning and becoming is how we imagine our social worlds. Does becoming happen inside hierarchical and autonomous social worlds (e.g., as discourse community theories suggest), or does becoming happen across the laminated, rhizomatic, and deeply dialogic trajectories of socio-material worlds?

In spite of long-standing critiques, research into academic and professional writing has usually been grounded in the territorial metaphor of "joining," or "becoming a member of," a discourse community (see Prior, "Are Communities of Practice", for a summary of these critiques). Lave and Wenger suggested that diverse trajectories of participation in evolving social practices lead to the continuation and transformation of social formations and identities, including those we refer to as disciplines and professions. They argued for the need to situate "learning in the trajectories of participation in which it takes meaning" (121) and particularly in its relevant community of practice, which they stated "most emphatically, has no single core or center" (36) but is forged as "a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice" (98). However, Lave and Wenger seemed to lose sight of that basic vision when they turned to science. Consider the following quote:

For example, in most high schools, there is a group of students engaged over a substantial period of time in learning physics. What community of practice is in the process of reproduction? Possibly the students participate only in the reproduction of the high school itself. . . . The reproduction cycles of the physicists' community start much later, possibly only in graduate school. (99)

In Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts, Dias, Freedman, Medway, and Pare articulated a radically autonomous account of learning trajectories. Reporting on a seven-year, multi-site project researching the relationship between university study in professional fields like public administration and architecture and then work in corresponding professional jobs, and drawing on Lave and Wenger, activity theory, and North American genre theory, they came to a somewhat surprising conclusion:

Because writing is so bound up with situation, the title of this book is not as hyperbolic as it appears. Writing at school and writing at work are indeed worlds apart. Writing is acting, but in Activity Theory terms, writing at work and writing in school constitute two very different activities. . . .  "we write where we are . . . location, it would appear, is (almost) everything" (223).

I could say that I believe that their worlds-apart conclusion is fundamentally wrong, but more to the point I am simply floored that so absurd a claim is so seriously articulated by a group of scholars at the end of a significant line of research and in terms of a rich set of theories, theories I also draw on in my work.

Why am I floored? If a student's work in a senior architecture design course is irrelevant to her work in an architecture firm perhaps weeks later, then what are we to say of more distant social experiences: other courses in college, high school, and elementary school; home life; pretend play; community activities? Dias et al. set the stage for the strange debates playing out today that often position transfer of learning (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak) as a fragile, torturously hard-won achievement rather than as what is obvious: continuities of learning across time and setting are a fundamental necessity for any conceivable account of human development. To challenge these worlds-apart, discourse community accounts, I draw on sociocultural/CHAT theories that take learning/socialization to be the mediated production and co-genesis of both the person and society across heterogeneous times, places, and activities (see What is CHAT? from Prior et al., “Re-situating and Re-mediating the Canons”).