That newcomers to Crossroads are so immediately incorporated into the larger group has been mentioned enough times that it has become noteworthy. This phenomenon has been reported by novice attendees but has also been noted by those who are Crossroads veterans. Within "legitimate peripheral participation" is the possibility that apprentices must linger and lurk at the edges. This isn't anything a true scholar of Lave & Wenger would propose. Instead, it comes from my early and painful experiences as a wallflower at research conferences. It seems to take years to move from the periphery into the community and that might be an artifact of the move from apprentice to journeyman to master. Because this transition happens so suddenly at Crossroads, it suggests that something unique is at play. I have an hypothesis.
Everybody who comes to Crossroads has been pre-approved. Whether we actually have done so or not, the assumption by the community is that each newcomer has been hand-selected and specially invited to join the event. Like the holders of golden tickets, there is no guantlet to pass through in order to qualify as a legitimate member of the group. By virtue of their very presence, each new arrival is embraced as bona fide and worthy. How wonderful it must be to arrive, nervous about one's legitimacy yet excited to share with others -- and then to become one of the crowd even before anybody knows your name. And what great pressure that puts on those who distribute the invitations.
I suspect that this is one of the magic aspects of Crossroads: everyone who has attended was specially invited and usually through a face-to-face conversation. The personalized recruitment has continued since this project's inception. But until recently, I was only partially aware of the sense of coming together of old and new. And I had not recognized how instantly everything went "into solution" -- without stirring, with warming up, without waiting. This also becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because those who we did not personally invited (known only to us) were accepted as if they were because no one knew any different. The effect was the same. Perhaps the invitations themselves are as important as many of the other aspects of this process.
Everybody who comes to Crossroads has been pre-approved. Whether we actually have done so or not, the assumption by the community is that each newcomer has been hand-selected and specially invited to join the event. Like the holders of golden tickets, there is no guantlet to pass through in order to qualify as a legitimate member of the group. By virtue of their very presence, each new arrival is embraced as bona fide and worthy. How wonderful it must be to arrive, nervous about one's legitimacy yet excited to share with others -- and then to become one of the crowd even before anybody knows your name. And what great pressure that puts on those who distribute the invitations.
I suspect that this is one of the magic aspects of Crossroads: everyone who has attended was specially invited and usually through a face-to-face conversation. The personalized recruitment has continued since this project's inception. But until recently, I was only partially aware of the sense of coming together of old and new. And I had not recognized how instantly everything went "into solution" -- without stirring, with warming up, without waiting. This also becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because those who we did not personally invited (known only to us) were accepted as if they were because no one knew any different. The effect was the same. Perhaps the invitations themselves are as important as many of the other aspects of this process.
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