Of course practice fields are designed to support the development of shared goals, understandings and practices among those collaborators working on a particular problem or issue. The contrast, however, is in the embeddedness of the experiences in the community and the impact of that larger experiential context on the development of self. For example, it is through stories (narratives) that community members pass on casual accounts of their experiences to replace the impoverished descriptions frequently codified in manuals and texts. Through this telling and retelling, individuals do more than pass on knowledge. They contribute to the construction of their own identity in relationship to the community of practice and, reciprocally, to the construction and development of the community of which they are a part