 Gender and community of practice. For short, in this module, I want to tell you before time that we'll be using abbreviation COP for community of practice. Let's define it, what is it and how is it related with our new concept of gender as activities. Now, already we have discussed that gender is a personal, but we related it with individual actions and individual activities. For example, we talked about a single role. A person is anchor, female anchor, can talk like a male anchor person. But here, we would talk about the same concept in terms of a community of practice, a social group particularly. And in the last modules, you have learned that we enter to our activities in new social groups and the same social groups are now being technically called community of practice. So, in this module, we will elaborate this concept. Some scholars think that gender identity is not constructed by individual activity and speech style and adopting speech styles of each other. Their point of view is that gender construction, we create gender by our talk. This is called gender construction. Culturally speaking, if we talk about gender, not biologically, we cannot construct biological gender. This is about cultural gender. So, we construct it through our talk, through our speech, through our language. So, according to some scholars, gender construction is not an individual function. It is related with community of practice, COP. A COP is a group of people who have to come, who have to meet regularly at a place for a common goal, for a common purpose. For example, people daily meet in offices. They come there for a certain purpose. They want to do work for some organization and that is their source of income. They have economic reasons to meet there daily. Similarly, people come together at some studio, again the same reasons. People come together at some gym for physical fitness purposes. So, they regularly meet with each other. So, their membership of a gym club, this is a community of practice. Similarly, workstab groups, they are a community of practice according to this definition. So, these groups, they have a common goal that can be economic, that can be educational, that can be commercial, that can be health related purpose. In this everyday interaction, when they meet regularly at the same place for a shared goal, what happens? The result is that they develop new values, new ways of talking. They adopt each other's social points of views, their styles of talk, their styles of dressing, etc. And even their worldviews are shared with each other. So, these interactions bring a change. So, similarly, their viewpoint about gender, about being a male or female are also affected by this daily interaction. Community of practice, this is the topic that we will elaborate in this module. Community of practice provides us an environment for regular interaction, for exchange of values and cultures and norms and styles of talking, etc. So, during this environment, our gender, our points of view about being a male and female are also developed or which technically is being called constructed, created. Now, through community of practice, this is a chain. Individuals become part of community of practice. Community of practice is part of some larger institution. Institutions are part of ultimately the society. So, this is how the points of view are created and recreated and changed through this interaction in community of practice. Now, with this chain, what happens? Individuals are regulated by community of practice. Community of practice is regulated by institutions and they are regulated by society to nothing deviates from the larger and broader social setup. This is the central point around community of practice. That's the reason that this idea works well. This idea is very convincing that definitely community of practice has some conditional effect on our points of view regarding gender. You will understand all these things which were discussed in this module. If you try to do this task, there would be some opportunity for you to explore these things in some practical manner. For example, here select any one COP. You are a member of the community of practice. Right, you may be a member of some gym, you may be a member of some club, you may be a member of some Facebook group, etc. Any community of practice, physical are virtual. So, you are required to write features of talk which you acquired as a member of this community of practice. That means which were not possessed by you before your membership of this community of practice. So, this is how you would know the effect of being part of a community of practice. Another task is which of these is not a COP. This would give you an idea how to define COP. What is it? For example, family, is it a COP? Courts, neighbors, hospitals, wedding ceremony. You must see the definition of COP before attempting this task and match your answers with that definition. This is another task about this. Now, with these tasks, I hope you will understand what is COP and how COP defines our points of view regarding gender and how we construct our gender through collective activities which we daily do as a member of some community of practice.