Jean Lave

Situated Learning: Frontmatter

Acknowledgements 1. Legitimate peripheral participation 2. Practice, person, social world 3. Midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, non-drinking alcoholics 4. Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice 5. Conclusion References Index.

Situated Learning by Jean Lave

Acknowledgements 1. Legitimate peripheral participation 2. Practice, person, social world 3. Midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, non-drinking alcoholics 4. Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice 5. Conclusion References Index.

Legitimate Peripheral Participation

Learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral participation . By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. “Legitimate peripheral participation” provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which new comers become part of a community of practice. A persons intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This social process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills. In order to explain our interest in the concept of legitimate peripheral participation, we will try to convey a sense of the perspectives that it opens and the kinds of questions that it raises. A good way to start is to outline the history of the concept as it has become increasingly central to our thinking about issues of learning. Our initial intention in writing what has gradually evolved into this book was to rescue the idea of apprenticeship . In 1988, notions about apprenticeship were flying around the halls of the Institute for Research on Learning, acting as a token of solidarity and as a focus for discussions on the nature of learning.

Understanding practice: Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education Roy D. Pea

What is anthropological research? An interview with Jean Lave by Steinar Kvale

Steinar Kvale has conducted an interview about anthropological research with Jean Lave. The interview focuses on Jean Laves anthropological field work on apprenticeship among Liberian tailors. It pursues issues such as whether there is an anthropological “method”; the practicalities of doing field work, including the use of interviews; the role of interpretation and theory in empirical work in the field; and the issue of subjectivity in reporting anthropological studies.

The Values of Quantification

Standardized forms of knowledge, such as systems of measurement and money, and the formal arithmetic taught in school, may be thought of as attempts to dominate the definitions of the situations of their use and forms of knowledge in practice. Ethnographic research on middle class American adults shopping in supermarkets, managing family finances, and trying to lose weight in a dieting organisation suggest, rather, that calculation and measurement procedures are generated in situationally-specific terms which both reflect and help to produce the specific character of activities in daily life. At the same time, the values embodied in the standarised forms of quantitative knowledge discussed here, especially values of rational objective utility, appear to be resources employed expressively in everyday practice. A politics of knowledge is thus embodied in mundane transformations of knowledge and value through activity constituted in relation with its daily settings.

Behavior setting analysis of situated learning: The case of newcomers

Latour, B. (1986). Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands. Knowledge and Society, 6, 1-40. Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Law,]. (1987). Technology and heterogeneous engineering: The case of Portuguese expansion. In W. Bijker, T. Hughes, & T. Pinch (Eds.), The social construction of technological systems (pp. 111-134). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Livingston, E. (1986). The ethnomethodological foundations of mathematics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lynch, M. (1985). Art and artifact in laboratory science: A study of shop work and shop talk in a research laboratory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lynch, M., Livingston, E., & Garfinkel, H. (1983). Temporal order in laboratory work. In K. Knorr-Cetina & M. Mulkay (Eds.), Science observed: Perspectives on the social study of science (pp. 205-238). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Lynch, M., & Woolgar, S. (1990). Introduction: Sociological orientations to representational practice in science. In M. Lynch & S. Woolgar (Eds.), Representation in scientific practice (pp. 1-18). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schegloff, E. (1972). Notes on a conversational practice: Formulating place. In D. Sudnow (Ed.), Studies in social interaction (pp. 75-115). New York: Free

Producing the Future: Getting To Be British

Enduring struggles between different historical capitalisms are concretely instantiated in the British “colony” in Porto, Portugal. In contention is the future of the community and its identity as a venerable port merchant or multinational corporate enclave. Residents, both long- and short-term, work to produce the future place and identity of their children. Church, club, and—above all—schools are the focus of their clashes and also of this essay, as it explores the articulation of practices that help to produce those futures.

Math lessons from Liberia

Over five years of ethnographic research in Monrovia, Liberia (1973—8), I was engaged in research in a mud-pathed alley at the edge of the commercial district, lined with 20 shacks, housing 100 Vai and Gola tailors, their treadle sewing machines, and 150 apprentices. Given the variety of relations math entered into during the course of the tailors’ lives, it became increasingly important to explore what it might mean to understand Vai and Gola tailoring lives in their quantitatively practiced aspects. At the same time an inquiry into math in Vai and Gola tailor shops was part of a struggle I take to be fundamental to anthropology to confront and make more starkly clear our own (high-)cultural premises and commitments as part of our craft of inquiry. Very briefly, this is an account of a struggle to comprehend situated mathematical practice through critical ethnographic practice.

Aprendizagem como/na prática

Este artigo considera como o estudo da cultura e da aprendizagem pode ser de particular relevância para o campo da antropologia sociocultural em geral. O termo mais importante na expressao “cultura & aprendizagem” talvez seja o logograma “&” – ou seja, coloca-se a questao sobre o que conecta cultura e aprendizagem, perguntando-se como esses termos estao relacionados. Como devemos compreender cultura e aprendizagem como instâncias produtoras delas proprias, e uma da outra, na pratica? Recalibrando em termos relacionais, podemos dizer que nao e possivel abordar a “aprendizagem” ou “cultura e aprendizagem” sem o seu emaranhamento na vida politico-economica, nas lutas e disputas historicas, em suas coerencias e incoerencias, e na producao relacional e historica da vida cotidiana. Atraves das lentes da teoria da pratica social, os estudos etnograficos sobre aprendizagem na pratica oferecem diferentes entendimentos sobre como certa vida e certas disputas e incoerencias sao produzidas.