Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation Jennifer Alexandra Francois Center for Human Computer Interaction 2202 Kraft Dr. Blacksburg, VA 24060 USA Virginia Tech jenniff@vt.edu
Francis Quek Center for Human Computer Interaction 2202 Kraft Dr. Blacksburg, VA 24060 USA Virginia Tech quek@vt.edu ABSTRACT Below is the review of the book entitled “Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation” written by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger and published in New York at the Cambridge University Press in 1991.The authors want to show that we can learn from how people use to learn in the past and this new concept they taught of is called situated learning. The new concept involves co-participation; it doesn’t involve only an individual but a community of practice. It gives a definition of what they call legitimate peripheral and how apprenticeship, which before was considered one of the best way to learn, has helped them determine what learning should incorporate and how the social aspect of the world is important. This paper is to show how education has evolved from the concept of learning individually to learning in-group and how the community is important in the process. Author Keywords Situated Learning, legitimate peripheral participation, communities of practice, education, psychology ACM Classification Keywords Human-Computer Interaction, Embodied Interaction INTRODUCTION This book is aimed at giving a better understanding of how people learn. After studying several apprenticeship categories, they came up with a new concept, which is the Legitimate Peripheral Participation. According to the book it is the Situated Learning Practice, which have grown to incorporate participation and the idea of newcomers to become full practitioners. The community of practice therefore incorporates people from diverse background but all aspiring to acquire the same knowledge to get together and share it to other people who might become newcomers
in the community. Wenger emphasizes that learning in community of practice implies different meaning for the individual; the community or the organization the person belongs to. We therefore can understand what is the main focus of the book “Situated Learning”. They are trying to advocate a new way of learning, which requires co-participation in a community of practice. We will talk about the motivations of the authors for writing that book and what new insight they have come up with and why all this is important for me who has decided to read and examine the book in the lights of my own research. AUTHORS BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE OF THE BOOK According to the authors’ websites, Jean Lave is a social anthropologist with a strong interest in social theory. She has conducted many ethnographic researches. Her research concentrates on the re-conceiving of learning, learners, and everyday life in terms of social practice. Wenger describes himself as a social theorist. He is trying to understand the connection between knowledge, community, learning, and identity. The basic idea is that human knowing is fundamentally a social act. His aim is to design more effective knowledge-oriented organizations and all subsequent relationship that ties learning to organization including design. More importantly, in this review we want to understand why Lave and Wenger have decided to talk about situated learning and if they have the qualifications to undergo this important study, which changes how people perceive learning. It is most likely evident that people that do not have the required background cannot talk about a subject that important. We need to ask ourselves how can we be sure that learning does indeed involve communities and that the theories that is being talked about are really true. The main themes of the book are mostly about education and it seems more natural that a person from the education industry be the author of the book. The authors are social learning theorist. To understand if it is related to education, we need to understand where did the concept come from. Bandura developed the theory “social learning theory” and it is said to resemble Vygotsky’s “Social development theory” and Lave’s “Situated Learning theory”. What motivated Bandura’s theory is that he wanted to understand
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how people learn? His idea was simple, by observation [1]. If we read the ideas from the book Situated Learning, a lot of the case studies that they did incorporated observation. In that sense, they are truly trying to learn more about the ideas of learning. The authors follow the footsteps of Bandura. WINDOW VIEW ON THE SITUATED LEARNING THEORY The authors’ main goal was to explain their concept of Legitimate Peripheral Participation. This concept itself was not an idea that they add and wanted to prove. It was more than that. “It was a well thought off concept that came to replace the idea of apprenticeship” [3], which was considered the best form of learning at the time even though it was stated that people in the intellectual community didn’t fully understand what the term really meant. It was just a way to separate teachers from students where the students were called apprentice and would follow and learn a lot from the teacher, which at that time was called the master. The authors during their research were not certain that the notion of apprenticeship alone could be a basis for the development of a new theory. What they wanted was to understand the flaws of the concept and refine their ideas. After refinement, they come up with a new theory that is better structured. They went on to talk about how their concept shifted from apprenticeship, to situated learning and finally to legitimate peripheral participation. The latter concept took some time to develop. A distinction between legitimate and illegitimate, peripheral and central, participation and no-participation was required to fully apprehend the definition of the concept. It is mainly a way of belonging to a community and a constitutive element of the content of learning. The book serves of a way to highlight how the theory build shift slightly from the idea of situated learning. Coming up with the theory required that they try to incorporate three concepts, practice, person and social world. Indeed in the book he states “the concept of legitimate peripheral participation provides a framework for bringing together theories of situated activity and theories about the production and reproduction of the social order.” [3] In that same line of work, they analyze the internalization of learning, which could be compared to Vygostky’s concept of “proximal development”. The concept of internalization is divided into three categories. It is “firstly the distance between problem-solving abilities exhibited by a learner working along and that learner’s problem-solving abilities when assisted by or collaborating with more experienced people” [3] page 48. Secondly, “it is the distance between understood knowledge that is provided by instruction and active knowledge as owned by the individual” [3] page 48-49. Hedegaard gave this nice explanation in 1988. Lastly, they talk about the development of collectivist and societal perspective, which
include activity theory and critical psychology. A more accurate definition would be from Engestrom, which defines it as a “distance between everyday actions of individuals and the historically new form of societal activity that can be collectively generated as a solution to the double bind potentially embedded in … everyday actions” [3]. Page 49 The relationship between Vygostky’s concept of zone of proximal development and the concept that the authors were trying to develop and understand was that they “try to extend the study of learning beyond the concept of pedagogical structuring, including the structure of the social world and taking into account in a central way the conflictual nature of social practice.” Page 49-52. What they try to capture in more details is “connecting issues of socio-cultural transformation with the changing relations between newcomers and old-timers in the context of a changing shared practice”. This short presentation of Vygostky theory is to show where and what the contribution of Lave and Wenger is to the social learning community. As stated earlier, they wanted to incorporate practice, person and the social world. In that sense they didn’t want the concept to be an internalization, which was explained earlier, but “learning as increasing participation in communities of practice”. It really concerns the person, which is acting in the world. In that sense, the person is important in the community of practice because he evolves; he becomes a different when he interacts with his community, when he learns in community. This brief explanation of the definition of the concept therefore shows us that it truly incorporates three major components and that it is not internal. APPRENTICESHIP STUDY After trying to understand the concept in a theoretical way, they wanted to test their ideas. From the study of apprenticeship, they wanted to determine in what way their concept could be different. They decided to study five communities of practice and see what kind of ideas and questions was found that helped them understand the concept even more. These five communities include midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and nondrinking alcoholics. These are communities which were considered to be using apprenticeship as a way to help newcomers in the field to learn all the techniques and become masters themselves and in the same way be able to give back to their communities by transmitting to others the knowledge they have received from the their own master. This concept indeed requires the newcomers to first engage with the masters, sometimes by only watching and reproducing what they have seen and try to become better under the strict guidance of the more-experienced person which is also the master.