Situated Learning Within Practice, Culture, and Community: Jean Lave’s Political Project

Jean Lave is a social anthropologist whose studies in the 1970s and 1980s of apprentice tailors in West Africa and everyday routines such as grocery shopping contributed to the development of situated learning theory, which posits that learning is embedded within socially, culturally, and contextually specific activity. With Etienne Wenger, she conceptualizes situated learning as legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice. Learning is fundamentally change, they argue, that emerges through nuanced interactions between newcomers and old timers as the former moves toward full participation in a community’s defining practices. Practices, people, and communities mutually constitute one another and generate conflicts and contradictions that must be negotiated. Learning is thus political for Lave, as are learning theories in the ways they frame social relations and structure the world. Lave challenges dominant psychological views of learning as mental processes of acquisition and transfer, noting how schooling practices reproduce these views as common sense. Lines of research drawing upon Lave’s work include studies of cognitive apprenticeship, communities of practice, and critical examinations of transfer and schooling. More recently, scholars have embraced her ethical-political project by using a situated view to foreground culture in educational practice and center justice and equity in the study of learning within historically marginalized communities.