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Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation

TL;DR: This work has shown that legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice is not confined to midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, non-drinking alcoholics and the like.
Abstract: In this important theoretical treatist, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning - that learning is fundamentally a social process. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. LPP provides a way to speak about crucial relations between newcomers and old-timers and about their activities, identities, artefacts, knowledge and practice. The communities discussed in the book are midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics, however, the process by which participants in those communities learn can be generalised to other social groups.
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Collins, Brown, and Newman as mentioned in this paper argue that knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used, and propose cognitive apprenticeship as an alternative to conventional practices.
Abstract: Many teaching practices implicitly assume that conceptual knowledge can be abstracted from the situations in which it is learned and used. This article argues that this assumption inevitably limits the effectiveness of such practices. Drawing on recent research into cognition as it is manifest in everyday activity, the authors argue that knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used. They discuss how this view of knowledge affects our understanding of learning, and they note that conventional schooling too often ignores the influence of school culture on what is learned in school. As an alternative to conventional practices, they propose cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, in press), which honors the situated nature of knowledge. They examine two examples of mathematics instruction that exhibit certain key features of this approach to teaching.

14,006 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
John Seely Brown1, Paul Duguid
TL;DR: Work, learning, and innovation in the context of actual communities and actual practices are discussed in this paper, where it is argued that the conventional descriptions of jobs mask not only the ways people work, but also significant learning and innovation generated in the informal communities-of-practice in which they work.
Abstract: Recent ethnographic studies of workplace practices indicate that the ways people actually work usually differ fundamentally from the ways organizations describe that work in manuals, training programs, organizational charts, and job descriptions. Nevertheless, organizations tend to rely on the latter in their attempts to understand and improve work practice. We examine one such study. We then relate its conclusions to compatible investigations of learning and of innovation to argue that conventional descriptions of jobs mask not only the ways people work, but also significant learning and innovation generated in the informal communities-of-practice in which they work. By reassessing work, learning, and innovation in the context of actual communities and actual practices, we suggest that the connections between these three become apparent. With a unified view of working, learning, and innovating, it should be possible to reconceive of and redesign organizations to improve all three.

8,227 citations

Book
16 May 2003
TL;DR: Good computer and video games like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Pikmin, Rise of Nations, Neverwinter Nights, and Xenosaga: Episode 1 are learning machines as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Good computer and video games like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Pikmin, Rise of Nations, Neverwinter Nights, and Xenosaga: Episode 1 are learning machines. They get themselves learned and learned well, so that they get played long and hard by a great many people. This is how they and their designers survive and perpetuate themselves. If a game cannot be learned and even mastered at a certain level, it won't get played by enough people, and the company that makes it will go broke. Good learning in games is a capitalist-driven Darwinian process of selection of the fittest. Of course, game designers could have solved their learning problems by making games shorter and easier, by dumbing them down, so to speak. But most gamers don't want short and easy games. Thus, designers face and largely solve an intriguing educational dilemma, one also faced by schools and workplaces: how to get people, often young people, to learn and master something that is long and challenging--and enjoy it, to boot.

7,211 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Research shows that this threat dramatically depresses the standardized test performance of women and African Americans who are in the academic vanguard of their groups, that it causes disidentification with school, and that practices that reduce this threat can reduce these negative effects.
Abstract: A general theory of domain identification is used to describe achievement barriers still faced by women in advanced quantitative areas and by African Americans in school. The theory assumes that sustained school success requires identification with school and its subdomains; that societal pressures on these groups (e.g., economic disadvantage, gender roles) can frustrate this identification; and that in school domains where these groups are negatively stereotyped, those who have become domain identified face the further barrier of stereotype threat, the threat that others' judgments or their own actions will negatively stereotype them in the domain. Research shows that this threat dramatically depresses the standardized test performance of women and African Americans who are in the academic vanguard of their groups (offering a new interpretation of group differences in standardized test performance), that it causes disidentification with school, and that practices that reduce this threat can reduce these negative effects.

6,069 citations