in this volume, lave and wenger undertake a radical and im-

In this volume, Lave and Wenger undertake a radical and im-portant rethinking and reformulation of our conception oflearning. By placing emphasis on the whole person, and byviewing agent, activity, and world as mutually constitutive,they give us the opportunity to escape from the tyranny of theassumption that learning is the reception of factual knowledgeor information. The authors argue that most accounts of learn-ing have ignored its quintessentially social character. To makethe crucial step away from a solely epistemological account ofthe person, they propose that learning is a process of partici-pation in communities of practice, participation that is at firstlegitimately peripheral but that increases gradually in engage-ment and complexity.

Situated Learning

Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, andComputational Perspectives

Senior Editor EmeritusJOHN SEELY BROWN, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

General EditorsROY PEA, Professor of Education and the LearningSciences and Director, Stanford Center for Innovationsin Learning, Stanford UniversityCHRISTIAN HEATH, The Management Centre, King'sCollege, LondonLUCY A. SUCHMAN, Centre for Science Studies andDepartment of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK

Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine CommunicationLUCY A. SUCHMAN

The Construction Zone: Working for Cognitive Change in SchoolsDENIS NEWMAN, PEG GRIFFIN, and MICHAEL COLE

Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral ParticipationJEAN LAVE and ETIENNE WENGER

Street Mathematics and School MathematicsTEREZINHA NUNES, DAVID WILLIAM CARRAHER, and

ANALUCIA DIAS SCHLIEMANN

Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and ContextSETH CHAIKLIN and JEAN LAVE

Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational ConsiderationsGAVRIEL SALOMON

The Computer As MediumPETER BOGH ANDERSEN, BERIT HOLMQVIST, and JENS F. JENSEN

Sociocultural Studies of MindJAMES V. WERTSCH, PABLO DEL RIO, and AMELIA ALVAREZ

Sociocultural Psychology: Theory and Practice of Doing and KnowingLAURA M. W. MARTIN, KATHERINE NELSON, and ETHEL TOBACH

Mind and Social Practice: Selected Writings of Sylvia ScribnerETHEL TOBACH, RACHEL JOFFEE FALMAGNE, MARY BROWN PARLEE,

LAURA M. W. MARTIN, and AGGIE SCRIBNER KAPELMAN

Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at WorkCHARLES M. KELLER and JANET DIXON KELLER

Computation and Human ExperiencePHILIP E. AGRE

Continued on page following the Index

Situated LearningLegitimate Peripheral Participation

JEAN LAVEETIENNE WENGER

CAMBRIDGEUNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSCambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi

Cambridge University Press32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

www.cambridge.orgInformation on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521413084

© Cambridge University Press 1991

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exceptionand to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,

no reproduction of any part may take place without the writtenpermission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 199118th printing 2008

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-521-41308-4 hardbackISBN 978-0-521-42374-8 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2008

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence oraccuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in

this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

It occurred to us at the same moment to dedicate this book toeach other. We do so as a celebration of an extraordinarilyhappy collaboration, in which we experienced many of the thingswe were writing about.

Contents

Series Foreword

Foreword by William F. Hanks

Acknowledgments

Legitimate Peripheral ParticipationFrom apprenticeship to situated learningFrom situated learning to legitimate

peripheral participationAn analytic perspective on learningWith legitimate peripheral participationThe organization of this monograph

Practice, Person, Social WorldInternalization of the cultural givenParticipation in social practiceThe person and identity in learningThe social world

page 11

13

25

2732

34373942

4547495254

Contents

3 Midwives, Tailors, Quartermasters, Butchers,Nondrinking Alcoholics 59The case of apprenticeship 62Five studies of apprenticeship 65The apprenticeship of Yucatec midwives 67The apprenticeship of Vai and Gola tailors 69The apprenticeship of naval quartermasters 73The apprenticeship of meat cutters 76The apprenticeship of nondrinking alcoholics 79Apprenticeship and situated learning: A new

agenda 84

4 Legitimate Peripheral Participation inCommunities of Practice 89Structuring resources for learning in practice 91The place of knowledge: Participation, learning

curricula, communities of practice 94The problem of access: Transparency and

sequestration 100Discourse and practice 105Motivation and identity: Effects of participation 110Contradictions and change: Continuity and

displacement 113

5 Conclusion 119

References 125

Index 131

10

Series Foreword

The situated nature of learning, remembering, and understand-ing is a central fact. It may appear obvious that human mindsdevelop in social situations, and that they use the tools andrepresentational media that culture provides to support, ex-tendvand reorganize mental functioning. But cognitive theo-ries of knowledge representation and educational practice, inschool and in the workplace, have not been sufficiently re-sponsive to questions about these relationships. And the needfor responsiveness has become salient as computational mediaradically reshape the frontiers of individual and social action,and as educational achievement fails to translate into effectiveuse of knowledge.

This series is born of the conviction that new and excitinginterdisciplinary syntheses are under way, as scholars andpractitioners from diverse fields seek to analyze and influencethe new transformations of social and mental life, and to un-derstand successful learning wherever it occurs.

Computational media include not only computers but thevast array of expressive, receptive, and presentational devicesavailable for use with computers, including interactive video,optical media such as CD-ROM and CD-I, networks, hyper-

11

Series Foreword

media systems, work-group collaboration tools, speech rec-ognition and synthesis, image processing and animation, andsoftware more generally.

These technologies are dramatically transforming the basicpatterns of communication and knowledge interchange in so-cieties, and automating the component processes of thinkingand problem solving. In changing situations of knowledge ac-quisition and use, the new interactive technologies redefine -in ways yet to be determined - what it means to know andunderstand, and what it means to become "literate" or an"educated citizen."

The series invites contributions that advance our under-standing of these seminal issues.

Roy PeaJohn Seely Brown

12


I first encountered these ideas in spring of 1990, when JeanLave spoke at the Workshop on Linguistic Practice at the Uni-versity of Chicago. There were about a dozen of us, mostlyworking on problems in language use and interaction; mostlyanthropologists, linguists, or hybrids; several with researchcommitments to a non-Western language. I had just completeda study of reference as a social practice, in which I analyzedYucatec Maya language use in its linguistic, indexical, andcultural contexts (1990). One of the central issues being pur-sued in the workshop was the relation between context andliteral meaning or, in somewhat more technical terms, the roleof indexicality in semantics. Coming from this angle, Laveand Wenger's work was really exciting because it locatedlearning squarely in the processes of coparticipation, not in theheads of individuals. The analogy to language was just belowthe surface, only occasionally made explicit during several hoursof very fruitful discussion, and yet many of us felt that we hadgained new insights into problems of language. We had al-ready been exploring speech as interaction, trying to takemeaning production out of the heads of individual speakersand locate it in the fields of social interaction. The 1990 pre-sentation, and Jean Lave's ability to engage intellectually in

13


the issues it raised, provoked some of the best discussion wehave enjoyed. My first reason for mentioning this background,then, is to say that this book, on which the speech was based,is very productive in the sense of setting forth a strong, pro-vocative position on issues that are of basic significance topractice theory quite generally, and not only to how practicegrounds learning. The second reason is simply to underscorethe fact that my remarks in this foreword come from a certainperspective, and are necessarily selective.

Situated Learning contributes to a growing body of researchin human sciences that explores the situated character of hu-man understanding and communication. It takes as its focusthe relationship between learning and the social situations inwhich it occurs. Rather than defining it as the acquisition ofpropositional knowledge, Lave and Wenger situate learning incertain forms of social coparticipation. Rather than asking whatkinds of cognitive processes and conceptual structures are in-volved, they ask what kinds of social engagements provide theproper context for learning to take place. This shift has inter-esting consequences, which relate the book to a broad set ofinterdisciplinary issues.

On the one hand, it implies a highly interactive and produc-tive role for the skills that are acquired through the learningprocess. The individual learner is not gaining a discrete bodyof abstract knowledge which (s)he will then transport and reapplyin later contexts. Instead, (s)he acquires the skill to performby actually engaging in the process, under the attenuated con-ditions of legitimate peripheral participation. This centralconcept denotes the particular mode of engagement of a learnerwho participates in the actual practice of an expert, but only toa limited degree and with limited responsibility for the ulti-mate product as a whole. There is no necessary implication

14


that a learner acquires mental representations that remain fixedthereafter, nor that the "lesson" taught consists itself in a setof abstract representations. On the contrary, Lave and Wengerseem to challenge us to rethink what it means to learn, indeedto rethink what it means to understand. On this point theirproject joins a growing literature in cognitive studies, dis-course analysis, and sociolinguistics, which treats verbalmeaning as the product of speakers' interpretive activities, andnot merely as the "content" of linguistic forms. The commonelement here is the premise that meaning, understanding, andlearning are all defined relative to actional contexts, not toself-contained structures.

On the other hand, the shift also alters the locus of learning.In a classical intellectualist theory, it is the individual mindthat acquires mastery over processes of reasoning and descrip-tion, by internalizing and manipulating structures. Like think-ing, learning so construed takes place in the individual. Twopeople may well learn the same thing, just as they may derivewhat is for all practical purposes the same understanding, yetthis is a matter of coincidence, not collaborative production.The challenge of this book is surely deeper: Learning is a pro-cess that takes place in a participation framework, not in anindividual mind. This means, among other things, that it ismediated by the differences of perspective among the coparti-cipants. It is the community, or at least those participating inthe learning context, who "learn" under this definition. Learningis, as it were, distributed among coparticipants, not a one-person act. While the apprentice may be the one transformedmost dramatically by increased particpation in a productiveprocess, it is the wider process that is the crucial locus andprecondition for this transformation. How do the masters ofapprentices themselves change through acting as colearners and,

15


therefore, how does the skill being mastered change in theprocess? The larger community of practitioners reproduces it-self through the formation of apprentices, yet it would presum-ably be transformed as well. Legitimate peripheral participa-tion does not explain these changes, but it has the virtue ofmaking them all but inevitable. Even in cases where a fixeddoctrine is transmitted, the ability of a community to repro-duce itself through the training process derives not from thedoctrine, but from the maintenance of certain modes of copar-ticipation in which it is embedded.

As a corollary of these shifts, the framework of this bookimplies a constitutive role in learning for improvisation, actualcases of interaction, and emergent processes which cannot bereduced to generalized structures. Here it joins developmentsin those social sciences where phenomenological, interactive,and "practice"-centered approaches have gained importance.One of the basic moves of such approaches has been to ques-tion the validity of descriptions of social behavior based on theenactment of prefabricated codes and structures. Instead, thefocus on actors' productive contributions to social order hasled naturally to a greater role for negotiation, strategy, andunpredictable aspects of action. This shift has far-reaching andas yet little-understood consequences for how one describeshuman thought, communication, and learning. The challenge,it would seem, is to rethink action in such a way that structureand process, mental representation and skillful execution, in-terpenetrate one another profoundly. It is important to see thatLave and Wenger reject both of the obvious extremes in re-sponding to this challenge.

In a classical structural analysis, aspects of behavior areexplained by, and serve as empirical evidence for, preexisting,"underlying" systems. It is these systems that provide the ob-

16


ject of which an analysis is a model. To the extent that actualprocesses are analyzed, they are "structuralized" - made tofollow from, or instantiate, structures. The activity of under-standing, in such a view, comes down to recognizing and im-plementing instances of structure, filling them in with an overlayof situational particulars, and relating them to a "context"(which is in turn structured). Insofar as "understanding" issomething a person does in his or her head, it ultimately in-volves the mental representations of individuals. Understand-ing is seen to arise out of the mental operations of a subject onobjective structures. Lave and Wenger reject this view of un-derstanding insofar as they locate learning not in the acquisi-tion of structure, but in the increased access of learners to par-ticipating roles in expert performances.

The other extreme position would be sheerly interactive,rejecting altogether the premise that structures may preformaspects of experience. Here, too, the position implicit in thisbook is nuanced. For Lave and Wenger do not reject the notionthat participation frameworks are structured - it is preciselythis that provides the conditions for legitimate peripheral par-ticipation - nor do they deny that expert performance is sys-tematic. The hard question is what kind of system, and whatkind of structure? It is not merely that the structural issue istransposed from the level of mental representations to that ofparticipation frames. Rather, this transposition is compoundedby a more subtle and potentially radical shift from invariantstructures to ones that are less rigid and more deeply adaptive.One way of phrasing this is to say that structure is more thevariable outcome of action than its invariant precondition.Preexisting structures may vaguely determine thought, learn-ing, or action, but only in an underspecified, highly schematicway. And the structures may be significantly reconfigured in

17


the local context of action. Such a conception retains a consti-tutive role for the actual activities in which learners engage,while still avoiding the extreme position which denies any pre-fabricated content in what they learn.

Given this framework, learning could be viewed as a specialtype of social practice associated with the kind of participationframe designated legitimate peripheral participation (LPP).Under this reading, Lave and Wenger's proposal gives learn-ing an actional ground, but retains its discreteness as a cate-gory of action. Alternatively, and clearly more in line withtheir goals, it can be viewed as a feature of practice, whichmight be present in all sorts of activities, not just in clear casesof training and apprenticeship. Think of all the everyday situ-ations in which people coparticipate to a limited extent, therebygaining access to modes of behavior not otherwise available tothem, eventually developing skill adequate to certain kinds ofperformance. Participating members of religious congrega-tions, athletes training together, the third string on a team,spectators at any public event, faculty and students in auniversity setting, new friends, the home bricoleur who helpsa tradesperson repair his porch, nonmechanics when they de-scribe the problems with their cars to mechanics, patients beingtreated by doctors - all of these interactions initially involvelimited, highly asymmetric forms of coparticipation. All seemto have the potential to transform the participants, even if theirtrajectories and thresholds of change differ widely. In actualempirical studies of LPP, it will be important to consider crit-ically the range of contexts it is meant to describe, from institu-tionally circumscribed training all the way to the learning imma-nent in everyday activities. At the latter extreme, both limitedperipheral engagements and the potential for change would seemto be present whenever one party to an activity is more skilled

18


more skilled or expert (in some relevant way) than another.Such a liberal reading of the LPP concept runs the risk of eras-ing its specificity, but has the advantage of tying it into allkinds of practice. Furthermore, one could suggest that learningwould be likely to take place whenever people interact underconditions of LPP. This would imply that certain participationframeworks may be "dispositionally adapted" to producinglearning, even if the coparticipants are not attempting to ac-quire or inculcate identifiable skills. Language acquisition, wherethe learner is a legitimate peripheral participant interacting withmasterful speakers, may well involve this. A child interactingwith adults and an outsider habituating himself to local waysof speaking may be submitting to and ultimately reproducingcommunity standards of which they never become aware. Thiskind of pervasive, low-level learning can be seen when speak-ers acquire regional accents or turns of phrase despite them-selves, or when students come to reproduce aspects of the per-formance style of a charismatic teacher. Clearly, on such ageneral reading of learning, the trajectories followed by thosewho learn will be extremely diverse and may not be predict-able. The challenge for a community that seeks to reproduceitself would be to regiment the interactions in which learningis likely to occur, as well as the outcomes to which it maylead.

It is clear that in many learning contexts, even quite nar-rowly defined, participants may disengage before attainingmastery over core skills. In such cases, they may leave thelearning context with some but not all of the relevant skills,transporting what they have learned into another context. Thequestion seems to be how one describes the detachability ofthese skills from the participatory contexts in which they wereacquired. If both learning and the subject learned are embed-

19


ded in participation frameworks, then the portability of learnedskills must rely on the commensurability of certain forms ofparticipation. The employee who rises up through the ranks,performing a variety of tasks which she must later integrate asa manager, has in effect learned modes of acting and problemsolving, not a system of rules or representations. Presumably,the success of a learner changing work contexts, and thereforeintegrating into new participation frameworks, would dependupon his or her ability to move between modes of copartici-pation. This ability could be described in two quite differentways. One could assume that participation is schematized andthat what is transported by the effective learner is an expand-ing repertoire of participation schemata. This reintroduces thenotion of learning as structure acquisition. Alternatively, onecould insist that participation is not schematized that way, andthat what the effective learner learns is how to actually dopractices. A schema cannot explain its own use, manipulation,or role in future improvisations. On this aspect, it seems nec-essary to posit that the skillful learner acquires something morelike the ability to play various roles in various fields of partic-ipation. This would involve things other than schemata: abilityto anticipate, a sense of what can feasibly occur within speci-fied contexts, even if in a given case it does not occur. It in-volves a prereflective grasp of complex situations, which mightbe reported as a propositional description, but is not one itself.Mastery involves timing of actions relative to changing cir-cumstances: the ability to improvise. By tying learning intoparticipation, the notion of LPP leads us to think again aboutwhat it means for knowledge to be portable. Notice that theability to engage in LPP, and the ability to learn, would pre-sumably be acquired as well. The relative transparency of alearning context would depend not on features of the context

20


per se, but on the preparedness and flexibility of the learner.(This is not to deny that contexts may be relatively transparentor opaque in terms of the level of preparedness they require onthe part of a learner.)

Taken in relation to a single craft that is taught through"hands-on" legitimate peripheral participation, the ability tolearn would develop in close relation to the ability to performtasks. On the other hand, a training program that consists ofinstructional settings separated from actual performance wouldtend to split the learner's ability to manage the learning situa-tion apart from his ability to perform the skill. Given a suffi-cient disjunction between the skill being taught and the actualperformance situation, one could imagine an actor who be-comes expert as a learner - that is, who becomes a master atmanaging the learning situation - but who never actually learnsthe performance skills themselves. This possibility seems tobe what periodic tests of performance are supposed to guardagainst. In an apprenticeship relation, where the learner is ac-tually performing routinely, this kind of abstract exam is lessrelevant.

Insofar as learning really does consist in the development ofportable interactive skills, it can take place even when copar-ticipants fail to share a common code. The apprentice's abilityto understand the master's performance depends not on theirpossessing the same representation of it, or of the objects itentails, but rather on their engaging in the performance in con-gruent ways. Similarly, the master's effectiveness at produc-ing learning is not dependent on her ability to inculcate thestudent with her own conceptual representations. Rather, it de-pends on her ability to manage effectively a division of partic-ipation that provides for growth on the part of the student.Again, it would be this common ability to coparticipate that

21


would provide the matrix for learning, not the commonality ofsymbolic or referential structures. (Of course the two may beinterwoven in given cases, depending upon the nature of theskill.)

This last point raises a question about language in learning.In Chapter 4, Lave and Wenger rightly question the idea thatverbal explanation is a uniquely effective mode of instruction,somehow superior to direct demonstration. Given the rest oftheir approach, the inverse claim would appear more natural.Quite simply, if learning is about increased access to perfor-mance, then the way to maximize learning is to perform, notto talk about it. The notion that demonstration is context spe-cific and explanation context independent is based on an im-poverished notion of both. A word of caution is merited here,lest Lave and Wenger's position be misunderstood, for thiscritique might appear to treat language as a code for talkingabout the world. As they recognize, a significant body of the-ory and research has shown that speech is equally a means ofacting in the world. The point is germane, since language useentails multiple participatory skills, and is one of the most ba-sic modes of access to interaction in social life. To equatediscourse with reflections on action, instead of action itself,would be to fall prey to the very structural views that Lave andWenger undermine in their approach to learning. Indeed, asthey point out, the role of language in learning is likely to behighly differentiated, and a powerful source of evidence forthe other ongoing modes of participation. At the least, the co-participants in communication among masters, learners, pa-tients (etc.) provide part of the necessary background againstwhich LPP must be defined. Once we see discourse productionas a social and cultural practice, and not as a second-orderrepresentation of practice, it becomes clear that it must be con-

22


figured along with other kinds of work in the overall matrix ofperformance. It also becomes important to investigate retell-ings and discussions that take place between and around per-formance events, and between learners and their respectivecommunities. Rather than slipping back into the structure-acquisition model, such an investigation of language wouldcontribute to a more deeply historicized account of situatedlearning.

Attention to linguistic action may also help sort out a verytricky question regarding LPP, namely, whether it designatesa kind of role configuration that actors may engage in or, rather,a way of engaging. Students of conversation have shown thata single party to an interaction may simultaneously fill severalroles, and that, under proper circumstances, a single role canbe occupied by more than one interactant. To the extent thatLPP works at the level of how roles are occupied, we wouldbe inclined to say that it is a way of engaging, not a structurein which engagement takes place. As such, it may be charac-terized by the partiality of the apprentice's contribution to thewhole, or by the fact that the apprentice is simultaneously at-tending to the task at hand and to how the master performs inrelation to it. In other words, LPP is not a simple participationstructure in which an apprentice occupies a particular role atthe edge of a larger process. It is rather an interactive processin which the apprentice engages by simultaneously performingin several roles - status subordinate, learning practitioner, soleresponsible agent in minor parts of the performance, aspiringexpert, and so forth - each implying a different sort of respon-sibility, a different set of role relations, and a different inter-active involvement. One would expect that the role configu-rations in which LPP takes place would differ widely throughtime and space, and even over the course of a single appren-

23


ticeship, yet the interactive prise de conscience, the way thelearner places himself in relation to the whole, would remainconsistent. Under such a view, LPP is not a structure, no mat-ter how subtly defined, but rather a way of acting in the worldwhich takes place under widely varying conditions.

This last remark raises a final, still broader suggestion thatis implicit in the book, namely, that learning is a way of beingin the social world, not a way of coming to know about it.Learners, like observers more generally, are engaged both inthe contexts of their learning and in the broader social worldwithin which these contexts are produced. Without this en-gagement, there is no learning, and where the proper engage-ment is sustained, learning will occur. Just as making theoryis a form of practice in the world, not a speculation at a removefrom it, so too learning is a practice, or a family of them. Thisentailment of Lave and Wenger's provocative book brings itinto line with important developments in a range of other hu-man sciences.

William F. HanksUniversity of Chicago

24

Acknowledgments

The idea of exploring and developing the notion of legitimateperipheral participation would not have happened in any othercontext but that in which we were both working in 1988: theInstitute for Research on Learning in Palo Alto, California. Inparticular, an ongoing reading group on activity theory, criti-cal psychology, and learning in the workplace was a wonder-ful source of ideas and discussion. We wish to thank YrjoEngestrom, Chandra Mukerji, and Michael Cole, the organiz-ers of a conference on Work and Communication at the Uni-versity of California, San Diego, in July 1988, where we pre-sented the first formulation of our ideas. We are grateful, bothto organizers and participants, for the opportunity to discussthese ideas with them, and especially to Aaron Cicourel for hishelpful suggestions for revising our first draft. We also wishto thank Stephen Shapin and Adi Ophir, the conveners of aWorkshop on the Place of Knowledge, at the Van Leer Insti-tute in Jerusalem in May of 1989, which provided us with anopportunity to push our thinking further. Above all, we wishto thank the readers of our successive drafts, too numerous toaddress individually, for their discussions and comments andfor their willingness to share our enthusiasm while providing

25

Acknowledgments

constructive critiques. Two names must be mentioned, how-ever. We give special thanks to Ole Dreier, who greatly helpedus deepen our thinking by writing us a "paper" about ourpaper, and to Paul Duguid, that rare colleague whose editorialinvolvement became akin to coauthorship.

Jean LaveEtienne Wenger

26

Legitimate PeripheralParticipation

Legitimate Peripheral Participation

Learning viewed as situated activity has as its central definingcharacteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral par-ticipation. By this we mean to draw attention to the point thatlearners inevitably participate in communities of practitionersand that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcom-ers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural prac-tices of a community. "Legitimate peripheral participation"provides a way to speak about the relations between newcom-ers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts,and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns theprocess by which newcomers become part of a community ofpractice. A person's intentions to learn are engaged and themeaning of learning is configured through the process of be-coming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This so-cial process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning ofknowledgeable skills.

In order to explain our interest in the concept of legitimateperipheral participation, we will try to convey a sense of theperspectives that it opens and the kinds of questions that itraises. A good way to start is to outline the history of theconcept as it has become increasingly central to our thinkingabout issues of learning. Our initial intention in writing whathas gradually evolved into this book was to rescue the idea ofapprenticeship. In 1988, notions about apprenticeship wereflying around the halls of the Institute for Research on Learn-ing, acting as a token of solidarity and as a focus for discus-sions on the nature of learning. We and our colleagues hadbegun to talk about learners as apprentices, about teachers andcomputers as masters, and about cognitive apprenticeship, ap-prenticeship learning, and even life as apprenticeship. It wasevident that no one was certain what the term meant. Further-

29

Situated Learning

more, it was understood to be a synonym for situated learning,about which we were equally uncertain. Resort to one did notclarify the other. Apprenticeship had become yet another pan-acea for a broad spectrum of learning-research problems, andit was in danger of becoming meaningless.

Other considerations motivated this work as well. Our ownearlier work on craft apprenticeship in West Africa, on intel-ligent tutoring systems, and on the cultural transparency oftechnology seemed relevant and at the same time insufficientfor the development of an adequate theory of learning, givingus an urgent sense that we needed such a theory. Indeed, ourcentral ideas took shape as we came to see that the most inter-esting features both of apprenticeship and of "glass-box" ap-proaches to the development and understanding of technologycould be characterized - and analyzed - as legitimate periph-eral participation in communities of practice.

The notion that learning through apprenticeship was a mat-ter of legitimate peripheral participation arose first in researchon craft apprenticeship among Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia(Lave, in preparation). In that context it was simply an obser-vation about the tailors' apprentices within an analysis ad-dressing questions of how apprentices might engage in a com-mon, structured pattern of learning experiences without beingtaught, examined, or reduced to mechanical copiers of every-day tailoring tasks, and of how they become, with remarkablyfew exceptions, skilled and respected master tailors. It wasdifficult, however, to separate the historically and culturallyspecific circumstances that made Vai and Gola apprenticeshipboth effective and benign as a form of education from the cri-tique of schooling and school practices that this inevitably sug-gested, or from a more general theory of situated learning.

30


This added to the general confusion that encouraged us to un-dertake this project.

Over the past two years we have attempted to clarify theconfusion. Two moments in that process were especially im-portant. To begin with, the uses of "apprenticeship" in cog-nitive and educational research were largely metaphorical, eventhough apprenticeship as an actual educational form clearlyhad a long and varied train of historically and culturally spe-cific realizations. We gradually became convinced that weneeded to reexamine the relationship between the "apprentice-ship" of speculation and historical forms of apprenticeship.This led us to insist on the distinction between our theoreticalframework for analyzing educational forms and specific his-torical instances of apprenticeship. This in turn led us to ex-plore learning as "situated learning."

Second, this conception of situated learning clearly was moreencompassing in intent than conventional notions of "learningin situ" or "learning by doing" for which it was used as arough equivalent. But, to articulate this intuition usefully, weneeded a better characterization of "situatedness" as a theo-retical perspective. The attempt to clarify the concept of situ-ated learning led to critical concerns about the theory and tofurther revisions that resulted in the move to our present viewthat learning is an integral and inseparable aspect of socialpractice. We have tried to capture this new view under therubric of legitimate peripheral participation.

Discussing each shift in turn may help to clarify our reasonsfor coming to characterize learning as legitimate peripheralparticipation in communities of practice.

31

Situated Learning

FROM APPRENTICESHIP TO SITUATED LEARNING

Fashioning a firm distinction between historical forms of ap-prenticeship and situated learning as a historical-cultural the-ory required that we stop trying to use empirical cases of ap-prenticeship as a lens through which to view all forms oflearning. On these grounds we started to reconsider the formsof apprenticeship with which we were most familiar as modelsof effective learning in the context of a broader theoreticalgoal. Nevertheless, specific cases of apprenticeship were ofvital interest in the process of developing and exemplifying atheory of situated learning and we thus continued to use someof these studies as resources in working out our ideas. Wemight equally have turned to studies of socialization; childrenare, after all, quintessential^ legitimate peripheral participantsin adult social worlds. But various forms of apprenticeshipseemed to capture very well our interest in learning in situatedways - in the transformative possibilities of being and becom-ing complex, full cultural-historical participants in the world- and it would be difficult to think of a more apt range ofsocial practices for this purpose.

The distinction between historical cases of apprenticeshipand a theory of situated learning was strengthened as we de-veloped a more comprehensive view of different approachesto situatedness. Existing confusion over the meaning of situatedlearning and, more generally, situated activity resulted fromdiffering interpretations of the concept. On some occasions"situated" seemed to mean merely that some of people'sthoughts and actions were located in space and time. On otheroccasions, it seemed to mean that thought and action weresocial only in the narrow sense that they involved other peo-ple, or that they were immediately dependent for meaning on

32


the social setting that occasioned them. These types of inter-pretations, akin to naive views of indexicality, usually tooksome activities to be situated and some not.

In the concept of situated activity we were developing,however, the situatedness of activity appeared to be anythingbut a simple empirical attribute of everyday activity or a cor-rective to conventional pessimism about informal, experience-based learning. Instead, it took on the proportions of a generaltheoretical perspective, the basis of claims about the relationalcharacter of knowledge and learning, about the negotiatedcharacter of meaning, and about the concerned (engaged,dilemma-driven) nature of learning activity for the people in-volved. That perspective meant that there is no activity that isnot situated. It implied emphasis on comprehensive under-standing involving the whole person rather than "receiving"a body of factual knowledge about the world; on activity inand with the world; and on the view that agent, activity, andthe world mutually constitute each other.

We have discovered that this last conception of situated ac-tivity and situated learning, which has gradually emerged inour understanding, frequently generates resistance, for it seemsto carry with it connotations of parochialism, particularity, andthe limitations of a given time and task. This misinterpretationof situated learning requires comment. (Our own objections totheorizing in terms of situated learning are somewhat differ-ent. These will become clearer shortly.) The first point to con-sider is that even so-called general knowledge only has powerin specific circumstances. Generality is often associated withabstract representations, with decontextualization. But ab-stract representations are meaningless unless they can be madespecific to the situation at hand. Moreover, the formation oracquisition of an abstract principle is itself a specific event in

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Situated Learning

specific circumstances. Knowing a general rule by itself in noway assures that any generality it may carry is enabled in thespecific circumstances in which it is relevant. In this sense,any "power of abstraction" is thoroughly situated, in the livesof persons and in the culture that makes it possible. On theother hand, the world carries its own structure so that specific-ity always implies generality (and in this sense generality isnot to be assimilated to abstractness): That is why stories canbe so powerful in conveying ideas, often more so than an ar-ticulation of the idea itself. What is called general knowledgeis not privileged with respect to other "kinds" of knowledge.It too can be gained only in specific circumstances. And it toomust be brought into play in specific circumstances. The gen-erality of any form of knowledge always lies in the power torenegotiate the meaning of the past and future in constructingthe meaning of present circumstances.

FROM SITUATED LEARNING TO LEGITIMATE

PERIPHERAL PARTICIPATION

This brings us to the second shift in perspective that led us toexplore learning as legitimate peripheral participation. The no-tion of situated learning now appears to be a transitory con-cept, a bridge, between a view according to which cognitiveprocesses (and thus learning) are primary and a view accordingto which social practice is the primary, generative phenome-non, and learning is one of its characteristics. There is a sig-nificant contrast between a theory of learning in which practice(in a narrow, replicative sense) is subsumed within processesof learning and one in which learning is taken to be an integral

34


aspect of practice (in a historical, generative sense). In ourview, learning is not merely situated in practice - as if it weresome independently reifiable process that just happened to belocated somewhere; learning is an integral part of generativesocial practice in the lived-in world. The problem - and thecentral preoccupation of this monograph - is to translate thisinto a specific analytic approach to learning. Legitimate pe-ripheral participation is proposed as a descriptor of engage-ment in social practice that entails learning as an integral con-stituent.

Before proceeding with a discussion of the analytic ques-tions involved in a social practice theory of learning, we needto discuss our choices of terms and the issues that they reflect,in order to clarify our conception of legitimate peripheral par-ticipation. Its composite character, and the fact that it is notdifficult to propose a contrary for each of its components, maybe misleading. It seems all too natural to decompose it into aset of three contrasting pairs: legitimate versus illegitimate,peripheral versus central, participation versus nonparticipa-tion. But we intend for the concept to be taken as a whole.Each of its aspects is indispensable in defining the others andcannot be considered in isolation. Its constituents contributeinseparable aspects whose combinations create a landscape -shapes, degrees, textures - of community membership.

Thus, in the terms proposed here there may very well be nosuch thing as an "illegitimate peripheral participant." The formthat the legitimacy of participation takes is a defining charac-teristic of ways of belonging, and is therefore not only a cru-cial condition for learning, but a constitutive element of itscontent. Similarly, with regard to " peripherally" there maywell be no such simple thing as "central participation" in acommunity of practice. Peripherality suggests that there are

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Situated Learning

multiple, varied, more- or less-engaged and -inclusive ways ofbeing located in the fields of participation defined by a com-munity. Peripheral participation is about being located in thesocial world. Changing locations and perspectives are part ofactors' learning trajectories, developing identities, and formsof membership.

Furthermore, legitimate peripherality is a complex notion,implicated in social structures involving relations of power. Asa place in which one moves toward more-intensive participa-tion, peripherality is an empowering position. As a place inwhich one is kept from participating more fully - often legiti-mately, from the broader perspective of society at large - it isa disempowering position. Beyond that, legitimate peripher-ality can be a position at the articulation of related communi-ties. In this sense, it can itself be a source of power or power-lessness, in affording or preventing articulation and interchangeamong communities of practice. The ambiguous potentialitiesof legitimate peripherality reflect the concept's pivotal role inproviding access to a nexus of relations otherwise not per-ceived as connected.

Given the complex, differentiated nature of communities, itseems important not to reduce the end point of centripetal par-ticipation in a community of practice to a uniform or univocal"center," or to a linear notion of skill acquisition. There is noplace in a community of practice designated "the periphery,"and, most emphatically, it has no single core or center. Cen-tral participation would imply that there is a center (physical,political, or metaphorical) to a community with respect to anindividual's "place" in it. Complete participation would sug-gest a closed domain of knowledge or collective practice forwhich there might be measurable degrees of "acquisition" bynewcomers. We have chosen to call that to which peripheral

36


participation leads, full participation. Full participation is in-tended to do justice to the diversity of relations involved invarying forms of community membership.

Full participation, however, stands in contrast to only oneaspect of the concept of peripherality as we see it: It places theemphasis on what partial participation is not, or not yet. In ourusage, peripherality is also & positive term, whose most salientconceptual antonyms are unrelatedness or irrelevance to on-going activity. The partial participation of newcomers is by nomeans "disconnected" from the practice of interest. Further-more, it is also a dynamic concept. In this sense, peripherality,when it is enabled, suggests an opening, a way of gainingaccess to sources for understanding through growing involve-ment. The ambiguity inherent in peripheral participation mustthen be connected to issues of legitimacy, of the social orga-nization of and control over resources, if it is to gain its fullanalytical potential.

AN ANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE ON LEARNING

With the first shift in the development of this project we havetried to establish that our historical-cultural theory of learningshould not be merely an abstracted generalization of the con-crete cases of apprenticeship - or any other educational form.Further, coming to see that a theory of situated activity chal-lenges the very meaning of abstraction and/or generalizationhas led us to reject conventional readings of the generalizabil-ity and/or abstraction of "knowledge." Arguing in favor of ashift away from a theory of situated activity in which learningis reified as one kind of activity, and toward a theory of social

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Situated Learning

practice in which learning is viewed as an aspect of all activ-ity, has led us to consider how we are to think about our ownpractice. And this has revealed a dilemma: How can we pur-port to be working out a theoretical conception of learningwithout, in fact, engaging in just the project of abstractionrejected above?

There are several classical dualist oppositions that in manycontexts are treated as synonymous, or nearly so: abstract-concrete; general-particular; theory about the world, and theworld so described. Theory is assumed to be general and ab-stract, the world, concrete and particular. But in the Marxisthistorical tradition that underpins social practice theory theseterms take on different relations with each other and differentmeanings. They do so as part of a general method of socialanalysis. This method does not deny that there is a concreteworld, which is ordinarily perceived as some collection of par-ticularities, just as it is possible to invent simple, thin, abstracttheoretical propositions about it. But these two possibilities arenot considered as the two poles of interest. Instead, both ofthem offer points of departure for starting to explore and pro-duce an understanding of multiply determined, diversely uni-fied - that is, complexly concrete - historical processes, ofwhich particularities (including initial theories) are the result(Marx 1857; Hall 1973; Ilyenkov 1977). The theorist is tryingto recapture those relations in an analytic way that turns theapparently "natural" categories and forms of social life intochallenges to our understanding of how they are (historicallyand culturally) produced and reproduced. The goal, in Marx'smemorable phrase, is to "ascend (from both the particular andthe abstract) to the concrete."

It may now be clearer why it is not appropriate to treat le-gitimate peripheral participation as a mere distillation of ap-

38


prenticeship, an abstracting process of generalizing from ex-amples of apprenticeship. (Indeed, turned onto apprenticeship,the concept should provide the same analytical leverage as itwould for any other educational form.) Our theorizing aboutlegitimate peripheral participation thus is not intended as ab-straction, but as an attempt to explore its concrete relations.To think about a concept like legitimate peripheral participa-tion in this way is to argue that its theoretical significance de-rives from the richness of its interconnections: in historicalterms, through time and across cultures. It may convey betterwhat we mean by a historically, culturally concrete "concept"to describe legitimate peripheral participation as an "analyti-cal perspective." We use these two terms interchangeablyhereafter.

WITH LEGITIMATE PERIPHERAL PARTICIPATION

We do not talk here about schools in any substantial way, norexplore what our work has to say about schooling. Steeringclear of the problem of school learning for the present was aconscious decision, which was not always easy to adhere to asthe issue kept creeping into our discussions. But, although wemention schooling at various points, we have refrained fromany systematic treatment of the subject. It is worth outliningour reasons for this restraint, in part because this may helpclarify further the theoretical status of the concept of legitimateperipheral participation.

First, as we began to focus on legitimate peripheral partici-pation, we wanted above all to take a fresh look at learning.Issues of learning and schooling seemed to have become too

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Situated Learning

deeply interrelated in our culture in general, both for purposesof our own exploration and the exposition of our ideas. Moreimportantly, the organization of schooling as an educationalform is predicated on claims that knowledge can be decontex-tualized, and yet schools themselves as social institutions andas places of learning constitute very specific contexts. Thus,analysis of school learning as situated requires a multilayeredview of how knowing and learning are part of social practice- a major project in its own right. Last, but not least, perva-sive claims concerning the sources of the effectiveness ofschooling (in teaching, in the specialization of schooling inchanging persons, in the special modes of inculcation for whichschools are known) stand in contradiction with the situatedperspective we have adopted. All this has meant that our dis-cussions of schooling were often contrastive, even opposi-tional. But we did not want to define our thinking and buildour theory primarily by contrast to the claims of any educa-tional form, including schooling. We wanted to develop a viewof learning that would stand on its own, reserving the analysisof schooling and other specific educational forms for the fu-ture.

We should emphasize, therefore, that legitimate peripheralparticipation is not itself an educational form, much less a ped-agogical strategy or a teaching technique. It is an analyticalviewpoint on learning, a way of understanding learning. Wehope to make clear as we proceed that learning through legiti-mate peripheral participation takes place no matter which ed-ucational form provides a context for learning, or whether thereis any intentional educational form at all. Indeed, this view-point makes a fundamental distinction between learning andintentional instruction. Such decoupling does not deny thatlearning can take place where there is teaching, but does not

40


take intentional instruction to be in itself the source or causeof learning, and thus does not blunt the claim that what getslearned is problematic with respect to what is taught. Undoubt-edly, the analytical perspective of legitimate peripheral partic-ipation could - we hope that it will - inform educational en-deavors by shedding a new light on learning processes, and bydrawing attention to key aspects of learning experience thatmay be overlooked. But this is very different from attributinga prescriptive value to the concept of legitimate peripheral par-ticipation and from proposing ways of "implementing" or"operationalizing" it for educational purposes.

Even though we decided to set aside issues of schooling inthis initial stage of our work, we are persuaded that rethinkingschooling from the perspective afforded by legitimate periph-eral participation will turn out to be a fruitful exercise. Suchan analysis would raise questions about the place of schoolingin the community at large in terms of possibilities for devel-oping identities of mastery. These include questions of the re-lation of school practices to those of the communities in whichthe knowledge that schools are meant to "impart" is located,as well as issues concerning relations between the world ofschooling and the world of adults more generally. Such a studywould also raise questions about the social organization ofschools themselves into communities of practice, both officialand interstitial, with varied forms of membership. We wouldpredict that such an investigation would afford a better contextfor determining what students learn and what they do not, andwhat it comes to mean for them, than would a study of thecurriculum or of instructional practices.

Thinking about schooling in terms of legitimate peripheralparticipation is only one of several directions that seem prom-ising for pursuing the analysis of contemporary and other his-

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Situated Learning

torical forms of social practice in terms of legitimate periph-eral participation in communities of practice. There are centralissues that are only touched upon in this monograph, and thatneed to be given more attention. The concept of "communityof practice" is left largely as an intuitive notion, which servesa purpose here but which requires a more rigorous treatment.In particular, unequal relations of power must be included moresystematically in our analysis. Hegemony over resources forlearning and alienation from full participation are inherent inthe shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality of participationin its historical realizations. It would be useful to understandbetter how these relations generate characteristically intersti-tial communities of practice and truncate possibilities for iden-tities of mastery.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS MONOGRAPH

In this brief history we have tried to convey how and why thecore concept of legitimate peripheral participation has takenon theoretical interest for us. In the next chapter we place thishistory in a broader theoretical context and investigate as-sumptions about learning; we contrast our own views to con-ventional views concerning internalization, the construction ofidentity, and the production of communities of practice. InChapter 3, we present excerpts from five studies of apprentice-ship, analyzing them as instances of learning through legiti-mate peripheral participation. These studies raise a series ofissues: the relations between learning and pedagogy, the placeof knowledge in practice, the importance of access to the learningpotential of given settings, the uses of language in learning-in-

42


practice, and the way in which knowledge takes on value forthe learner in the fashioning of identities of full participation.Our discussion of these issues provokes an examination of thefundamental contradictions embodied in relations of legitimateperipheral participation, and of how such contradictions areinvolved in generating change (Chapter 4). In conclusion, weemphasize the significance of shifting the analytic focus fromthe individual as learner to learning as participation in the so-cial world, and from the concept of cognitive process to themore-encompassing view of social practice.

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Practice, Person,Social World

Practice, Person, Social World

All theories of learning are based on fundamental assumptionsabout the person, the world, and their relations, and we haveargued that this monograph formulates a theory of learning asa dimension of social practice. Indeed, the concept of legiti-mate peripheral participation provides a framework for bring-ing together theories of situated activity and theories about theproduction and reproduction of the social order. These haveusually been treated separately, and within distinct theoreticaltraditions. But there is common ground for exploring their in-tegral, constitutive relations, their entailments, and effects ina framework of social practice theory, in which the produc-tion, transformation, and change in the identities of persons,knowledgeable skill in practice, and communities of practiceare realized in the lived-in world of engagement in everydayactivity.

INTERNALIZATION OF THE CULTURAL GIVEN

Conventional explanations view learning as a process by whicha learner internalizes knowledge, whether "discovered,""transmitted" from others, or "experienced in interaction"with others. This focus on internalization does not just leavethe nature of the learner, of the world, and of their relationsunexplored; it can only reflect far-reaching assumptions con-cerning these issues. It establishes a sharp dichotomy betweeninside and outside, suggests that knowledge is largely cere-bral, and takes the individual as the nonproblematic unit ofanalysis. Furthermore, learning as internalization is too easilyconstrued as an unproblematic process of absorbing the given,as a matter of transmission and assimilation.

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Situated Learning

Internalization is even central to some work on learning ex-plicitly concerned with its social character, for instance in thework of Vygotsky. We are aware that Vygotsky's concept ofthe zone of proximal development has received vastly differ-ing interpretations, under which the concept of internalizationplays different roles. These interpretations can be roughlyclassified into three categories. First, the zone of proximal de-velopment is often characterized as the distance betweenproblem-solving abilities exhibited by a learner working aloneand that learner's problem-solving abilities when assisted byor collaborating with more-experienced people. This "scaf-folding" interpretation has inspired pedagogical approaches thatexplictly provide support for the initial performance of tasksto be later performed without assistance (Greenfield 1984;Wood, Bruner, and Ross 1976; for critiques of this position,see Engestrom 1987, and Griffin and Cole 1984). Second, a"cultural" interpretation construes the zone of proximal de-velopment as the distance between the cultural knowledge pro-vided by the sociohistorical context - usually made accessiblethrough instruction - and the everyday experience of individ-uals (Davydov and Markova 1983). Hedegaard (1988) callsthis the distance between understood knowledge, as providedby instruction, and active knowledge, as owned by individu-als. This interpretation is based on Vygotsky's distinction be-tween scientific and everyday concepts, and on his argumentthat a mature concept is achieved when the scientific andeveryday versions have merged. In these two classes of inter-pretation of the concept of the zone of proximal development,the social character of learning mostly consists in a small "aura"of socialness that provides input for the process of internali-zation viewed as individualistic acquisition of the cultural given.There is no account of the place of learning in the broader

48


context of the structure of the social world (Fajans and Turnerin preparation).

Contemporary developments in the traditions of Soviet psy-chology, in which Vygotsky's work figures prominently, in-clude activity theory (Bakhurst 1988; Engestrom 1987; Wertsch1981, 1985) and critical psychology (Holzkamp 1983, 1987;Dreier in press; see also Garner 1986). In the context of theserecent developments, a third type of interpretation of the zoneof proximal development takes a "collectivism" or "societal"perspective. Engestrom defines the zone of proximal develop-ment as the "distance between the everyday actions of individ-uals and the historically new form of the societal activity thatcan be collectively generated as a solution to the double bindpotentially embedded in . . . everyday actions" (Engestrom1987: 174). Under such societal interpretations of the conceptof the zone of proximal development researchers tend to con-centrate on processes of social transformation. They share ourinterest in extending the study of learning beyond the contextof pedagogical structuring, including the structure of the socialworld in the analysis, and taking into account in a central waythe conflictual nature of social practice. We place more em-phasis on connecting issues of sociocultural transformation withthe changing relations between newcomers and old-timers inthe context of a changing shared practice.

PARTICIPATION IN SOCIAL PRACTICE

In contrast with learning as internalization, learning as increas-ing participation in communities of practice concerns the wholeperson acting in the world. Conceiving of learning in terms of

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Situated Learning

participation focuses attention on ways in which it is an evolv-ing, continuously renewed set of relations; this is, of course,consistent with a relational view, of persons, their actions, andthe world, typical of a theory of social practice.

Theorizing about social practice, praxis, activity, and thedevelopment of human knowing through participation in anongoing social world is part of a long Marxist tradition in thesocial sciences. It influences us most immediately throughcontemporary anthropological and sociological theorizing aboutpractice. The critique of structural and phenomenological the-ory early in Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice, withits vision of conductorless orchestras, and regulation withoutrules, embodied practices and cultural dispositions concertedin class habitus, suggest the possibility of a (crucially impor-tant) break with the dualisms that have kept persons reducedto their minds, mental processes to instrumental rationalism,and learning to the acquisition of knowledge (the discourse ofdualism effectively segregates even these reductions from theeveryday world of engaged participation). Insistence on thehistorical nature of motivation, desire, and the very relationsby which social and culturally mediated experience is avail-able to persons-in-practice is one key to the goals to be met indeveloping a theory of practice. Theorizing in terms of prac-tice, or praxis, also requires a broad view of human agency(e.g., Giddens 1979), emphasizing the integration in practiceof agent, world, and activity (Bourdieu 1977; Ortner 1984;Bauman 1973).

Briefly, a theory of social practice emphasizes the relationalinterdependency of agent and world, activity, meaning, cog-nition, learning, and knowing. It emphasizes the inherentlysocially negotiated character of meaning and the interested,concerned character of the thought and action of persons-in-

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activity. This view also claims that learning, thinking, andknowing are relations among people in activity in, with, andarising from the socially and culturally structured world. Thisworld is socially constituted; objective forms and systems ofactivity, on the one hand, and agents' subjective and intersub-jective understandings of them, on the other, mutually consti-tute both the world and its experienced forms. Knowledge ofthe socially constituted world is socially mediated and openended. Its meaning to given actors, its furnishings, and therelations of humans with/in it, are produced, reproduced, andchanged in the course of activity (which includes speech andthought, but cannot be reduced to one or the other). In a theoryof practice, cognition and communication in, and with, thesocial world are situated in the historical development of on-going activity. It is, thus, a critical theory; the social scientist'spractice must be analyzed in the same historical, situated termsas any other practice under investigation. One way to think oflearning is as the historical production, transformation, andchange of persons. Or to put it the other way around, in athoroughly historical theory of social practice, the historiciz-ing of the production of persons should lead to a focus onprocesses of learning.

Let us return to the question of internalization from such arelational perspective. First, the historicizing of processes oflearning gives the lie to ahistorical views of "internalization"as a universal process. Further, given a relational understand-ing of person, world, and activity, participation, at the core ofour theory of learning, can be neither fully internalized asknowledge structures nor fully externalized as instrumental ar-tifacts or overarching activity structures. Participation is al-ways based on situated negotiation and renegotiation of mean-ing in the world. This implies that understanding and experience

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Situated Learning

are in constant interaction - indeed, are mutually constitutive.The notion of participation thus dissolves dichotomies be-tween cerebral and embodied activity, between contemplationand involvement, between abstraction and experience: per-sons, actions, and the world are implicated in all thought,speech, knowing, and learning.

THE PERSON AND IDENTITY IN LEARNING

Our claim, that focusing on the structure of social practice andon participation therein implies an explicit focus on the per-son, may appear paradoxical at first. The individualistic as-pects of the cognitive focus characteristic of most theories oflearning thus only seem to concentrate on the person. Paintinga picture of the person as a primarily "cognitive" entity tendsto promote a nonpersonal view of knowledge, skills, tasks,activities, and learning. As a consequence, both theoreticalanalyses and instructional prescriptions tend to be driven byreference to reified "knowledge domains," and by constraintsimposed by the general requirements of universal learningmechanisms understood in terms of acquisition and assimila-tion. In contrast, to insist on starting with social practice, ontaking participation to be the crucial process, and on includingthe social world at the core of the analysis only seems to eclipsethe person. In reality, however, participation in social practice- subjective as well as objective - suggests a very explicitfocus on the person, but as person-in-the-world, as member ofa sociocultural community. This focus in turn promotes a viewof knowing as activity by specific people in specific cir-cumstances.

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As an aspect of social practice, learning involves the wholeperson; it implies not only a relation to specific activities, buta relation to social communities - it implies becoming a fullparticipant, a member, a kind of person. In this view, learningonly partly - and often incidentally - implies becoming ableto be involved in new activities, to perform new tasks andfunctions, to master new understandings. Activities, tasks,functions, and understandings do not exist in isolation; theyare part of broader systems of relations in which they havemeaning. These systems of relations arise out of and are repro-duced and developed within social communities, which are inpart systems of relations among persons. The person is definedby as well as defines these relations. Learning thus impliesbecoming a different person with respect to the possibilitiesenabled by these systems of relations. To ignore this aspect oflearning is to overlook the fact that learning involves the con-struction of identities.

Viewing learning as legitimate peripheral participation meansthat learning is not merely a condition for membership, but isitself an evolving form of membership. We conceive of iden-tities as long-term, living relations between persons and theirplace and participation in communities of practice. Thus iden-tity, knowing, and social membership entail one another.

There may seem to be a contradiction between efforts to"decenter" the definition of the person and efforts to arrive ata rich notion of agency in terms of "whole persons." We thinkthat the two tendencies are not only compatible but that theyimply one another, if one adopts as we have a relational viewof the person and of learning: It is by the theoretical processof decentering in relational terms that one can construct a ro-bust notion of "whole person" which does justice to the mul-tiple relations through which persons define themselves in

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Situated Learning

practice. Giddens (1979) argues for a view of decentering thatavoids the pitfalls of "structural determination" by consider-ing intentionality as an ongoing flow of reflective moments ofmonitoring in the context of engagement in a tacit practice.We argue further that this flow of reflective moments is orga-nized around trajectories of participation. This implies thatchanging membership in communities of practice, like partic-ipation, can be neither fully internalized nor fully externalized.

THE SOCIAL WORLD

If participation in social practice is the fundamental form oflearning, we require a more fully worked-out view of the so-cial world. Typically, theories, when they are concerned withthe situated nature of learning at all, address its socioculturalcharacter by considering only its immediate context. For in-stance, the activity of children learning is often presented aslocated in instructional environments and as occurring in thecontext of pedagogical intentions whose context goes unana-lyzed. But there are several difficulties here, some of whichwill be discussed later when we address the traditional connec-tion of learning to instruction.

Of concern here is an absence of theorizing about the socialworld as it is implicated in processes of learning. We think itis important to consider how shared cultural systems of mean-ing and political-economic structuring are interrelated, in gen-eral and as they help to coconstitute learning in communitiesof practice. "Locating" learning in classroom interaction isnot an adequate substitute for a theory about what schoolingas an activity system has to do with learning. Nor is a theory

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of the sociohistorical structuring of schooling (or simple ex-trapolations from it) adequate to account for other kinds ofcommunities and the forms of legitimate peripheral participa-tion therein. Another difficulty is that the classroom, or theschool, or schooling (the context of learning activity cannot beunambiguously identified with one of these while excludingthe other two) does not exist alone, but conventional theoriesof learning do not offer a means for grasping their interrela-tions. In effect, they are more concerned with furnishing theimmediate social environment of the target action/interactionthan with theorizing about the broader forces shaping and beingshaped by those more immediate relations.

To furnish a more adequate account of the social world oflearning in practice, we need to specify the analytic units andquestions that would guide such a project. Legitimate periph-eral participation refers both to the development of knowl-edgeably skilled identities in practice and to the reproductionand transformation of communities of practice. It concerns thelatter insofar as communities of practice consist of and dependon a membership, including its characteristic biographies/tra-jectories, relationships, and practices.

Legitimate peripheral participation is intended as a concep-tual bridge - as a claim about the common processes inherentin the production of changing persons and changing commu-nities of practice. This pivotal emphasis, via legitimate periph-eral participation, on relations between the production ofknowledgeable identities and the production of communitiesof practice, makes it possible to think of sustained learning asembodying, albeit in transformed ways, the structural charac-teristics of communities of practice. This in turn raises ques-tions about the sociocultural organization of space into placesof activity and the circulation of knowledgeable skill; about

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Situated Learning

the structure of access of learners to ongoing activity and thetransparency of technology, social relations, and forms of ac-tivity; about the segmentation, distribution, and coordinationof participation and the legitimacy of partial, increasing,changing participation within a community; about its charac-teristic conflicts, interests, common meanings, and intersect-ing interpretations and the motivation of all participants vis avis their changing participation and identities - issues, in short,about the structure of communities of practice and their pro-duction and reproduction.

In any given concrete community of practice the process ofcommunity reproduction - a historically constructed, ongo-ing, conflicting, synergistic structuring of activity and rela-tions among practitioners - must be deciphered in order tounderstand specific forms of legitimate peripheral participationthrough time. This requires a broader conception of individualand collective biographies than the single segment encom-passed in studies of "learners." Thus we have begun to ana-lyze the changing forms of participation and identity of per-sons who engage in sustained participation in a community ofpractice: from entrance as a newcomer, through becoming anold-timer with respect to new newcomers, to a point whenthose newcomers themselves become old-timers. Rather thana teacher/learner dyad, this points to a richly diverse field ofessential actors and, with it, other forms of relationships ofparticipation.

For example, in situations where learning-in-practice takesthe form of apprenticeship, succeeding generations of partici-pants give rise to what in its simplest form is a triadic set ofrelations: The community of practice encompasses appren-tices, young masters with apprentices, and masters some ofwhose apprentices have themselves become masters. But there

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are other inflection points as well, where journeyfolk, not yetmasters, are relative old-timers with respect to newcomers.The diversified field of relations among old-timers and new-comers within and across the various cycles, and the impor-tance of near-peers in the circulation of knowledgeable skill,both recommend against assimilating relations of learningto the dyadic form characteristic of conventional learningstudies.

Among the insights that can be gained from a social per-spective on learning is the problematic character of processesof learning and cycles of social reproduction, as well as therelations between the two. These cycles emerge in the contra-dictions and struggles inherent in social practice and the for-mation of identities. There is a fundamental contradiction inthe meaning to newcomers and old-timers of increasing partic-ipation by the former; for the centripetal development of fullparticipants, and with it the successful production of a com-munity of practice, also implies the replacement of old-timers.This contradiction is inherent in learning viewed as legitimateperipheral participation, albeit in various forms, since compet-itive relations, in the organization of production or in the for-mation of identities, clearly intensify these tensions.

One implication of the inherently problematic character ofthe social reproduction of communities of practice is that thesustained participation of newcomers, becoming old-timers,must involve conflict between the forces that support processesof learning and those that work against them. Another relatedimplication is that learning is never simply a process of trans-fer or assimilation: Learning, transformation, and change arealways implicated in one another, and the status quo needs asmuch explanation as change. Indeed, we must not forget thatcommunities of practice are engaged in the generative process

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Situated Learning

of producing their own future. Because of the contradictorynature of collective social practice and because learning pro-cesses are part of the working out of these contradictions inpractice, social reproduction implies the renewed constructionof resolutions to underlying conflicts. In this regard, it is im-portant to note that reproduction cycles are productive as well.They leave a historical trace of artifacts - physical, linguistic,and symbolic - and of social structures, which constitute andreconstitute the practice over time.

The following chapter begins the exploration of legitimateperipheral participation with a description of apprenticeship infive communities of practice and their location in relation toother structuring forms and forces. These studies raise - at oneand the same time - questions about persons acting and thesocial world in relation to which they act. The questions focuson relations between forms of production and the reproductionof communities of practice, on the one hand, and the produc-tion of persons, knowledgeable skill, and identities of mas-tery, on the other.

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Mid wives, Tailors,Quartermasters, Butchers,

Nondrinking Alcoholics

Midwives, Tailors, Quartermasters, Butchers, Alcoholics

Actual cases of apprenticeship provide historically and cultur-ally specific examples which seem especially helpful in ex-ploring the implications of the concept of legitimate peripheralparticipation. As we have insisted, however, the concept shouldnot be construed as a distillation of apprenticeship. Ethno-graphic studies of apprenticeship emphasize the indivisiblecharacter of learning and work practices. This, in turn, helpsto make obvious the social nature of learning and knowing. Asthese studies partially illustrate, any complex system of workand learning has roots in and interdependencies across its his-tory, technology, developing work activity, careers, and therelations between newcomers and old-timers and among co-workers and practitioners.

We have already outlined some reasons for turning awayfrom schooling in our search for exemplary material, thoughschooling provides the empirical basis for much cognitive re-search on learning and also for much work based on the notionof the zone of proximal development. Such research is concep-tually tied in various ways to school instruction and to thepedagogical intentions of teachers and other caregivers. In thiscontext, schooling is usually assumed to be a more effectiveand advanced institution for educational transmission than(supposedly) previous forms such as apprenticeship. At thevery least, schooling is given a privileged role in intellectualdevelopment. Because the theory and the institution have com-mon historical roots (Lave 1988), these school-forged theoriesare inescapably specialized: They are unlikely to afford us thehistorical-cultural breadth to which we aspire. It seems use-ful, given these concerns, to investigate learning-in-practice insituations that do not draw us in unreflective ways into theschool milieu, and to look for "educational" occasions whose

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structure is not obscured quite so profoundly as those foundedon didactic structuring.

THE CASE OF APPRENTICESHIP

For present purposes, we have gathered together examples ofapprenticeship from different cultural and historical traditions.This process clearly requires us to assume the validity of ap-plying such a rubric across widely disparate times and places.It is not our intention to carry out here the searching exami-nation that this assumption requires, though we would be gladto see our use of it get such a discussion under way. Mean-while, since we found it useful to investigate the common,readily identifiable features of apprenticeship in craft or"craftlike" forms of production and to push toward the com-monsense boundaries of the concept with our choice of ex-amples, a brief foray into the controversies surrounding theconcept of apprenticeship is in order.

The historical significance of apprenticeship as a form forproducing knowledgeably skilled persons has been over-looked, we believe, for it does not conform to either function-alist or Marxist views of educational "progress." In both tra-ditions apprenticeship has been treated as a historicallysignificant object more often than most educational phenom-ena - but only to emphasize its anachronistic irrelevance. Itconnotes both outmoded production and obsolete education.When its history is the pretext for dismissing an issue as anobject of study, there is good reason to reexamine its existinghistorical and cultural diversity.

We take issue with a narrow reading of apprenticeship as if

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it were always and everywhere organized in the same ways asin feudal Europe. Engestrom, for instance, associates appren-ticeship with craft production, emphasizing the individual orsmall-group nature of production, the use of simple tools andtacit knowledge, a division of labor based on individual adap-tation, and the prevalence of traditional protective codes (1987:284). But this does not fit the descriptions of apprenticeshippresented here. In fact, we emphasize the diversity of histori-cal forms, cultural traditions, and modes of production in whichapprenticeship is found (in contrast with research that stressesthe uniform effects of schooling regardless of its location).

Forms of apprenticeship have been described for, amongother historical traditions, ancient China; Europe, feudal andotherwise; and much of the contemporary world including WestAfrica and the United States (e.g., Goody 1982; Coy 1989;Cooper 1980; Geer 1972; Jordan 1989; Medick 1976). In theUnited States today much learning occurs in the form of somesort of apprenticeship, especially wherever high levels ofknowledge and skill are in demand (e.g., medicine, law, theacademy, professional sports, and the arts). The examplespresented below come from different cultural traditions thathave emerged in different periods in their separate and relatedhistories in different parts of the world. All are contemporaryand each reflects the complex articulation of modes of produc-tion in which it is embedded. Our intention is to show howlearning or failure to learn in each of our examples of appren-ticeship may be accounted for by underlying relations of legit-imate peripheral participation.

In a useful caution to recent enthusiasm about the efficacyof apprenticeship learning, Grosshans (1989) points out that inWestern Europe and indeed in the United States (where itsrenewal in the 1920s and 1930s served as a convenient means

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Situated Learning

of exploiting workers), apprenticeship has a long reputation asa traditional form of control over the most valuable, least pow-erful workers. In contemporary West Africa, however, forcomplex reasons, among them the poverty, large numbers, andunorganized state of craft masters, there appears to be a rela-tively benign, relatively egalitarian, and nonexploitive char-acter to apprenticeship. There is no point, then, either in damningapprenticeship absolutely, on the basis of its sorry reputationin Western Europe, or in glorifying it unreflectively. Althoughapprenticeship has no determined balance of relations of poweras an abstract concept, it does have such relations in everyconcrete case. Any given attempt to analyze a form of learningthrough legitimate peripheral participation must involve analy-sis of the political and social organization of that form, itshistorical development, and the effects of both of these on sus-tained possibilities for learning.

The need for such analysis motivates our focus on commu-nities of practice and our insistence that learners must be legit-imate peripheral participants in ongoing practice in order forlearning identities to be engaged and develop into full partici-pation. Conditions that place newcomers in deeply adversarialrelations with masters, bosses, or managers; in exhausting ov-erinvolvement in work; or in involuntary servitude rather thanparticipation distort, partially or completely, the prospects forlearning in practice. Our viewpoint suggests that communitiesof practice may well develop interstitially and informally incoercive workplaces. What will be learned then will be thesociocultural practices of whatever informal community takesplace in response to coercion (Orr in press). These practicesshape and are shaped indirectly through resistance to the pre-scriptions of the ostensibly primary organizational form.

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FIVE STUDIES OF APPRENTICESHIP

We present excerpts from five accounts of apprenticeship: amongYucatec Mayan midwives in Mexico (Jordan 1989), amongVai and Gola tailors in Liberia (Lave in preparation), in thework-learning settings of U.S. navy quartermasters (Hutchinsin press), among butchers in U.S. supermarkets (Marshall 1972),and among "nondrinking alcoholics" in Alcoholics Anony-mous (Cain n.d.). Even though this last case is not usuallydescribed as a form of apprenticeship, the learning this studydescribes is so remarkably similar to the first four in its basiccharacter that it serves to highlight common features of theothers.

These studies illustrate the varied character of concrete re-alizations of apprenticeship. But it is noteworthy that all ofthem diverge in similar ways from popular stereotypes aboutapprenticeship learning. It is typically assumed, for example,that apprenticeship has had an exclusive existence in associa-tion with feudal craft production; that master-apprentice rela-tions are diagnostic of apprenticeship; and that learning in ap-prenticeship offers opportunities for nothing more complex thanreproducing task performances in routinized ways. The casesalso call into question assumptions that learning through ap-prenticeship shows some typical degree of informal organiza-tion.

The first three cases, as well as the last, are quite effectiveforms of learning; the fourth - butchers' apprenticeship incontemporary supermarkets - often doesn't work. The tech-nologies employed, the forms of recruitment, the relations be-tween masters and apprentices, and the organization of learn-ing activity differ. The Yucatec midwives provide healing and

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Situated Learning

ritual services using herbal remedies, their knowledge of tech-niques of birthing (including a manual cephalic version to pre-vent breech births), massage, and ritual procedures. The tai-lors are engaged in craft production for the market, using simpletechnology (e.g., scissors, measuring tape, thread and needle,and treadle sewing machines); masters work individually, as-sisted only by their apprentices. The quartermasters utilize hightechnology in "knowledge production" involving telescopicsighting devices called alidades, radio telephones, maps andnautical charts, a logbook, plotting devices, and collaborativelabor. The butchers perform a commoditized service (meatcutting) using powered cutting tools and plastic-wrapping ma-chines. And the members of A. A. band together to cope withwhat they perceive to be an incurable disease.

Apprentice Yucatec midwives (all women) are almost al-ways the daughters of experienced midwives - specializedknowledge and practice is passed down within families. In thecase of the tailors (all men), the apprentice and his family ne-gotiate with a master tailor to take a newcomer into his houseand family and make sure he learns the craft. The master israrely a close relative of the apprentice. Quartermasters leavehome to join the Navy, and become part of that total institutionfor a relatively short period of time (two or three years). Theyhave "instructors" and "officers" and work with other "en-listed persons." Butchers' apprentices join a union and areplaced in trade schools; they receive on-the-job training in su-permarkets, where they are supposed to learn meat cutting fromthe master butchers and journeymen who work there. A. A.members join the organization, attend frequent meetings, andgradually adopt a view of themselves, through their member-ship in A. A., which becomes an integral part of their life. The

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butchers and in some respects the quartermasters are wage la-borers; the midwives and tailors' apprentices, and of courseA. A. members, are not.

There is variation in the forms of apprenticeship and thedegree of integration of apprenticeship into daily life, as wellas in the forms of production with which apprenticeship is as-sociated. For instance, apprenticeship is not always, or per-haps even often, "informal." For midwives in Yucatan, ap-prenticeship is integrated into daily life and it is only recognizedafter the fact that they have served an apprenticeship. Theydescribe the process as one in which they receive their callingand learn everything they know in dreams, though they aremiddle-aged adepts when this happens (Jordan 1989: 933). Onthe other hand, Vai masters and apprentices enter into a formalagreement before apprenticeship begins, there is some explicitstructure to the learning curriculum, apprenticeship is their dailylife, and at the close of the apprenticeship the new master mustreceive the official blessing of his master before he can begina successful business independently. Quartermasters enter train-ing programs and receive certificates, as do butchers. The ap-prenticeship of nondrinking alcoholics is sanctified by an ex-plicit commitment to the organization and passage throughwell-defined "steps" of membership.

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF YUCATEC MIDWIVES

Jordan (1989) describes the process by which Yucatec mid-wives move, over a period of many years, from peripheral tofull participation in midwifery. This work poses a puzzle con-

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Situated Learning

cerning the general role of masters in the lives of apprentices.Teaching does not seem to be central either to the identities ofmaster midwives or to learning.

Apprenticeship happens as a way of, and in the courseof, daily life. It may not be recognized as a teachingeffort at all. A Maya girl who eventually becomes amidwife most likely has a mother or grandmother whois a midwife, since midwifery is handed down in fam-ily lines. . . . Girls in such families, without beingidentified as apprentice midwives, absorb the essenceof midwifery practice as well as specific knowledgeabout many procedures, simply in the process ofgrowing up. They know what the life of a midwife islike (for example, that she needs to go out at all hoursof the day or night), what kinds of stories the womenand men who come to consult her tell, what kinds ofherbs and other remedies need to be collected, and thelike. As young children they might be sitting quietlyin a corner as their mother administers a prenatal mas-sage; they would hear stories of difficult cases, of mi-raculous outcomes, and the like. As they grow older,they may be passing messages, running errands, get-ting needed supplies. A young girl might be present asher mother stops for a postpartum visit after the dailyshopping trip to the market.

Eventually, after she has had a child herself, shemight come along to a birth, perhaps because her ail-ing grandmother needs someone to walk with, and thusfind herself doing for the woman in labor what otherwomen had done for her when she gave birth; that is,she may take a turn . . . at supporting the laboring

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woman. . . . Eventually, she may even administerprenatal massages to selected clients. At some point,she may decide that she actually wants to do this kindof work. She then pays more attention, but only rarelydoes she ask questions. Her mentor sees their associ-ation primarily as one that is of some use to her. ("Rosaalready knows how to do a massage, so I can send herif I am too busy.") As time goes on, the apprenticetakes over more and more of the work load, startingwith the routine and tedious parts, and ending withwhat is in Yucatan the culturally most significant, thebirth of the placenta [Jordan 1989: 932-4].

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF VAI AND GOLA TAILORS

Vai and Gola tailors enter and leave apprenticeship ceremo-niously. Their apprenticeship is quite formal in character com-pared to that of the Yucatec midwives. In an insightful his-torical analysis, Goody (1989) argues that in West Africaapprenticeship developed a formal character in response to adiversification of the division of labor. This development in-volved a transition from domestic production in which chil-dren learned subsistence skills from their same-sex parent, tolearning part-time specialisms in the same way, to learning aspecialized occupation from a specialist master. Householdproduction units have moved from integrating their own chil-dren into productive activities, to including other kin, to in-corporating nonkin, to production separated from the house-hold. Today, many Vai and Gola craft shops are located incommercial areas, so that craft production is separated from

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Situated Learning

craft masters' households by time and space. (These house-holds, however, still include the apprentices who work in theshops.) Goody notes that there have been corresponding trans-formations in the relations between learners and communitiesof practice: from the child's labor that contributes use value tothe household, to exchange of child labor between related fam-ilies for political/social resources (fostering) or economic ones(pawning, slavery), to apprenticeship where learners' labor isexchanged for opportunities to learn. Learning to produce haschanged thereby from a process of general socialization; towhat might be called contrastive general socialization (as chil-dren grow up in households different from their own); to ap-prenticeship, which focuses on occupational specializationloosely within the context of household socialization. Learnersshifted from participating in the division of labor as householdmembers, growing up in the "culture of the household's la-bor," to being naive newcomers, participating in an unfamil-iar culture of production.

In summary, formalized apprenticeship in West Africa hasdeveloped as a mechanism for dealing with two needs gener-ated by increasing diversification of the market and of the di-vision of labor: the demand for additional labor, on the onehand, and on the other, the desires of individuals or familiesto acquire the knowledgeable skills of diverse occupations, de-sires which simply could not be met within the household(Goody 1989). The developmental cycles that reproduce do-mestic groups and other communities of practice, the relationsof newcomers to those who are adept, and the way in whichdivisions of labor articulate various kinds of communities ofpractice in communities in the larger sense all shape the iden-tities that may be constructed, and with them, knowledgeable,skillful activity. Nonetheless, the examples of the midwives

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and the tailors reveal strong similarities in the process of mov-ing from peripheral to full participation in communities ofpractice through either formal or informal apprenticeship.

Between 1973 and 1978 . . . a number of Vai andGola tailors clustered their wood, dirt-floored, tin-roofedtailor shops along a narrow path at the edge of theriver at the periphery of . . . the commercial district.. . . There were several masters present in each shopvisibly doing what masters do - each ran a business,tailored clothes, and supervised apprentices. Appren-ticeship, averaging five years, involved a sustained,rich structure of opportunities to observe masters,journeymen, and other apprentices at work, to observefrequently the full process of producing garments, andof course, the finished products.

The tailors made clothes for the poorest segment ofthe population, and their specialty was inexpensive,ready-to-wear men's trousers. But they made otherthings as well. The list of garment types in fact en-coded complex, intertwined forms of order integral tothe process of becoming a master tailor [serving as ageneral "curriculum" for apprentices]. . . . Appren-tices first learn to make hats and drawers, informal andintimate garments for children. They move on to moreexternal, formal garments, ending with the HigherHeights suit.

The organization of the process of apprenticeship isnot confined to the level of whole garments. The veryearliest steps in the process involve learning to sew byhand, to sew with the treadle sewing machine, and topress clothes. Subtract these from the corpus of tailor-

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Situated Learning

ing knowledge and for each garment the apprenticemust learn how to cut it out and how to sew it. Learn-ing processes do not merely reproduce the sequence ofproduction processes. In fact, production steps are re-versed, as apprentices begin by learning the finishingstages of producing a garment, go on to learn to sewit, and only later learn to cut it out. This pattern regu-larly subdivides [the learning of] each new type ofgarment. Reversing production steps has the effect offocusing the apprentices' attention first on the broadoutlines of garment construction as they handle gar-ments while attaching buttons and hemming cuffs. Next,sewing turns their attention to the logic (order, orien-tation) by which different pieces are sewn together,which in turn explains why they are cut out as theyare. Each step offers the unstated opportunity to con-sider how the previous step contributes to the presentone. In addition, this ordering minimizes experiencesof failure and especially of serious failure.

There is one further level of organization to the cur-riculum of tailoring. The learning of each operation issubdivided into phases I have dubbed "way-in" and"practice." "Way in" refers to the period of obser-vation and attempts to construct a first approximationof the garment. . . . The practice phase is carried outin a particular way: apprentices reproduce a produc-tion segment from beginning to end, . . . though theymight be more skilled at carrying out some parts of theprocess than others [Lave in preparation].

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THE APPRENTICESHIP OF NAVAL

QUARTERMASTERS

Hutchins (in press) has carried out ethnographic research onan amphibious helicopter-transport ship of the U.S. Navy. Hedescribes the process by which new members of the quarter-master corps move from peripheral to key distributed tasks inthe collaborative work of plotting the ship's position. He em-phasizes the importance for learning of having legitimate, ef-fective access to what is to be learned.

Quartermasters begin their careers with rather limitedduties and advance to more complicated procedures asthey gain expertise. . . . Any new quartermaster needsto learn to plot the ship's position, either alone whenat sea, or in collaborative work with five others whenmoving into harbors. It takes about a year to learn thebasics of the quartermaster rate. For a young man en-tering the quartermaster rate, there are many sourcesof information about the work to be done. Some go tospecialized schools before they join a ship. There theyare exposed to basic terminology and concepts, butlittle more. In some sense, they are "trained" but theyhave no experience. (In fact, the two quartermasterchiefs with whom I worked most closely said they pre-ferred to get their trainees as able-bodied seamen with-out any prior training in the rate. They said this savedthem the trouble of having to break the trainees of badhabits acquired in school.) Most quartermasters learntheir rating primarily on the job [though] some of theexperience aboard ship is a bit like school with work-books and exercises. In order to advance to higher ranks

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. . . novice quartermasters participate in joint activitywith more experienced colleagues in two contexts:Standard Steaming Watch and Sea and Anchor Detail.

[At sea] depending upon the level of experience ofthe novice he may be asked to perform all of the dutiesof the quartermaster of the watch. While under in-struction, his activities are closely monitored by themore experienced watch stander who is always on handand can help out or take over if the novice is unable tosatisfy the ship's navigation requirements. However,even with the help of a more experienced colleague,standing watch under instruction requires a significantamount of knowledge, so novices do not do this untilthey have several months of experience. . . . The taskfor the novice is to learn to organize his own behaviorsuch that it produces a competent performance. . . .As [the novice] becomes more competent, he will doboth the part of this task that he [performed before],and also the organizing part that was done [for him].. . . Long before they are ready to stand watch underinstruction in standard steaming watch, novice quar-termasters begin to work as fathometer operators andbearing takers in sea and anchor detail; . . . there aresix positions involved, and novice quartermasters movethrough this sequence of positions, mastering each be-fore moving on to the next. This ordering also de-scribes the flow of information from the sensors (fa-thometer and sighting telescopes) to the chart wherethe information is integrated into a single representa-tion (the position fix). . . . The fact that the quarter-masters themselves follow this same trajectory through

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the system as does sensed information, albeit on a dif-ferent time scale, has an important consequence forthe larger system's ability to detect, diagnose, andcorrect errors. . . . [Besides], movement through thesystem with increasing expertise results in a pattern ofoverlapping expertise, with knowledge of the entry leveltasks most redundantly represented and knowledge ofexpert level tasks least redundantly represented.

. . . The structure of the distributed task [fix takingamong the collaborating six quartermasters] providesmany constraints on the learning environment. The waya task is partitioned across a set of task performers hasconsequences for both the efficiency of task perfor-mance and for the efficiency of knowledge acquisi-tion. . . . [So do] lines of communication and limitson observation of the activities of others. . . . But beingin the presence of others who are working is not al-ways enough by itself. . . . We saw that the fact thatthe work was done in an interaction between membersopened it to other members of the team. In a similarway, the design of tools can affect their suitability forjoint use. . . . The interaction of a task performer witha tool may or may not be open to others dependingupon the nature of the tool itself. The openness of atool can also affect its use as an instrument in instruc-tion.

A good deal of the structure that a novice will haveto acquire in order to stand watch alone in standardsteaming watch is present in the organization of therelations among the members of the team in sea andanchor detail. The computational dependencies among

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the steps of the procedure for the individual watchstander are present as interpersonal dependencies amongthe members of the team [Hutchins in press].

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF MEAT CUTTERS

Our use of apprenticeship as a source of insights for exploringthe concept of legitimate peripheral participation cannot beconstrued as a general claim that apprenticeship facilitateslearning-in-practice in some inevitable way. Not all concreterealizations of apprenticeship learning are equally effective.The exchange of labor for opportunities to become part of acommunity of mature practice is fraught with difficulties (Becker1972). The commoditization of labor can transform appren-tices into a cheap source of unskilled labor, put to work inways that deny them access to activities in the arenas of maturepractice. Gaining legitimacy may be so difficult that some failto learn until considerable time has passed. For example, Haas(1972) describes how high-steel-construction apprentices arehazed so roughly by old-timers that learning is inhibited. Gain-ing legitimacy is also a problem when masters prevent learningby acting in effect as pedagogical authoritarians, viewing ap-prentices as novices who "should be instructed" rather thanas peripheral participants in a community engaged in its ownreproduction.

The example of the butchers illustrates several of the poten-tial ways in which particular forms of apprenticeship can pre-vent rather than facilitate learning. The author discusses theeffects, frequently negative, of trade-school training for butch-ers. This study, like other studies of trade schools and training

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Midwivesy Tailors, Quartermasters, Butchers, Alcoholics

programs in the apprenticeship literature, is quite pessimisticabout the value of didactic exercises (e.g., Jordan 1989, Orr1986, as well as the excerpt from Hutchins). It should be keptin mind that many contemporary vocational education and union-based "apprenticeship" programs implicitly reject an appren-ticeship model and strive to approximate the didactic mode ofschooling in their educational programs, which inevitably addsto the difficulties of implementing effective apprenticeship.

Butchers' apprenticeship consists of a mix of tradeschool and on the job training. [This program was]started by the meat cutters' union to grant a certificate.The certificate equaled six months of the apprentice-ship and entitled the holder to receive journeyman'spay and status after two and one-half years on the job.. . . To justify awarding the certificate, the trade schoolclass runs in traditional fashion, with book work andwritten examinations in class and practice in shop. Thework follows the same pattern year after year withoutreference to apprentices' need to learn useful thingsnot learned on the job. Teachers teach techniques inuse when they worked in retail markets that are readilyadaptable to a school setting. . . . Most assignmentsare not relevant to the supermarket. For instance, stu-dents learn to make wholesale cuts not used in stores,or to advise customers in cooking meat. Because theseare not skills in demand, few students bother to learnthem. . . . Apprentices are more interested in the shopperiod, where they become familiar with equipmentthey hope to use someday at work. But the shop, too,has tasks useless in a supermarket. One of the firstthings learned is how to sharpen a knife - a vital task

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Situated Learning

only in the past. Today, a company delivers sharpenedknives and collects dull ones from meat departmentsat regular intervals. . . .

On the job, learning experiences vary with certainstructural dimensions of the work settings. A super-market meat department manager tries to achieve anadvantageous difference between the total volume ofsales for the department and the wholesale price of hismeat order, plus his costs for personnel and facilities.To do this, the manager sees to it that his skilled jour-neymen can prepare a large volume of meat efficientlyby specializing in short, repetitive tasks. He puts ap-prentices where they can work for him most effi-ciently. Diverting journeymen from work to trainingtasks increases the short-run cost of selling meat. Be-cause journeymen and apprentices are so occupied withprofit-making tasks, apprentices rarely learn manytasks. . . .

The physical layout of a work setting is an impor-tant dimension of learning, since apprentices get a greatdeal from observing others and being observed. Somemeat departments were laid out so that apprenticesworking at the wrapping machine could not watchjourneymen cut and saw meat. An apprentice's feelingabout this separation came out when a district managerin a large, local market told him to return poorly ar-ranged trays of meat to the journeymen. "I 'm scaredto go in the back room. I feel so out of place there. Ihaven't gone back there in a long time because I justdon't know what to do when I'm there. All those guysknow so much about meat cutting and I don't knowanything."

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When he arrives at a store, an apprentice is trainedto perform a task, usually working the automaticwrapping machine. If he handles this competently, heis kept there until another apprentice comes. If nonecomes, he may do this job for years almost withoutinterruption. If a new apprentice comes, he trains himto wrap and then learns another task himself. . . . Storesoffer the kind of meat customers in their locale willbuy. . . . In poor neighborhoods, apprentices have moreopportunity to practice cutting meat than in wealthyneighborhoods [due to lower error cost]. [Where thereis high volume] a division of labor among a relativelylarge number of workers increases efficiency. . . . Inthis situation, not only apprentices but journeymen,too, seldom learn the full range of tasks once properto their trade [Marshall 1972: 42-6].

THE APPRENTICESHIP OF NONDRINKING

ALCOHOLICS

The descriptions of apprenticeship in midwifery, tailoring, andquartermastering provide examples of how learning in practicetakes place and what it means to move toward full participa-tion in a community of practice. A more detailed view of thefashioning of identity may be found in an analysis of the pro-cess of becoming a nondrinking alcoholic through AlcoholicsAnonymous. An apprentice alcoholic attends several meetingsa week, spending that time in the company of near-peers andadepts, those whose practice and identities are the communityof A. A. At these meetings old-timers give testimony about

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Situated Learning

their drinking past and the course of the process of becomingsober. In addition to "general meetings," where old-timersmay tell polished, hour-long stories - months and years in themaking - of their lives as alcoholics, there are also smaller"discussion meetings," which tend to focus on a single aspectof what in the end will be a part of the reconstructed life story(Cainn.d.).

The notion of partial participation, in segments of work thatincrease in complexity and scope, a theme in all the analysesof apprenticeship discussed here, also describes the changingform of participation in A. A. for newcomers as they graduallybecome old-timers. In the testimony at early meetings new-comers have access to a comprehensive view of what the com-munity is about. Goals are also made plain in the litany of the"Twelve Steps" to sobriety, which guide the process of mov-ing from peripheral to full participation in A. A., much as thegarment inventory of the tailors' apprentices serves as an itin-erary for their progress through apprenticeship. The contribu-tion of an absolutely new member may be no more than one si-lent gesture - picking up a white chip at the end of the meetingto indicate the intention not to take a drink during the next 24hours (Cain n.d.). In due course, the Twelfth-Step visit to anactive drinker to try to persuade that person to become a new-comer in the organization initiates a new phase of participa-tion, now as a recognized old-timer. Cain (n.d.) argues that themain business of A. A. is the reconstruction of identity, throughthe process of constructing personal life stories, and with them,the meaning of the teller's past and future action in the world.

The change men and women . . . undergo . . . is muchmore than a change in behavior. It is a transformationof their identities, from drinking non-alcoholics to non-

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drinking alcoholics, and it affects how they view andact in the world. . . . One important vehicle for this isthe personal story. . . .

By "identity" I mean the way a person understandsand views himself, and is viewed by others, a percep-tion of self which is fairly constant. . . . There are twoimportant dimensions to the identity of A. A. alco-holic. The first distinction which A. A. makes is al-coholic and non-alcoholic, where alcoholic refers to astate which, once attained, is not reversible. The sec-ond is drinking and non-drinking, and refers to a po-tentially controllable activity. . . . There are thereforetwo aspects of the A. A. alcoholic identity importantfor continuing membership in A. A.; qualification asan alcoholic, which is based on one's past, and contin-ued effort at not drinking. The A. A. identity requiresa behavior - not drinking - which is a negation of thebehavior which originally qualified one for member-ship. One of the functions of the A. A. personal storyis to establish both aspects of membership in an indi-vidual. . . . In personal stories, A. A. members telltheir own drinking histories, how they came to under-stand that they are alcoholics, how they got intoA. A., and what their life has been like since theyjoined A. A. . . .

In A. A. personal stories are told for the explicit,stated purpose of providing a model of alcoholism, sothat other drinkers may find so much of themselves inthe lives of professed alcoholics that they cannot helpbut ask whether they, too, are alcoholics. Since thedefinition of an alcoholic is not really agreed on in thewider culture, arriving at this interpretation of events

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is a process negotiated between the drinker and thosearound her. A. A. stories provide a set of criteria bywhich the alcoholic can be identified. . . . A. A. rec-ognizes their importance, and dedicates a significantamount of meeting time and publishing space to thetelling of these stories. A. A. members tell personalstories formally in "speakers' meetings." . . . Lessformally, members tell shortened versions of their sto-ries, or parts of them, at discussion meetings. . . . Thefinal important context for telling personal stories is in"Twelfth Step calls." When A. A. members talk tooutsiders who may be alcoholics in a one-to-one inter-action, they are following the last of the Twelve Steps.. . . Ideally, at these individual meetings, the membertells his story, tells about the A. A. program, tries tohelp the drinker see herself as an alcoholic if she is"ready." [Members] claim that telling their own sto-ries to other alcoholics, and thus helping other alco-holics to achieve sobriety, is an important part ofmaintaining their own sobriety. [At the same time]telling a personal story, especially at a speaker's meet-ing or on a Twelfth Step call, signals membership be-cause this "is the time that they [members] feel thatthey belong enough to 'carry the message'."

Telling an A. A. story is not something one learnsthrough explicit teaching. Newcomers are not told howto tell their stories, yet most people who remain inA. A. learn to do this. There are several ways in whichan A. A. member learns to tell an appropriate story.First, he must be exposed to A. A. models. . . . Thenewcomer to A. A. hears and reads personal storiesfrom the time of early contact with the program -

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Midwivesy Tailors, Quartermasters, Butchers, Alcoholics

through meetings, literature, and talk with individualold-timers. . . . In addition to learning from the models,learning takes place through interaction. All membersare encouraged to speak at discussions and to maintainfriendship with other A. A. members. In the course ofthis social interaction the new member is called on totalk about her own life. . . . This may be in bits andpieces, rather than the entire life. For example, in dis-cussion meetings, the topic of discussion may be "ad-mitting you are powerless," "making amends," "howto avoid the first drink," or shared experiences indealing with common problems. . . . One speaker fol-lows another by picking out certain pieces of what haspreviously been said, saying why it was relevant tohim, and elaborating on it with some episode of hisown. . . . Usually, unless the interpretation runs counterto A. A. beliefs, the speaker is not corrected. Rather,other speakers will take the appropriate parts of thenewcomer's comments, and build on this in their owncomments, giving parallel accounts with differentinterpretations, for example, or expanding on parts oftheir own stories which are similar to parts of the new-comer's story, while ignoring the inappropriate partsof the newcomer's story.

In addition to the structure of the A. A. story, thenewcomers must also learn the cultural model of al-coholism encoded in them, including A. A. proposi-tions, appropriate episodes to serve as evidence, andappropriate interpretations of events. . . . Simplylearning the propositions about alcohol and its natureis not enough. They must be applied by the drinker tohis own life, and this application must be demon-

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Situated Learning

strated. . . . In A. A. success, or recovery, requireslearning to perceive oneself and one's problems froman A. A. perspective. A. A.s must learn to experiencetheir problems as drinking problems, and themselvesas alcoholics. Stories do not just describe a life in alearned genre, but are tools for reinterpreting the past,and understanding the self in terms of the A. A. iden-tity. The initiate begins to identify with A. A. mem-bers. . . . She comes to understand herself as a non-drinking alcoholic, and to reinterpret her life asevidence.

APPRENTICESHIP AND SITUATED LEARNING: A

NEW AGENDA

We have seen apprenticeship here in conjunction with variousforms for the organization of production. There are rich rela-tions among community members of all sorts, their activitiesand artifacts. All are implicated in processes of increasing par-ticipation and knowledgeability. To a certain extent the eth-nographic studies excerpted here focus on different facets ofapprenticeship. The Yucatec study addresses the puzzle of howlearning can occur without teaching and without formally or-ganized apprenticeship. The analysis of Vai apprenticeshipcontributes to resolving the puzzle in laying out the curriculumof everyday practice in Vai tailor shops. Hutchins analyzesrelations between the flow of information in a pivotal task andthe trajectories of persons through different forms of partici-pation in the task, in the course of which he problematizes thequestion of learners' access to important learning resources.

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Once raised, the "dark side" of questions of access, vividlylaid out in the butchers' example, helps to underline the crucialcharacter of broad, and broadly legitimate, peripheral partici-pation in a community of practice as central for increasingunderstanding and identity. And turned back on the Yucatecand Vai studies, these questions suggest a transmutation ofpreoccupations with teaching and with formal, intentionallearning situations into cases in which access to all the meansand grounds of membership is virtually a matter of course. Ifmasters don't teach, they embody practice at its fullest in thecommunity of practice. Becoming a "member such as those"is an embodied telos too complex to be discussed in the nar-rower and simpler language of goals, tasks, and knowledgeacquisition. There may be no language for participants withwhich to discuss it at all - but identities of mastery, in all theircomplications, are there to be assumed (in both senses).

The importance of language should not, however, be over-looked. Language is part of practice, and it is in practice thatpeople learn. In Cain's ethnographic study of identity con-struction in A. A., talk is a central medium of transformation.Whether activity or language is the central issue, the importantpoint concerning learning is one of access to practice as re-source for learning, rather than to instruction. Issues of moti-vation, identity, and language deserve further discussion.

We would be remiss, in any discussion of converging char-acterizations of apprenticeship, if we did not include Becker'spathbreaking analysis, which preceded all the ethnographicstudies discussed here with the exception of Marshall's. In-deed, he compared research in schools with research on Amer-ican trade apprenticeship, including Marshall's research on thebutchers. He insisted on the significance of the broad initialview that taking part in ongoing work activities offers to new-

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Situated Learning

comers, the value of being in relevant settings for learning, theexistence of strong goals for learning in work-learning set-tings, the absence of tests, and the greater effectiveness ofapprenticeship than school. He further assumed, in contradis-tinction to the examples discussed here, that teaching is centralto learning through apprenticeship; and that apprentices, indi-vidually, must organize their own learning "curriculum" andrecruit teaching or guidance for themselves.

In these respects, the present studies pose novel questions,given their more insistent focus on learning resources in thecommunity than on teaching and "pupil initiative." However,they are perhaps too quick to assume that an explanation ofcommunity learning resources is to be found in the "work-driven" nature of apprenticeship. If apprenticeship is a formof education in which work and learning are seamlessly re-lated, it is nonetheless a form in which the work and under-standing of newcomers bear complex and changing relationswith ongoing work processes; the structure of production andthe structure of apprenticeship do not coincide as a whole (thoughthey may do so for given tasks, e.g., plot-fixing for the quar-termasters). This has interesting, also complex, implicationsfor processes of deepening and changing understanding for allmembers of a community of practice.

Becker raises a serious new set of concerns about the issueof access. He recognizes the disastrous possibilities that struc-tural constraints in work organizations may curtail or extin-guish apprentices' access to the full range of activities of thejob, and hence to possibilities for learning what they need toknow to master a trade. In particular, he raises more acutelythan the ethnographic studies discussed here the conflictualcharacter of access for newcomers, the problems about powerand control on which these studies are on the whole silent.

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Neither Becker nor the ethnographic studies address the impli-cations of conflictual community practice in conjunction withidentity development, a problem to be taken up shortly.

In sum, a first reading of these examples along with Beck-er's work, takes us a considerable distance in redescribing andresetting an agenda of questions for the analysis of situatedlearning. But we will need to turn the problems of access, ofits embedding in the conflictual forms of everyday practice, ofmotivation, and of the development of membership/identityinto objects of analysis. The theoretical framework of legiti-mate peripheral participation may be used to launch us on thistask in the next chapter.

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Legitimate PeripheralParticipation in Communities

of Practice

In Communities of Practice

We now can begin to turn the observations of the previouschapter into objects to be analyzed. In the following sections,we recast the central characteristics of these several historicalrealizations of apprenticeship in terms of legitimate peripheralparticipation. First, we discuss the structuring resources thatshape the process and content of learning possibilities and ap-prentices' changing perspectives on what is known and done.Then we argue that "transparency" of the sociopolitical or-ganization of practice, of its content and of the artifacts en-gaged in practice, is a crucial resource for increasing partici-pation. We next examine the relation of newcomers to thediscourse of practice. This leads to a discussion of how iden-tity and motivation are generated as newcomers move towardfull participation. Finally, we explore contradictions inherentin learning, and the relations of the resulting conflicts to thedevelopment of identity and the transformation of practice.

STRUCTURING RESOURCES FOR LEARNING IN

PRACTICE

One of the first things people think of when apprenticeship ismentioned is the master-apprentice relation. But in practicethe roles of masters are surprisingly variable across time andplace. A specific master-apprentice relation is not even ubiq-uitously characteristic of apprenticeship learning. Indeed, nei-ther Yucatec midwives nor quartermasters learn in specificmaster-apprentice relations. Newcomers to A. A. do havespecial relations with specific old-timers who act as their spon-sors, but these relations are not what defines them as newcom-ers. In contrast, tailors' apprentices most certainly have spe-

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cific relations with their masters, without whom they wouldn'tbe apprentices. Master tailors must sponsor apprentices beforethe latter can have legitimate access to participation in thecommunity's productive activities. In short, the form in whichsuch legitimate access is secured for apprentices depends onthe characteristics of the division of labor in the social milieuin which the community of practice is located. Thus, the mid-wife is learning a specialism within her own family of orien-tation, a form of labor different, but not separated in markedways, from the widely distributed "ordinary" activities ofeveryday life; legitimate participation comes diffusely throughmembership in family and community. Where apprentices learna specialized occupation, sponsorship into a community ofpractice - within a community in the more general sense -becomes an issue. Intentional relations, and even contractualrelations with a specific master, are common. It should be clearthat, in shaping the relation of masters to apprentices, the issueof conferring legitimacy is more important than the issue ofproviding teaching.

Even in the case of the tailors, where the relation of appren-tice to master is specific and explicit, it is not this relationship,but rather the apprentice's relations to other apprentices andeven to other masters that organize opportunities to learn; anapprentice's own master is too distant, an object of too muchrespect, to engage with in awkward attempts at a new activity.In A. A., old-timers who act as "sponsors" reportedly with-hold advice and instruction appropriate to later stages; theyhold back and wait until the newcomer becomes "ready" fora next step through increasing participation in the community(Alibrandi 1977). In all five cases described in the precedingchapter, in fact, researchers insist that there is very little ob-servable teaching; the more basic phenomenon is learning. The

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practice of the community creates the potential "curriculum"in the broadest sense - that which may be learned by newcom-ers with legitimate peripheral access. Learning activity ap-pears to have a characteristic pattern. There are strong goalsfor learning because learners, as peripheral participants, candevelop a view of what the whole enterprise is about, and whatthere is to be learned. Learning itself is an improvised practice:A learning curriculum unfolds in opportunities for engagementin practice. It is not specified as a set of dictates for properpractice.

In apprenticeship opportunities for learning are, more oftenthan not, given structure by work practices instead of by stronglyasymmetrical master-apprentice relations. Under these cir-cumstances learners may have a space of "benign communityneglect" in which to configure their own learning relationswith other apprentices. There may be a looser coupling be-tween relations among learner on the one hand and the oftenhierarchical relations between learners and old-timers on theother hand, than where directive pedagogy is the central mo-tive of institutional organization. It seems typical of appren-ticeship that apprentices learn mostly in relation with otherapprentices. There is anecdotal evidence (Butler personalcommunication; Hass n.d.) that where the circulation ofknowledge among peers and near-peers is possible, it spreadsexceedingly rapidly and effectively. The central grounds onwhich forms of education that differ from schooling are con-demned are that changing the person is not the central motiveof the enterprise in which learning takes place (see the lastsection of this chapter). The effectiveness of the circulation ofinformation among peers suggests, to the contrary, that engag-ing in practice, rather than being its object, may well be acondition for the effectiveness of learning.

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Situated Learning

So far, we have observed that the authority of masters andtheir involvement in apprenticeship varies dramatically acrosscommunities of practice. We have also pointed out that struc-turing resources for learning come from a variety of sources,not only from pedagogical activity. We argue that a coherentexplanation of these observations depends upon decenteringcommon notions of mastery and pedagogy. This decenteringstrategy is, in fact, deeply embedded in our situated approach- for to shift as we have from the notion of an individuallearner to the concept of legitimate peripheral participation incommunities of practice is precisely to decenter analysis oflearning. To take a decentered view of master-apprentice re-lations leads to an understanding that mastery resides not inthe master but in the organization of the community of practiceof which the master is part: The master as the locus of author-ity (in several senses) is, after all, as much a product of theconventional, centered theory of learning as is the individuallearner. Similarly, a decentered view of the master as peda-gogue moves the focus of analysis away from teaching andonto the intricate structuring of a community's learning re-sources.

THE PLACE OF KNOWLEDGE: PARTICIPATION,

LEARNING CURRICULA, COMMUNITIES OF

PRACTICE

The social relations of apprentices within a community changethrough their direct involvement in activities; in the process,the apprentices' understanding and knowledgeable skills de-velop. In the recent past, the only means we have had for

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understanding the processes by which these changes occur havecome from conventional speculations about the nature of "in-formal" learning: That is, apprentices are supposed to acquirethe "specifics" of practice through "observation and imita-tion." But this view is in all probability wrong in every partic-ular, or right in particular circumstances, but for the wrongreasons. We argue instead that the effects of peripheral partic-ipation on knowledge-in-practice are not properly understood;and that studies of apprenticeship have presumed too literal acoupling of work processes and learning processes.

To begin with, newcomers' legitimate peripherality pro-vides them with more than an "observational" lookout post:It crucially involves participation as a way of learning - ofboth absorbing and being absorbed in - the "culture of prac-tice." An extended period of legitimate peripherality provideslearners with opportunities to make the culture of practice theirs.From a broadly peripheral perspective, apprentices graduallyassemble a general idea of what constitutes the practice of thecommunity. This uneven sketch of the enterprise (available ifthere is legitimate access) might include who is involved; whatthey do; what everyday life is like; how masters talk, walk,work, and generally conduct their lives; how people who arenot part of the community of practice interact with it; whatother learners are doing; and what learners need to learn tobecome full practitioners. It includes an increasing under-standing of how, when, and about what old-timers collaborate,collude, and collide, and what they enjoy, dislike, respect, andadmire. In particular, it offers exemplars (which are groundsand motivation for learning activity), including masters, fin-ished products, and more advanced apprentices in the processof becoming full practitioners.

Such a general view, however, is not likely to be frozen in

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Situated Learning

initial impressions. Viewpoints from which to understand thepractice evolve through changing participation in the divisionof labor, changing relations to ongoing community practices,and changing social relations in the community. This is as true,in different ways, of reformed alcoholics as they socialize withother A. A. members as it is of quartermasters as they movethrough different aspects of navigation work. And learners havemultiply structured relations with ongoing practice in other ways.Apprenticeship learning is not "work-driven" in the way ste-reotypes of informal learning have suggested; the ordering oflearning and of everyday practice do not coincide. Productionactivity-segments must be learned in different sequences thanthose in which a production process commonly unfolds, if pe-ripheral, less intense, less complex, less vital tasks are learnedbefore more central aspects of practice.

Consider, for instance, the tailors' apprentices, whose in-volvement starts with both initial preparations for the tailors'daily labor and finishing details on completed garments. Theapprentices progressively move backward through the produc-tion process to cutting jobs. (This kind of progression is quitecommon across cultures and historical periods.) Under thesecircumstances, the initial "circumferential" perspective ab-sorbed in partial, peripheral, apparently trivial activities - run-ning errands, delivering messages, or accompanying others -takes on new significance: It provides a first approximation toan armature of the structure of the community of practice. Thingslearned, and various and changing viewpoints, can be ar-ranged and interrelated in ways that gradually transform thatskeletal understanding.

When directive teaching in the form of prescriptions aboutproper practice generates one circumscribed form of partici-pation (in school), preempting participation in ongoing prac-

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tice as the legitimate source of learning opportunities, the goalof complying with the requirements specified by teaching en-genders a practice different from that intended (Bourdieu 1977).In such cases, even though the pedagogical structure of thecircumstances of learning has moved away from the principleof legitimate peripheral participation with respect to the targetpractice, legitimate peripheral participation is still the core ofthe learning that takes place. This leads us to distinguish be-tween a learning curriculum and a teaching curriculum. Alearning curriculum consists of situated opportunities (thus in-cluding exemplars of various sorts often thought of as "goals")for the improvisational development of new practice (Lave1989). A learning curriculum is a field of learning resources ineveryday practice viewed from the perspective of learners. Ateaching curriculum, by contrast, is constructed for the in-struction of newcomers. When a teaching curriculum supplies- and thereby limits - structuring resources for learning, themeaning of what is learned (and control of access to it, bothin its peripheral forms and its subsequently more complex andintensified, though possibly more fragmented, forms) is me-diated through an instructor's participation, by an external viewof what knowing is about. The learning curriculum in didacticsituations, then, evolves out of participation in a specific com-munity of practice engendered by pedagogical relations and bya prescriptive view of the target practice as a subject matter,as well as out of the many and various relations that tie partic-ipants to their own and to other institutions.

A learning curriculum is essentially situated. It is not some-thing that can be considered in isolation, manipulated in arbi-trary didactic terms, or analyzed apart from the social relationsthat shape legitimate peripheral participation. A learning cur-riculum is thus characteristic of a community. In using the

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term community, we do not imply some primordial culture-sharing entity. We assume that members have different inter-ests, make diverse contributions to activity, and hold variedviewpoints. In our view, participation at multiple levels is en-tailed in membership in a community of practice. Nor does theterm community imply necessarily co-presence, a well-defined,identifiable group, or socially visible boundaries. It does implyparticipation in an activity system about which participants shareunderstandings concerning what they are doing and what thatmeans in their lives and for their communities.

The concept of community underlying the notion of legitimateperipheral participation, and hence of "knowledge" and its"location" in the lived-in world, is both crucial and subtle.The community of practice of midwifery or tailoring involvesmuch more than the technical knowledgeable skill involved indelivering babies or producing clothes. A community of prac-tice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and world,over time and in relation with other tangential and overlappingcommunities of practice. A community of practice is an intrin-sic condition for the existence of knowledge, not least becauseit provides the interpretive support necessary for making senseof its heritage. Thus, participation in the cultural practice inwhich any knowledge exists is an epistemological principle oflearning. The social structure of this practice, its power rela-tions, and its conditions for legitimacy define possibilities forlearning (i.e., for legitimate peripheral participation).

It is possible to delineate the community that is the site of alearning process by analyzing the reproduction cycles of thecommunities that seem to be involved and their relations. For

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the quartermasters, the cycle of navigational practice is quiteshort; a complete reproduction of the practice of quartermas-tering may take place every five or six years (as a novice en-ters, gradually becomes a full participant, begins to work withnewcomer quartermasters who in their own turn become fullparticipants and reach the point at which they are ready towork with newcomers). The reproduction cycle of the mid-wives', the tailors', or the butchers' communities is much longer.In A. A., its length is rather variable as individuals go throughsuccessive steps at their own pace. Observing the span of de-velopmental cycles is only a beginning to such an analysis(and a rough approximation that sets aside consideration of thetransformation and change inherent in ongoing practice - seebelow), for each such cycle has its own trajectory, bench-marks, blueprints, and careers (Stack 1989).

In addition to the useful analytic questions suggested by atemporal focus on communities of practice, there is a furtherreason to address the delineation of communities of practice inprocessual, historical terms. Claims about the definition of acommunity of practice and the community of practice actuallyin process of reproduction in that location may not coincide -a point worth careful consideration.

For example, in most high schools there is a group of stu-dents engaged over a substantial period of time in learningphysics. What community of practice is in the process of re-production? Possibly the students participate only in the repro-duction of the high school itself. But assuming that the prac-tice of physics is also being reproduced in some form, thereare vast differences between the ways high school physics stu-dents participate in and give meaning to their activity and theway professional physicists do. The actual reproducing com-munity of practice, within which schoolchildren learn about

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physics, is not the community of physicists but the communityof schooled adults. Children are introduced into the latter com-munity (and its humble relation with the former community)during their school years. The reproduction cycles of the phys-icists' community start much later, possibly only in graduateschool (Traweek 1988).

In this view, problems of schooling are not, at their mostfundamental level, pedagogical. Above all, they have to dowith the ways in which the community of adults reproducesitself, with the places that newcomers can or cannot find insuch communities, and with relations that can or cannot beestablished between these newcomers and the cultural and po-litical life of the community.

In summary, rather than learning by replicating the perfor-mances of others or by acquiring knowledge transmitted ininstruction, we suggest that learning occurs through centripetalparticipation in the learning curriculum of the ambient com-munity. Because the place of knowledge is within a commu-nity of practice, questions of learning must be addressed withinthe developmental cycles of that community, a recommenda-tion which creates a diagnostic tool for distinguishing amongcommunities of practice.

THE PROBLEM OF ACCESS: TRANSPARENCY AND

SEQUESTRATION

The key to legitimate peripherality is access by newcomers tothe community of practice and all that membership entails. Butthough this is essential to the reproduction of any community,it is always problematic at the same time. To become a full

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member of a community of practice requires access to a widerange of ongoing activity, old-timers, and other members ofthe community; and to information, resources, and opportuni-ties for participation. The issue is so central to membership incommunities of practice that, in a sense, all that we have saidso far is about access. Here we discuss the problem more spe-cifically in connection with issues of understanding and con-trol, which along with involvement in productive activity arerelated aspects of the legitimate peripherality of participants ina practice.

The artifacts employed in ongoing practice, the technologyof practice, provide a good arena in which to discuss the prob-lem of access to understanding. In general, social scientistswho concern themselves with learning treat technology as agiven and are not analytic about its interrelations with otheraspects of a community of practice. Becoming a full partici-pant certainly includes engaging with the technologies ofeveryday practice, as well as participating in the social rela-tions, production processes, and other activities of communi-ties of practice. But the understanding to be gained from en-gagement with technology can be extremely varied dependingon the form of participation enabled by its use. Participationinvolving technology is especially significant because the ar-tifacts used within a cultural practice carry a substantial por-tion of that practice's heritage. For example, the alidade usedby the quartermasters for taking bearings has developed as anavigational instrument over hundreds of years, and embodiescalculations invented long ago (Hutchins in press). Thus, un-derstanding the technology of practice is more than learning touse tools; it is a way to connect with the history of the practiceand to participate more directly in its cultural life.

The significance of artifacts in the full complexity of their

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relations with the practice can be more or less transparent tolearners. Transparency in its simplest form may just imply thatthe inner workings of an artifact are available for the learner'sinspection: The black box can be opened, it can become a"glass box." But there is more to understanding the use andsignificance of an artifact: Knowledge within a community ofpractice and ways of perceiving and manipulating objectscharacteristic of community practices are encoded in artifactsin ways that can be more or less revealing. Moreover, the ac-tivity system and the social world of which an artifact is partare reflected in multiple ways in its design and use and canbecome further "fields of transparency," just as they can re-main opaque. Obviously, the transparency of any technologyalways exists with respect to some purpose and is intricatelytied to the cultural practice and social organization within whichthe technology is meant to function: It cannot be viewed as afeature of an artifact in itself but as a process that involvesspecific forms of participation, in which the technology fulfillsa mediating function. Apprentice quartermasters not only haveaccess to the physical activities going on around them and tothe tools of the trade; they participate in information flows andconversations, in a context in which they can make sense ofwhat they observe and hear. In focusing on the epistemologi-cal role of artifacts in the context of the social organization ofknowledge, this notion of transparency constitutes, as it were,the cultural organization of access. As such, it does not applyto technology only, but to all forms of access to practice.

Productive activity and understanding are not separate, oreven separable, but dialectically related. Thus, the term trans-parency when used here in connection with technology refersto the way in which using artifacts and understanding their

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significance interact to become one learning process. Mirror-ing the intricate relation between using and understanding ar-tifacts, there is an interesting duality inherent in the concept oftransparency. It combines the two characteristics of invisibilityand visibility: invisibility in the form of unproblematic inter-pretation and integration into activity, and visibility in the formof extended access to information. This is not a simple dicho-tomous distinction, since these two crucial characteristics arein a complex interplay, their relation being one of both conflictand synergy.

It might be useful to give a sense of this interplay by anal-ogy to a window. A window's invisibility is what makes it awindow, that is, an object through which the world outsidebecomes visible. The very fact, however, that so many thingscan be seen through it makes the window itself highly visible,that is, very salient in a room, when compared to, say, a solidwall. Invisibility of mediating technologies is necessary forallowing focus on, and thus supporting visibility of, the sub-ject matter. Conversely, visibility of the significance of thetechnology is necessary for allowing its unproblematic - in-visible - use. This interplay of conflict and synergy is centralto all aspects of learning in practice: It makes the design ofsupportive artifacts a matter of providing a good balance be-tween these two interacting requirements. (An extended analy-sis of the concept of transparency can be found in Wenger1990.)

Control and selection, as well as the need for access, areinherent in communities of practice. Thus access is liable tomanipulation, giving legitimate peripherality an ambivalentstatus: Depending on the organization of access, legitimate pe-ripherality can either promote or prevent legitimate participa-tion. In the study of the butchers' apprentices, Marshall pro-

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vides examples of how access can be denied. The trade schooland its shop exercises did not simulate the central practices ofmeat cutting in supermarkets, much less make them accessibleto apprentices; on-the-job training was not much of an im-provement. Worse, the master butchers confined their appren-tices to jobs that were removed from activities rather than pe-ripheral to them. To the extent that the community of practiceroutinely sequesters newcomers, either very directly as in theexample of apprenticeship for the butchers, or in more subtleand pervasive ways as in schools, these newcomers are pre-vented from peripheral participation. In either case legitimacyis not in question. Schoolchildren are legitimately peripheral,but kept from participation in the social world more generally.The butchers' apprentices participate legitimately, but not pe-ripherally, in that they are not given productive access to ac-tivity in the community of practitioners.

An important point about such sequestering when it is insti-tutionalized is that it encourages a folk epistemology of dicho-tomies, for instance, between "abstract" and "concrete"knowledge. These categories do not reside in the world as dis-tinct forms of knowledge, nor do they reflect some putativehierarchy of forms of knowledge among practitioners. Rather,they derive from the nature of the new practice generated bysequestration. Abstraction in this sense stems from the discon-nectedness of a particular cultural practice. Participation in thatpractice is neither more nor less abstract or concrete, experien-tial or cerebral, than in any other. Thus, legitimate peripheralparticipation as the core concept of relations of learning placesthe explanatory burden for issues such as "understanding" and"levels" of abstraction or conceptualization not on one typeof learning as opposed to another, but on the cultural practicein which the learning is taking place, on issues of access, and

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on the transparency of the cultural environment with respectto the meaning of what is being learned. Insofar as the notionof transparency, taken very broadly, is a way of organizingactivities that makes their meaning visible, it opens an alter-native approach to the traditional dichotomy between learningexperientially and learning at a distance, between learning bydoing and learning by abstraction.

DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE

The characterization of language in learning has, in discus-sions of conventional contrasts between formal and informallearning, been treated as highly significant in classifying waysof transmitting knowledge. Verbal instruction has been as-sumed to have special, and especially effective properties withrespect to the generality and scope of the understanding thatlearners come away with, while instruction by demonstration- learning by "observation and imitation" - is supposed toproduce the opposite, a literal and narrow effect.

Close analysis of both instructional discourse and cases ofapprenticeship raise a different point: Issues about language,like those about the role of masters, may well have more to dowith legitimacy of participation and with access to peripheral-ity than they do with knowledge transmission. Indeed, as Jor-dan (1989) argues, learning to become a legitimate participantin a community involves learning how to talk (and be silent)in the manner of full participants. In A. A. telling the story ofthe life of the nondrinking alcoholic is clearly a major vehiclefor the display of membership. Models for constructing A. A.life stories are widely available in published accounts of alco-

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Situated Learning

holies' lives and in the storytelling performances of old-timers.Early on, newcomers learn to preface their contributions toA.A. meetings with the simple identifying statement "I 'm arecovering alcoholic," and, shortly, to introduce themselvesand sketch the problems that brought them to A. A. They beginby describing these events in non-A. A. terms. Their accountsmeet with counterexemplary stories by more-experiencedmembers who do not criticize or correct newcomers' accountsdirectly. They gradually generate a view that matches moreclosely the A.A. model, eventually producing skilled testi-mony in public meetings and gaining validation from others asthey demonstrate the appropriate understanding.

The process of learning to speak as a full member of a com-munity of practice is vividly illustrated in an analysis of thechanging performances of newcomer spirit mediums in a spi-ritist congregation in Mexico (Kearney 1977). This example isinteresting partly because the notion of "proper speech" is soclearly crystallized in the collective expectations of the com-munity, while at the same time, if the community were forcedto acknowledge the idea that mediums must learn their craft,this would negate the legitimacy of spirit possession. Thatlearning through legitimate peripheral participation nonethe-less occurs makes this example especially striking.

Spiritist cult communities center around women who areadept at going into trance. They act as mediums, transmittingthe messages of a variety of spirits. The spirits are arranged ina complex hierarchy of more- and less-important forms of de-ity. It takes a great deal of practice to speak coherently whilein trance, especially while taking on a variety of personae.

It is quite apparent from biographical data I have onmediums that they typically begin "working" with

106


various [unimportant] exotic spirits who have idiosyn-cratic speech patterns, and then eventually switch toworking with the [highly revered] Divinities who typ-ically speak in a much more stereotypic manner. . . .Recently several novice mediums have been "entered''by "beings from outer space." These beings appearedquite intent on speaking to those present via the me-diums, but of course their language was incomprehen-sible to the audience. During the course of repeatedvisits, however, and with help from nonpossessedspiritualists, they slowly "began to learn to speak theSpanish language," and to articulate their messages.. . . A . . . characteristic of advanced mediums ascompared with novices is the large repertoire and widerrange of identities displayed by the former [Kearney1977].

In the Psychology of Literacy, Scribner and Cole (1981) spec-ulate that asking questions - learning how to "do" schoolappropriately - may be a major part of what school teaches.This is also Jordan's conclusion about Yucatec midwives' par-ticipation in biomedical, state-sponsored training courses. Sheargues that the verbal instruction provided by health officialshas the effect of teaching midwives how to talk in biomedicalterms when required. Such talk only serves to give them "facevalidity" in the eyes of others who believe in the authoritativecharacter of biomedicine. But Jordan argues that it has no ef-fect on their existing practice.

This point about language use is consonant with the earlierargument that didactic instruction creates unintended prac-tices. The conflict stems from the fact that there is a differencebetween talking about a practice from outside and talking within

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Situated Learning

it. Thus the didactic use of language, not itself the discourseof practice, creates a new linguistic practice, which has anexistence of its own. Legitimate peripheral participation in suchlinguistic practice is a form of learning, but does not implythat newcomers learn the actual practice the language is sup-posed to be about.

In a community or practice, there are no special forms ofdiscourse aimed at apprentices or crucial to their centripetalmovement toward full participation that correspond to themarked genres of the question-answer-evaluation format ofclassroom teaching, or the lecturing of college professors ormidwife-training course instructors. But Jordan makes a fur-ther, acute, observation about language, this time about therole of stories in apprenticeship: She points out that storiesplay a major role in decision making (1989). This has impli-cations for what and how newcomers learn. For apprenticeshiplearning is supported by conversations and stories about prob-lematic and especially difficult cases.

What happens is that as difficulties of one kind or an-other develop, stories of similar cases are offered upby the attendants [at a birth], all of whom, it shouldbe remembered, are experts, having themselves givenbirth. In the ways in which these stories are treated,elaborated, ignored, taken up, characterized as typicaland so on, the collaborative work of deciding on thepresent case is done. . . . These stories, then, arepackages of situated knowledge. . . . To acquire a storeof appropriate stories and, even more importantly, toknow what are appropriate occasions for telling them,is then part of what it means to become a midwife[1989:935].

108


Orr (in press) describes comparable patterns of story telling inhis research on the learning of machine-repair work: Techni-cians who repair copier machines tell each other "war stories"about their past experiences in making repairs. Such storiesconstitute a vital part of diagnosing and carrying out new re-pairs. In the process, newcomers learn how to make (some-times difficult) repairs, they learn the skills of war-story tell-ing, and they become legitimate participants in the communityof practice. In A. A. also, discussions have a dual purpose.Participants engage in the work of staying sober and they doso through gradual construction of an identity. Telling the per-sonal story is a tool of diagnosis and reinterpretation. Its com-munal use is essential to the fashioning of an identity as arecovered alcoholic, and thus to remaining sober. It becomesa display of membership by virtue of fulfilling a crucial func-tion in the shared practice.

It is thus necessary to refine our distinction between talkingabout and talking within a practice. Talking within itself in-cludes both talking within (e.g., exchanging information nec-essary to the progress of ongoing activities) and talking about(e.g., stories, community lore). Inside the shared practice, bothforms of talk fulfill specific functions: engaging, focusing, andshifting attention, bringing about coordination, etc., on the onehand; and supporting communal forms of memory and reflec-tion, as well as signaling membership, on the other. (And,similarly, talking about includes both forms of talk once itbecomes part of a practice of its own, usually sequestered insome respects.) For newcomers then the purpose is not to learnfrom talk as a substitute for legitimate peripheral participation;it is to learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral participa-tion.

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Situated Learning

MOTIVATION AND IDENTITY: EFFECTS OF

PARTICIPATION

It is important to emphasize that, during the extended periodof legitimate participation typical of the cases of apprentice-ship described here, newcomers participate in a community ofpractitioners as well as in productive activity. Legitimate pe-ripheral participation is an initial form of membership charac-teristic of such a community. Acceptance by and interactionwith acknowledged adept practitioners make learning legiti-mate and of value from the point of view of the apprentice.More generally, learning in practice, apprentice learners knowthat there is a field for the mature practice of what they arelearning to do - midwifing, tailoring, quartermastering, butch-ering, or being sober. The community of midwives, tailors,quartermasters, butchers, or nondrinking alcoholics and theirproductive relations with the world provide apprentices withthese continuity-based "futures."

To be able to participate in a legitimately peripheral wayentails that newcomers have broad access to arenas of maturepractice. At the same time, productive peripherality requiresless demands on time, effort, and responsibility for work thanfor full participants. A newcomer's tasks are short and simple,the costs of errors are small, the apprentice has little respon-sibility for the activity as a whole. A newcomer's tasks tend tobe positioned at the ends of branches of work processes, ratherthan in the middle of linked work segments. A midwife's ap-prentice runs errands. Tailors' apprentices do maintenance onthe sewing machine before the master begins work, and finish-ing details when the master has completed a pair of trousers; alot of time in between is spent sitting beside the master on his

110


two-person bench. For the quartermasters, the earliest jobs arephysically at the periphery of the work space. In many cases,distinctions between play and work, or between peripheral ac-tivity and other work, are little marked. In all five cases ofapprenticeship, however, it is also true that the initial, partialcontributions of apprentices are useful. Even the A. A. new-comer, while reinterpreting his or her life, produces new ma-terial that contributes to the communal construction of an un-derstanding of alcoholism. An apprentice's contributions toongoing activity gain value in practice - a value which in-creases as the apprentice becomes more adept. As opportuni-ties for understanding how well or poorly one's efforts contrib-ute are evident in practice, legitimate participation of a peripheralkind provides an immediate ground for self-evaluation. Thesparsity of tests, praise, or blame typical of apprenticeship fol-lows from the apprentice's legitimacy as a participant.

Notions like those of "intrinsic rewards" in empirical stud-ies of apprenticeship focus quite narrowly on task knowledgeand skill as the activities to be learned. Such knowledge is ofcourse important; but a deeper sense of the value of participa-tion to the community and the learner lies in becoming part ofthe community. Thus, making a hat reasonably well is seen asevidence that an apprentice tailor is becoming "a masterfulpractitioner,'' though it may also be perceived in a more util-itarian vein in terms of reward or even value. Similarly, tellingone's life story or making a Twelfth Step call confers a senseof belonging. Moving toward full participation in practice in-volves not just a greater commitment of time, intensified ef-fort, more and broader responsibilities within the community,and more difficult and risky tasks, but, more significantly, anincreasing sense of identity as a master practitioner.

I l l

Situated Learning

When the process of increasing participation is not the pri-mary motivation for learning, it is often because "didacticcaretakers" assume responsibility for motivating newcomers.In such circumstances, the focus of attention shifts from co-participating in practice to acting upon the person-to-be-changed.Such a shift is typical of situations, such as schooling, in whichpedagogically structured content organizes learning activities.Overlooking the importance of legitimate participation bynewcomers in the target practice has two related conse-quences. First, the identity of learners becomes an explicit ob-ject of change. When central participation is the subjectiveintention motivating learning, changes in cultural identity andsocial relations are inevitably part of the process, but learningdoes not have to be mediated - and distorted - through alearner's view of "self" as object. Second, where there is nocultural identity encompassing the activity in which newcom-ers participate and no field of mature practice for what is beinglearned, exchange value replaces the use value of increasingparticipation. The commoditization of learning engenders afundamental contradiction between the use and exchange val-ues of the outcome of learning, which manifests itself in con-flicts between learning to know and learning to display knowl-edge for evaluation. Testing in schools and trade schools(unnecessary in situations of apprenticeship learning) is per-haps the most pervasive and salient example of a way of estab-lishing the exchange value of knowledge. Test taking then be-comes a new parasitic practice, the goal of which is to increasethe exchange value of learning independently of it use value.

112


CONTRADICTIONS AND CHANGE: CONTINUITY

AND DISPLACEMENT

To account for the complexity of participation in social prac-tice, it is essential to give learning and teaching independentstatus as analytic concepts. Primary reliance on the concept ofpedagogical structuring in learning research may well preventspeculation about what teaching consists of, how it is per-ceived, and how - as perceived - it affects learning. Mostanalyses of schooling assume, whether intentionally or not,the uniform motivation of teacher and pupils, because theyassume, sometimes quite explicitly, that teacher and pupils sharethe goal of the main activity (e.g., Davydov and Markova 1983).In our view, this assumption has several consequences. First,it ignores the conflicting viewpoints associated with teachingand learning, respectively, and obscures the distortions thatensue (Fajans and Turner in preparation). Furthermore, it re-flects too narrowly rationalistic a perspective on the person andmotivation. The multiple viewpoints that are characteristic ofparticipation in a community of practice, and thus of legiti-mate peripheral participation, are to be found in more complextheories of the person-in-society, such as those proposed bycritical psychologists. Finally, assumptions of uniformity makeit difficult to explore the mechanisms by which processes ofchange and transformation in communities practice and pro-cesses of learning are intricately implicated in each other.

In considering learning as part of social practice, we havefocused our attention on the structure of social practice ratherthan privileging the structure of pedagogy as the source oflearning. Learning understood as legitimate peripheral partic-ipation is not necessarily or directly dependent on pedagogicalgoals or official agenda, even in situations in which these goals

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Situated Learning

appear to be a central factor (e.g., classroom instruction, tu-toring). We have insisted that exposure to resources for learn-ing is not restricted to a teaching curriculum and that instruc-tional assistance is not construed as a purely interpersonalphenomenon; rather we have argued that learning must beunderstood with respect to a practice as a whole, with its mul-tiplicity of relations - both within the community and with theworld at large. Dissociating learning from pedagogical inten-tions opens the possibility of mismatch or conflict among prac-titioners' viewpoints in situations where learning is going on.These differences often must become constitutive of the con-tent of learning.

We mentioned earlier that a major contradiction lies be-tween legitimate peripheral participation as the means ofachieving continuity over generations for the community ofpractice, and the displacement inherent in that same processas full participants are replaced (directly or indirectly) bynewcomers-become-old-timers. Both Fortes (1938) and Goody(1989) have commented on this conflict between continuityand displacement, which is surely part of all learning. Thistension is in fact fundamental - a basic contradiction of socialreproduction, transformation, and change. In recent accountsof learning by activity theorists (e.g., Engestrom 1987), themajor contradiction underlying the historical development oflearning is that of the commodity. Certainly this is fundamen-tal to the historical shaping of social reproduction as well asproduction. But we believe that a second contradiction - thatbetween continuity and displacement - is also fundamental tothe social relations of production and to the social reproductionof labor. Studies of learning might benefit from examining thefield of relations generated by these interrelated contradic-tions. For if production and the social reproduction of persons

114


are mutually entailed in the reproduction of the social order,the contradictions inherent in reproducing persons within thedomestic group and other communities of practice do not goaway when the form of production changes, but go throughtransformations of their own. How to characterize these con-tradictions in changing forms of production is surely the cen-tral question underlying a historical understanding of forms oflearning, family, and of course, schooling.

The continuity-displacement contradiction is present dur-ing apprenticeship, whether apprentice and master jointly havea stake in the increasingly knowledgeable skill of the appren-tice, as among the tailors and midwives, or whether there is aconflict between the master's desire for labor and the appren-tice's desire to learn (see Goody 1982), as among the meatcutters. The different ways in which old-timers and newcom-ers establish and maintain identities conflict and generate com-peting viewpoints on the practice and its development. New-comers are caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, they needto engage in the existing practice, which has developed overtime: to understand it, to participate in it, and to become fullmembers of the community in which it exists. On the other hand,they have a stake in its development as they begin to establishtheir own identity in its future.

We have claimed that the development of identity is centralto the careers of newcomers in communities of practice, andthus fundamental to the concept of legitimate peripheral partic-ipation. This is illustrated most vividly by the experience ofnewcomers to A. A., but we think that it is true of all learning.In fact, we have argued that, from the perspective we havedeveloped here, learning and a sense of identity are insepara-ble: They are aspects of the same phenomenon.

Insofar as the conflicts in which the continuity-displace-

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Situated Learning

ment contradiction is manifested involve power - as they doto a large extent - the way the contradiction is played outchanges as power relations change. Conflicts between mastersand apprentices (or, less individualistically, between genera-tions) take place in the course of everyday participation. Sharedparticipation is the stage on which the old and the new, theknown and the unknown, the established and the hopeful, actout their differences and discover their commonalities, mani-fest their fear of one another, and come to terms with theirneed for one another. Each threatens the fulfillment of the oth-er's destiny, just as it is essential to it. Conflict is experiencedand worked out through a shared everyday practice in whichdiffering viewpoints and common stakes are in interplay.Learners can be overwhelmed, overawed, and overworked. Yeteven when submissive imitation is the result, learning is neversimply a matter of the "transmission" of knowledge or the"acquisition" of skill; identity in relation with practice, andhence knowledge and skill and their significance to the subjectand the community, are never unproblematic. This helps toaccount for the common observation that knowers come in arange of types, from clones to heretics.

Granting legitimate participation to newcomers with theirown viewpoints introduces into any community of practice allthe tensions of the continuity-displacement contradiction. Thesemay be muted, though not extinguished, by the differences ofpower between old-timers and newcomers. As a way in whichthe related conflicts are played out in practice, legitimate pe-ripheral participation is far more than just a process of learningon the part of newcomers. It is a reciprocal relation betweenpersons and practice. This means that the move of learnerstoward full participation in a community of practice does nottake place in a static context. The practice itself is in motion.

116


Since activity and the participation of individuals involved init, their knowledge, and their perspectives are mutually con-stitutive, change is a fundamental property of communities ofpractice and their activities. Goody (1989) argues that the in-troduction of strangers into what was previously strictly do-mestic production (a change that occurred within an expandingmarket in West Africa in the recent past) led masters to thinkmore comprehensively about the organization of their produc-tion activities. She points out that the resulting division of workprocesses into segments to be learned has been mirrored insubsequent generations in new, increasingly specialized occu-pations. Legitimate peripherality is important for developing"constructively naive" perspectives or questions. From thispoint of view, inexperience is an asset to be exploited. It is ofuse, however, only in the context of participation, when sup-ported by experienced practitioners who both understand itslimitations and value its role. Legitimacy of participation iscrucial both for this naive involvement to invite reflection onongoing activity and for the newcomer's occasional contribu-tions to be taken into account. Insofar as this continual inter-action of new perspectives is sanctioned, everyone's partici-pation is legitimately peripheral in some respect. In other words,everyone can to some degree be considered a "newcomer" tothe future of a changing community.

117

Conclusion

Conclusion

Until recently, the notion of a concept was viewed as some-thing for which clarity, precision, simplicity, and maximumdefinition seemed commendable. We have tried, in reflectiveconsonance with our theoretical perspective, to reconceive itin interconnected, relational terms. Thus the concept of legit-imate peripheral participation obtains its meaning, not in aconcise definition of its boundaries, but in its multiple, theo-retically generative interconnections with persons, activities,knowing, and world. Exploring these interconnections in spe-cific cases has provided a way to engage in the practice-theoryproject that insists on participation in the lived-in world as akey unit of analysis in a theory of social practice (which in-cludes learning), and to develop our thinking in the spirit ofthis theoretically integrative enterprise.

There has crept into our analysis, as we have moved awayfrom conventional notions of learning, an expanded scale oftime and a more encompassing view of what constitutes learn-ing activity. Legitimate peripheral participation has led us toemphasize the sustained character of developmental cycles ofcommunities of practice, the gradual process of fashioning re-lations of identity as a full practitioner, and the enduring strainsinherent in the continuity-displacement contradiction. Thislonger and broader conception of what it means to learn, im-plied by the concept of legitimate peripheral participation, comescloser to embracing the rich significance of learning in humanexperience.

We have thus situated learning in the trajectories of partic-ipation in which it takes on meaning. These trajectories mustthemselves be situated in the social world. Theories of practicegrowing out of psychological orientations - even those fo-cused on activity - have left as an important set of unexploredterms the interconnections of activity and activity systems, and

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Situated Learning

of activity systems and communities, culture, and politicaleconomy. We are, then, trying to furnish the social world in away that begins to do justice to the structured forms and rela-tions in which legitimate peripheral participation takes place.Relational, historical conceptions have emerged from this ex-ercise, and this decentering tendency is characteristic of themeans we have explored for grasping "person," "activity,""knowing," and the "social world."

The person has been correspondingly transformed intoa practitioner, a newcomer becoming an old-timer, whosechanging knowledge, skill, and discourse are part of a devel-oping identity - in short, a member of a community of prac-tice. This idea of identity/membership is strongly tied to a con-ception of motivation. If the person is both member of acommunity and agent of activity, the concept of the personclosely links meaning and action in the world.

Situated learning activity has been transformed into legiti-mate peripheral participation in communities of practice. Le-gitimate peripheral participation moves in a centripetal direc-tion, motivated by its location in a field of mature practice. Itis motivated by the growing use value of participation, and bynewcomers' desires to become full practitioners. Communitiesof practice have histories and developmental cycles, and re-produce themselves in such a way that the transformation ofnewcomers into old-timers becomes unremarkably integral tothe practice.

Knowing is inherent in the growth and transformation ofidentities and it is located in relations among practitioners, theirpractice, the artifacts of that practice, and the social organiza-tion and political economy of communities of practice. Fornewcomers, their shifting location as they move centripetallythrough a complex form of practice creates possibilities for

122

Conclusion

understanding the world as experienced. Denying access andlimiting the centripetal movement of newcomers and otherpractitioners changes the learning curriculum. This raisesquestions - in specific settings, we hope - about what oppor-tunities exist for knowing in practice: about the process oftransparency for newcomers. These questions remain distinctfrom either official or idealized versions of what is meant tobe learned or should be learnable.

All of this takes place in a social world, dialetically consti-tuted in social practices that are in the process of reproduction,transformation, and change. The challenging problem has beento address the structural character of that world at the level atwhich it is lived. As a conceptual bridge, legitimate peripheralparticipation has allowed us to generate analytic terms andquestions fundamental to this analysis. In addition to forms ofmembership and construction of identities, these terms andquestions include the location and organization of mastery incommunities; problems of power, access, and transparency;developmental cycles of communities of practice; change aspart of what it means to be a community of practice; and itsbasis in the contradiction between continuity and displace-ment.

123

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Index

A.A., see Alcoholics Anonymousabstraction, 14-15, 33-4, 37-9, 51-2,

104-5access, 22, 37, 73, 84-5, 86-7, 92,

93, 97,100-5, 123acquisition, see knowledgeactive knowledge, 48activity system, 98, 102, 121 {see also

structure)activity theory, 48-9, 51, 113, 114,

121actor, see agencyadults, 19, 41, 100agency, 33, 50, 51, 53-4 {see also

person)Alcoholics Anonymous, 65, 66, 67,

79-84, 85, 91, 92, 96, 99, 105,106, 111, 115

Alibrandi, L. A., 92alidade, 66, 101alienation, 42analytical perspective, 38-9, 40-1, 123anthropology, 13, 50apprentice, see apprenticeship; master-

apprentice relation; newcomersapprenticeship, 21, 29-30, 31, 32, 37,

39, 56-7, 61, 62-7, 85, 91,105

continuity/displacement in, 115difficulties with, 62-4, 76 {see also

exchange of labor)

articulation of related communities, 36artifacts, 29, 51, 58, 63, 66, 75, 77,

101-3, 122significance of, 103

assimilation, 47, 52, 57 {see also inter-nalization; knowledge, acquisi-tion)

authority, 94, 107

Bakhurst, D., 49Bauman, Z., 50Becker, H., 76, 85, 86, 87biographies, see trajectories of partici-

pationblack box, 102blame, see evaluationBourdieu, P., 50, 97breadth (of initial view), see under-

standing, comprehensiveBruner, J., 48butchers, 65, 66, 67, 76-9, 85, 99,

103, 104-5, 115Butler, M., 93

Cain, C , 65, 80, 85careers, see trajectories of participationcentral, see participationcentripetal participation, see legitimate

peripheral participationcerebral, 47, 52, 104 {see also cogni-

tive processes)

131

Index

certificate, 67, 77 {see also formal ver-sus informal)

change, 57, 113-14, 123 {see also im-provisation; reproduction; trans-formation)

children, 19, 32, 54, 68-9, 70, 99-100, 104

China, 63circulation, see information, flow ofclassroom instruction, see schooling;

teachingclones, 116code, 16, 21cognitive apprenticeship, 29cognitive processes, 14, 34, 43, 50, 52

{see also individualistic perspec-tives)

cognitive research, 15, 31, 61 {see alsoconventional theories)

Cole, M., 48, 107collaborative work, 73, 108collectivist interpretation, 49commoditization, 114

of labor, 76of learning, 112

communication, 14, 16, 51, 75 {seealso language)

community of practice, 29, 42, 47, 53,64, 94-5, 96, 98-100, 115,117 {see also interstitial; repro-duction)

complete, see participation, completecomprehension, see understanding,

comprehensiveconcept, 38-9, 48, 121

conceptual bridge, 47, 55, 123conceptualization, see abstractionconcreteness, 38-9 {see also dichoto-

mies; formal versus informal;particular; stereotypes)

conflict, see access; continuity/displace-ment; power

continuity/displacement contradiction,57, 58, 113, 114, 121

contradiction, see commoditization;continuity/displacement contra-diction

contrast, see dichotomiescontributions, see newcomerscontrol, see access; powerconventional theories (of learning), 15-

17, 31, 47, 50, 52, 54-5, 56,57, 65, 94, 95, 105, 121

conversations, see language; storiesCooper, E., 63copiers, see machine repaircorrection, 83, 106Coy, M., 63craft production, 30, 62-3, 64, 65, 66,

69critical psychology, 49, 113critical theory, 51criticism, see correctionculture, see historical-cultural theories;

meaning, systems of; practice,social

cultural interpretation, 48curriculum, 41, 71, 84 {see also se-

quence)learning, 67, 72, 75, 80, 86, 93,

97, 100, 123cycles, see reproduction

daily life, see everyday life and prac-tice

Davydov, V., 48, 113decentering, 53-4, 94, 122decontextualization, see sequestrationdemonstration, 22, 83, 105design, 102-3developmental cycles, see reproductiondichotomies, 33-4, 35-6, 47-8, 50-2,

95, 104-5 {see also conven-tional theories)

didactic structuring, see teachingdisconnectedness, see sequestrationdiscourse, see language

132

Index

displacement, see continuity/displace-ment contradiction

distributed task, 75division of labor, 63, 69, 70, 79, 92,

96, 117domestic production, 69, 70, 117dreams, 67Dreier, O., 49dualism, see dichotomies

educational forms, 31, 37, 39, 40, 65educational purposes, see teachingeducational research, 31effectiveness (of educational forms),

30, 32, 40, 61, 65, 76-7, 86,93, 105

Engestrom, Y., 48, 49, 63, 114equipment, see artifactserror, 75, 79, 110Europe, 63evaluation, 21, 86, 111-12everyday concept, 48everyday life and practice, 18-9, 67,

68, 92, 96, 97, 116exchange of labor for learning, 64, 76,

78, 115exchange value, 112exemplar, see mature practice; modelsexperience, see dichotomies

factual, see knowledge, acquisition ofFajans, J., 49, 113family, 92, 115 (see also socialization)fields, see mature practice; participa-

tion; transparencyflow, see informationformal versus informal, 33, 64, 65, 67,

69-70, 84, 85, 95, 96, 105 (seealso dichotomies; stereotypes)

Fortes, M., 114fostering, 70full participation, 29, 37, 53, 64, 67,

79, 80, 100, 101, 105, 111, 114functionalism, 62

Garner, J., 49Geer, B., 63generality, 19-20, 33-4, 37-8, 105

(see also abstraction)generations, 56, 114, 116 (see also re-

production)Giddens, A., 50, 54glass box, 30, 102goals, 80, 85, 86, 93, 97, 113, 114

(see also mature practice)Gola, see tailorsGoody, E., 63, 69, 70, 114, 115, 117Greenfield, P., 48Griffin, P., 48Grosshans, R. R., 63

Haas, J., 76habitus, 50Hall, S., 38Hanks, W. F., 13Hass, M., 93hazing, 76Hedegaard, M., 48hegemony, 42heretics, 116high school, 99historical-cultural theory, 23, 31-2,

37-9, 42, 50-1 , 61-4, 114,115, 122

historical perspectives on communitiesof practice, 58, 99, 101

Holzkamp, K., 49household, see domestic production;

familyHutchins, E., 65, 73, 77, 84, 101

identity, 29, 36, 52-3, 55, 56, 70, 79,80, 81, 84, 109, 112, 115, 122

of mastery, 41-2, 85, 110-11, 121illegitimate participation, 35Ilyenkov, E. V., 38imitation, 95, 105, 116 (see also obser-

vation)improvisation, 15, 20, 93, 97

133

Index

indexicality, 13, 33 language, 13, 19, 22-3, 51, 52, 58,inividualistic perspective, 13, 15, 47, 85, 102, 105-9 (see also sto-

48, 63, 86, 94 (see also con- ries)ventional theories) proper speech, 106

informal, see formal versus informal talking about versus talking within,information, 101, 103 22, 107-9

flow of, 84, 93, 102 Lave, J., 65, 72, 97Institute for Research on Learning, 29 learning (see also curriculum)institution, 61, 64, 66, 93, 97, 104 (see as part of social practice, 18, 31,

also official agenda) 34-5, 38, 40, 47instruction, see teaching by abstraction, 105instrument, see artifacts by doing, 31, 105intelligent tutoring systems, 30 in situ, 31intentionality, 54 resources, 37, 94, 101, 114 (seeinteractionism, 17 also access)interests, multiple, 50, 56, 98 situated, 30, 31, 32-4, 87, 108,internalization, 15, 47-9, 51 122interstitial, 41, 42, 64 (see also official versus teaching, 40-1 , 113-14

agenda; unintended practices) legitimacy of participation, 35-7, 42,invisibility, 103 76, 92, 98, 104, 105, 117

legitimate peripheral participationJordan, B., 63, 65, 67, 77, 105, 107, definitions, 29, 35-7, 121

108 history of the concept, 29-35journeyfolk, 57, 66, 71, 77, 78, 79 in schooling contexts, 97

legitimate peripherality, 36, 39, 103Kearny, M., 106-7 Liberia, 30, 65knowledge life story, see stories, personal

acquisition of, 14, 33, 36, 48, 50, literal, see imitation; particular52, 75, 85, 95, 100, 116 location, see knowledge, place of

domains, 52 lore, 109 (see also stories)forms of, 104 (see also abstraction;

concreteness; stereotypes)knowledgeable skill, 29, 47, 55, machine repair, 109

57, 62, 63, 94, 115 manual cephalic version, 66place of, 94-8, 100 market-oriented production, 66, 70structures of, see structure, cogni- Markova, A., 48, 113

tive Marshall, H., 65, 85, 103transmission of, 15, 47, 57, 61, Marx, K., 38, 50, 62 (see also histori-

105, 116 cal-cultural theory)master, 29, 30, 56, 57, 64, 65, 66, 68,

labor, 76, 114 (see also exchange of 69, 71, 76, 85, 95, 105, 110,labor) 115

child, 70 master apprentice relation, 21, 23, 9 1 -wage, 67 4

134

Index

mastery, 20, 29, 94, 123 {see alsoidentity)

mature practice, fields of, 76, 85, 110,112, 122

meaningof learning, 13, 29, 33, 50, 51, 57,

79, 97, 98, 105, 121, 122systems of, 54

meat cutting, see butchersmediation, 15, 102-3Medick, H., 63mediums, 106-7membership, 52-4, 55, 85, 92, 98

forms of, 35, 36, 41, 110, 123signaling, 81, 82, 105, 109

memory, communal forms of, 109mental processes, see cognitive pro-

cessesMexico, 65, 106midwives, 65, 67-9, 70, 81, 84, 85,

91, 92, 98, 99, 107, 108, 110,115

models, 81-3, 95, 105 {see also ma-ture practice)

mode, see productionmotivation, see value

navy, see quartermastersneglect, benign, 93negotiation (of meaning), 16, 33, 34,

50, 51newcomers

becoming old-timers, 56-7, 80, 99,114, 122

contributions by, 111, 117relations with old-timers, 29, 49,

61, 79, 83, 91-4, 100-1, 103-4, 105-6, 110

versus old-timers, 76, 114-17nondrinking alcoholic, see Alcoholics

Anonymousnonparticipation, see participationnovice, see newcomers

objectification of the self, 112 {see alsoevaluation)

observation, 75, 78, 95, 105 {see alsoimitation; transparency)

limits on, 75official agenda, 113, 123 {see also in-

stitution; interstitial)old-timers, see journey folk; master;

mastery; newcomerson-the-job see trainingopenness (of a tool), 75 {see also trans-

parency)ordering, see sequenceorganization {see institution; production

processes)Orr, J., 77, 109Ortner, S. B., 50

parasitic, see unintendedparochialism, 33-4 {see also particular;

dichotomies)participation, 14, 19-20, 49-52, 54,

56, 95-8 {see also legitimateperipheral participation)

central, 35-6complete, 36fields of, 36versus nonparticipation, 35

particular, 17, 33-4, 38, 40, 52, 104{see also dichotomies)

pawning, 70pedagogical intentions, see teachingpeers, 57, 79, 92, 93 {see also new-

comers)perception, 102peripherally of participation, 35—7, 42,

105, 110 {see also access)reinterpretation of trivial activities,

96person, 34, 52-4, 112, 122 {see also

transformation)assumptions about, 47, 50-1 , 113production of, 51, 62, 114-15whole, 33, 49, 53

135

Index

personal story, see stories, personalperspective, see understanding, com-

prehensive; viewpoints, multiplephenomenology, 16, 50physics, 99place, see knowledgeplay, see workpolitical economy, 54, 64, 122power, 36, 42, 57, 64, 86-7, 98 (see

also access)practice, social, 29, 34-5, 43, 49, 58,

95-6, 98, 104 (see also com-munity of practice; mature prac-tice; participation; prescriptionof practice; unintended prac-tices)

theory of, 14, 16, 34-5, 38, 47,50-1, 52, 121

praise, see evaluationprescription of practice, 64, 96—7, (see

also teaching)prescriptive interpretation (of a con-

cept), 41production, 47, 51, 56, 67 (see also

craft; person)processes and organization of, 72,

80, 84, 96modes of, 63, 70, 114structure of, 86

progress, 62progression, see sequence

quartermasters, 65, 66, 67, 73-6, 84,86, 91, 96, 99, 101, 102, 111

rationalism, 50, 113 (see also conven-tional theories)

recruitment, 65reflection, 22, 54, 109, 117relational perspective, 33, 50—1, 53,

122relevance, see goal; mature practice;

understanding, comprehensiverepetitive tasks, see routine

replacement, see continuity/displace-ment

representation, 17-18, 33, 74 (see alsoabstraction; cognitive processes;structure)

reproductionof communities of practice, 19, 47,

55-7, 58, 76, 86, 113-17of the social order, 47, 58, 69-70,

113-17, 123cycles, 55-7, 70, 98-100, 121,

122resources, see learningreward, see evaluation; motivationrole, 17, 23Ross, G., 48routine, 65, 78 (see also particular; di-

chotomies)rule, 34, 50

scaffolding interpretation, 48schooling, 21, 30, 39-41, 54-5, 61-2,

63, 77, 85-6, 96-7, 99-100,104, 107, 112, 113, 115 (seealso teaching; training)

trade school, 66, 73, 76, 104, 112schemata, 20scientific concept, 48Scribner, S., 107Sea and Anchor Detail, 74segments of work, see production, pro-

cesses and organization ofselection, 103 (see also evaluation)sequence, 72, 74, 80, 96 (see also cur-

riculum)sequestration, 21, 40, 100, 104-5, 109shift in theoretical perspective, 14, 32-

7,43situated activity, theory of, see situat-

edness; learning, situatedsituatedness (as a theoretical perspec-

tive), 14, 31, 32-4, 37, 40, 94,97, 121

skill, see knowledge

136

Index

slavery, 70social, see identity; membership; prac-

tice; reproduction; structure;transformation; world

socialization, 32, 70 (see also children)sociology, 50Soviet psychology, 49specialized occupations, see division of

laborspecificity, see particularspeech, see languagespirit mediums, see mediumssponsoring, 91-2 (see also legitimacy;

newcomers)Stack, C , 99Standard Steaming Watch, 74steel-construction apprentices, 76stereotypes, 65, 96, 104 (see also con-

ventional theories)stories, 23, 34, 68, 80-4, 106, 108-9

personal, 80-4, 105, 109, 111war , 109

structural determination, 54structuralism, 16-17, 20, 22, 24, 54structure (see also abstraction; curricu-

lum; knowledge; production; se-quence)

activity, 23-4, 51, 67, 75, 97, 112cognitive, 15-17, 20, 51social, 6-7, 30, 34, 36, 49, 51, 52,

56, 58, 62, 67, 71, 83, 93, 96,98, 113, 122

student, see newcomers; schoolingsubject matter, 97, 103 (see also ma-

ture practice)supermarket, see butchers

tailors, 30, 65, 66, 67, 69-71, 80, 84,85, 91, 96, 98, 99, 110, 115

talking about versus talking within, seelanguage

tasks, 52, 53, 85, 86, 111 (see alsocurriculum; practice; sequence)

teachers, 29, 56, 61, 76, 77, 113teaching, 40-1 , 48, 49, 52, 54, 61-2,

76, 77, 86, 94, 96-7, 108, 112,113-14

absence of, 68-9, 82-3, 84, 85,92-4

curriculum, 49, 97, 112, 113-14verbal instruction, 22, 105, 107

(see also language)versus learning, see learning

technicians, see machine repairtechnology, 30, 56, 61, 65, 66, 101-3tests, see evaluationtheory, see concept; conventional theo-

ries; critical theory; historical-cultural theories; learning, situ-ated; practice, social; relationalperspective; shift in theoreticalperspective; situatedness

time, scope of, 121tools, see artifactstrade school, see schoolingtraditional theories, see conventional

theoriestraining, 73, 76, 107

on-the-job, 77, 104trajectories of participation, 18-19, 36,

54, 55, 74, 84, 121biographies, 56careers, 61, 115

transfer, see generality; internalization;knowledge, transmission

transformation (see also reproduction)of the social world, 16, 19, 49, 51,

57, 85, 113-17, 123of persons, 15, 18, 32, 51, 52-4,

80, 121 (see also newcomers,becoming old-timers)

transmission, see knowledgetransparency, 20, 30, 56, 75, 100,

102-3, 105, 123fields of, 102

Traweek, S., 100trivial activities, see peripherally

137

Index

Turner, T., 49, 113tutoring, 114 {see also teachers; teach-

ing)Twelve Steps, see Alcoholics Anony-

mous

understanding, 14, 16, 37, 51-2, 53,85, 86, 98, 101-3, 104, 105,123

comprehensive, 33, 80, 85-6, 93,94-6, 117

understood knowledge, 48uniformity, assumptions of, 113 {see

also viewpoints, multiple)unintended practices, 107, 112union-based apprenticeship, 66, 77unit of analysis, 47United States, 63use value, 112

Vai, see tailorsvalue (of participation), 50, 56, 85,

95-6, 110-12, 113, 115, 122{see also mature practice; under-standing, comprehensive)

exchange versus use value, 112verbal instruction, see teachingviewpoints, multiple, 97-8, 113-17visibility, 103

vocational education, 77 {see alsoschooling, trade school)

Vygotsky, L., 48-9

wage labor, see laborwar stories, see storiesway-in, 72Wenger, E., 103Wertsch, J., 49West Africa, 30, 63, 64, 69, 70, 117whole persons, see person, wholewindow analogy, 103Wood, D., 48work {see also exchange of labor; la-

bor; production)and learning, 61, 64, 76, 78, 86,

96, 110-11versus play, 111

world, social, 24, 33, 36, 41, 49-51,52, 54-8, 102, 104, 123 {seealso reproduction; transforma-tion)

worldview, 81, 84

Yucatec, see mid wivesYucatec Maya (language), 13

zone of proximal development, 48-9,61

138

in this volume, lave and wenger undertake a radical and im-

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