Learning in social practice

First of all, I like to explain my experience on reading this book; “Situated leaning Legitimate peripheral participation” by Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger.Here  This experience is probably only I felt, but I would like to mention it here as a part of my social learning: the writing of this book is not attractive at all!  It is so dry that I got exhausted so easily.  It was like walking in desert, my feet were sinking in, and my hands were slipping off, couldn't grab anything. (Thank God for a Camel named Dr. Plumb, I got rescued.)  I would like to tell them to go to see plays to theaters or read more classic Novels.  I wonder why it has to be this way.  If their intention to show how theoretical they are, they have done it very well, but if they want as many people as possible to understand their point of view, I am not sure if they succeeded.  It needs art in their writing!  What their investigate is very simple event of our cultural life, but because it is simple, their theory are very detailed and much more complicated than what we can see with our eyes.  Tomasello’s book “The Cultural origin of Human cognition” Here was not easy, but it has a story and art in it.  I wished Lave & Wenger had practiced what they preached in this book; if they want us to become a member of their society, they could have make this theory a bit more transparent with different wording and give some more meaning to it.   Maybe my brain is not used to this kind of writing yet, but it will not hurt to put some more art in it, I think. 

As Lave & Wenger said in their conclusion in this book (Page 121), legitimate peripheral participation has it’s meaning within interconnection among “person, activities, knowing, and world.”  They continued to say that they tried to “develop their thinking in the spirit of this theoretically integrative enterprise.”  I have to admit, even I mentioned my opinion about their writing in above paragraph, that they have done very well to do so.  They gave a very simple traditional activity called “apprenticeship” a deep theoretical integrative meaning.  And here, I would try to put this into my own words; I am just going to try….

All social activities are situated, and in order to understand this is to look at “whole person’s involvement in community practice, not just “receiving” a body of knowledge.” (Page 33)   From this social activity, Lave & Wenger took one characteristic cognitive skill called “learning” and they named this as “Legitimate peripheral participation.”  The reason why is, they said, that learning is “an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world.”  In another word, “the engagement in social practice that entails leaning as integral constituent.” (Page 35)  Leave and Wenger used 5 different social practices as examples to explain their view, which is "learning" is located in social practice. Legitimate peripheral participation could be the key to maintain and forwarding social practice, because it consists of “person, activity, knowing, and social world.”(Page 121) 

The person who is a newcomer becomes a member of community of practice by developing his/her identity.  To develop identity, he/she needs to change knowledge, skill, and discourse.  If the person develops identity in community, there will be meanings and actions in the world for them to connect.

Situated learning activity, therefore, has to move centripetal direction.  The above transformation of person is necessity for this movement. 

Knowing is inside of community, not only within a master.  Master is one of practitioners; therefore, knowing is located in relationship between practitioners.  In addition to this, knowing is located in the social organization and political economy of communities of practice. (Page 122)

Social world could not be separated from all of these.  After all, social world is the place “social practice that are in the process of reproduction” take place. (Page 123)

However, there are many problems arise in these aspects of “learning.”  They are: power in social world; access to centripetal movement as newcomers; transparency of activities; and limiting the centripetal movement of situated learning.  Social practice needs to keep its’ continuity, but at the same time, members’ identities in communities have to be changed. (Displacement) The difficult question is how to handle this contradiction in each community, because we cannot stay still, and our society is always moving.

Now, I believe that there are many points we can use to improve our practice of education in Lifelong learning from their theory.  It will be affective to our teaching if we make sure people are able to learn from each other, organizing activities the way newcomers are able to see the meaning of these activities, allow them to contribute to the practice in relation to their skill and knowledge placements.  And at last, we have to realize that we are not here to just present our knowledge and skills, but we are here to help them establish their identities in a community.  

And it is amazing that these are all coming from Tomasello's theory of our special cognition to recognize the other as intentional being like the self.  (Page 6  Here )