Best Quotes from Situated Learning by Jean Lave with Page Numbers

Learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral participation.

The mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community.

A person’s intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant.

Learning through apprenticeship was a matter of legitimate peripheral participation.

Learning is an integral aspect of social practice in the lived-in world.

Legitimate peripheral participation is proposed as a descriptor of engagement in social practice that entails learning as an integral constituent.

There may well be no such simple thing as "central participation" in a community of practice.

Complete participation would suggest a closed domain of knowledge or collective practice for which there might be measurable degrees of "acquisition" by newcomers.

Peripheral participation is about being located in the social world.

This viewpoint makes a fundamental distinction between learning and intentional instruction.

All theories of learning are based on fundamental assumptions about the person, the world, and their relations.

Learning is not merely a condition for membership, but is itself an evolving form of membership.

The critique of structural and phenomenological theory early in Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice... suggests the possibility of a (crucially important) break with the dualisms that have kept persons reduced to their minds.

To insist on starting with social practice, on taking participation to be the crucial process,... promotes a view of knowing as activity by specific people in specific circumstances.

Learning thus implies becoming a different person with respect to the possibilities enabled by these systems of relations.

Participation is always based on situated negotiation and renegotiation of meaning in the world.

The very relations by which social and culturally mediated experience is available to persons-in-practice is one key to the goals to be met in developing a theory of practice.

The person is defined by as well as defines these relations.

Knowledge of the socially constituted world is socially mediated and open ended.

Learning, transformation, and change are always implicated in one another.

"Any complex system of work and learning has roots in and interdependencies across its history, technology, developing work activity, careers, and the relations between newcomers and old-timers and among coworkers and practitioners."

"Learning-in-practice in situations that do not draw us in unreflective ways into the school milieu..."

"The historical significance of apprenticeship as a form for producing knowledgeably skilled persons has been overlooked, we believe, for it does not conform to either functionalist or Marxist views of educational 'progress.'"

"Conditions that place newcomers in deeply adversarial relations with masters, bosses, or managers... distort, partially or completely, the prospects for learning in practice."

"Learners must be legitimate peripheral participants in ongoing practice in order for learning identities to be engaged and develop into full participation."

"The need for such analysis motivates our focus on communities of practice..."

"...apprenticeship has no determined balance of relations of power as an abstract concept, it does have such relations in every concrete case."

"Transition from domestic production in which children learned subsistence skills from their same-sex parent... to apprenticeship, which focuses on occupational specialization..."

"...apprenticeship in contexts like Alcoholics Anonymous underscores how identity is intricately connected to processes of participation and learning."

"...the main business of A. A. is the reconstruction of identity, through the process of constructing personal life stories..."

"Legitimate peripheral participation is an initial form of membership characteristic of such a community."

"To be able to participate in a legitimately peripheral way entails that newcomers have broad access to arenas of mature practice."

"The social structure of this practice, its power relations, and its conditions for legitimacy define possibilities for learning."

"The significance of artifacts in the full complexity of their relations with the practice can be more or less transparent to learners."

"Learning must be understood with respect to a practice as a whole, with its multiplicity of relations – both within the community and with the world at large."

"Participation in cultural practice in which any knowledge exists is an epistemological principle of learning."

"Learning occurs through centripetal participation in the learning curriculum of the ambient community."

"The goal of complying with the requirements specified by teaching engenders a practice different from that intended."

"Learning to talk as a full member of a community involves learning how to engage, focus, and shift attention within that community."

"Legitimate peripheral participation is far more than just a process of learning on the part of newcomers; it is a reciprocal relation between persons and practice."

We have tried, in reflective consonance with our theoretical perspective, to reconceive it in interconnected, relational terms.

Exploring these interconnections in specific cases has provided a way to engage in the practice-theory project that insists on participation in the lived-in world as a key unit of analysis.

Legitimate peripheral participation has led us to emphasize the sustained character of developmental cycles of communities of practice.

This longer and broader conception of what it means to learn comes closer to embracing the rich significance of learning in human experience.

The person has been correspondingly transformed into a practitioner, a newcomer becoming an old-timer.

This idea of identity/membership is strongly tied to a conception of motivation.

Legitimate peripheral participation moves in a centripetal direction, motivated by its location in a field of mature practice.

Communities of practice have histories and developmental cycles, and reproduce themselves in such a way that the transformation of newcomers into old-timers becomes unremarkably integral to the practice.

Knowing is inherent in the growth and transformation of identities and is located in relations among practitioners.

All of this takes place in a social world, dialectically constituted in social practices that are in the process of reproduction, transformation, and change.