ABSTRACT
The American anthropologist Jean Lave is Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She has studied education and schooling in pre-industrial societies and, through comparisons with the corresponding American conditions, she has become a strong advocate of “practice learning.” Most signifi cantly this approach has been formulated in the famous book Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation which she published together with Etienne Wenger in 1991. The following chapter is an extract of Lave’s introduction to the anthology Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, edited together with Seth Chaiklin and published in 1993 as a kind of programmatic update, reformulation and overview of the learning approach of the Russian cultural-historical and activity theoretical school as developed in the 1930s by Lev Vygotsky and others.
