ABSTRACT
Born in the United States in 1939, Jean Lave, the coauthor of Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, is a social anthropologist based at the University of California, Berkeley, with an interest in social theory. Situated Learning is a pioneering book on social theories of learning. Lave and Wenger's book introduces a new way of looking at how people acquire knowledge. Lave and Wenger describe their apprenticeship theory by observing different kinds of communities, among them: midwives, tailors, US Navy quartermasters (who supervise supplies), meat cutters, and non-drinking alcoholics. People learn by joining these communities and participating in activities, at first as fringe players. The main argument is that learning should not be seen as an individual's acquisition of knowledge, but as a process of social participation. The focus is on the ways in which learning is 'an evolving, continuously renewed set of relations'.
