Books by Jean Lave

Interweaves analysis of the process of apprenticeship among the Vai and Gola tailors of Liberia with reflections on the evolution of the author's research on those tailors in the late 1970s. This title shows how the critical questions raised by ethnographic research erode conventional assumptions, altering the direction of the work that follows.

In this important theoretical treatist, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning - that learning is fundamentally a social process. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. LPP provides a way to speak about crucial relations between newcomers and old-timers and about their activities, identities, artefacts, knowledge and practice. The communities discussed in the book are midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics, however, the process by which participants in those communities learn can be generalised to other social groups.