Leaming viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral par­ticipation. By this we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcom­ers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community.

There are central issues that are only touched upon in this monograph, and that need to be given more attention. The concept of "community of practice" is left largely as an intuitive notion, which serves a purpose here but which requires a more rigorous treatment. In particular, unequal relations of power must be included more systematically in our analysis. Hegemony over resources for learning and alienation from full participation are inherent in the shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality of participation in its historical realizations. It would be useful to understand better how these relations generate characteristically intersti­tial communities of practice and truncate possibilities for iden­tities of mastery.

In this sense, peripherality, when it is enabled, suggests an opening, a way of gaining access to sources for understanding through growing involve­ment. The ambiguity inherent in peripheral participation must t�en _be connected to issues of legitimacy, of the social orga­mzat10n of and control over resources, if it is to gain its full analytical potential.

Furthermore, legitimate peripherality is a complex notion, imRlicated in social structures involving rel�tions _of pow�r •.

But we intend for the concept to be taken as a whole. Each of its aspects is indispensable in defining the others and cannot be considered in isolation. Its constituents contribute inseparable aspects whose combinations create a landscape _ shapes, degrees, textures -of community membership.

In our view, earning is not merely situated in practice -as if it were some independently reifiable process that just happened to be located somewhere; learning is ao integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world.

The no­tion of situated learning now appears to be a transitory con-cept, a bridge, between a view according to w�ich cognit'.ve processes (and thus learning) are primary and a v�ew according to which social practice is the primary, generative p�eno�e­non and learning is one of its characteristics.

The gen­erality of any form of knowledge always lies i� the powe� to renegotiate the meaning of the past and future m constructing the meaning of present circumstances.

Second, this conception of situated learning clearly was more �nc�m�assi�� in i�tent than �onventional notions of '' learning in suu or learnmg by domg" for which it was used as a rough equivalent.

"Legitimate peripheral participation" provides a way to speak about the relations between newcom­ers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice. A person's intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is configured through the process of be­coming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This so­cial process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills.