The transition point, from periphery into the principal stripof activity, hinges not on the spatial distribution of the participants, or evensimply on the character of the conduct, but rather through the ways thatactions are treated as sequentially responsive and prospectively relevant
And here's a definition of legitimacy - actions are legitimate only when their relevance is shown.
Educationally sig-nificant interactions do not involve abstract bearers of cognitivestructures, but real people who develop a variety of interpersonal re-lationships with one another in the course of their shared activity in agiven institutional context."
This is a nice summary of resnick and lave/wenger put together - we learn by participating in real activities together. Moll et. al. adds that the social and cultural context of the learning environment is critically important to consider.
In AA,pcrsorl:llsffuteo;··an'-tolcrfor the explicit, stated purpose of providing an understanding of alcoholism,
The definition of "understanding" is interesting in this case. It is noteworthy that this is not the understanding brought upon by rigorous analysis and scientific inquiry, but is understanding nonetheless. It seemed to resemble the kind of "understanding" or "learning" evidenced in some of Lave & Wenger scenarios.
continual participation
This idea of embodiment through continual participation is a theme that runs throughout all of the readings - and also connects back to LPP.
The learner only becomes a master of a figured world by immersing themselves in it, first peripherally, and then more and more actively (see the descriptions in chapter 4 about the development of individual's AA story). Ultimately, if successful, they come to identify with the world and see themselves as a part of it.
tries to help the drinker see herself as an alcoholic if she is ''ready.'' [Members] claim that telling their own sto-ries to other alcoholics, and thus helping other alco-holics to achieve sobriety, is an important part of maintaining their own sobriety. [At the same time] telling a personal story, especially at a speaker's meet-ing or on a Twelfth Step call, signals membership be-cause this "is the time that they [members] feel that they belong enough to 'carry the message'.''
This reminded me of Becker's discussion of evaluations in apprenticeships: learners be evaluated repeatedly as they are ready, and that progress is immediately observable (pp. 99-101). It also relates to the larger discussion of the mentor/teacher's role in learning, that they cannot learn for the learner, it is up to the learner to be successful.
structure of the A. A. story, the newcomers must also learn the cultural model of al-coholism encoded in them
This whole example of AA really helped solidify my understanding of LPP and apprenticeship outside the traditional models. I think that AA is a perfect example that considers each person relationally - as an individual, their actions, and the world they are in.
Stories do not just describe a life in a learned genre, but are tools for reinterpreting the past, and understanding the self in terms of the A. A. iden-tity.
Thinking of stories like this made me think back to Becker's provocative use of the word "myth." By using the word he located schools within the long tradition of mythology and storytelling. Essentially, mythology can be understood as just a tool to interpret the past and make sense of the present. Mythology isn't dead or static but is still a really radical tool if used to reinterpret and reconceptualize learning and schools and their relationships - which is what Lave and Wenger are attempting to do with LPP.
Usually, unless the intetpretation runs counter to A. A. beliefs, the speaker is not corrected. Rather, other speakers will take the appropriate parts of the newcomer's comments, and build on this in their own comments, giving parallel accounts with different interpretations, for example, or expanding on parts of their own stories which are similar to parts of the new-comer's story, while ignoring the inappropriate parts of the newcomer's story.
I found this to be a fascinating account of how very specific customs or practices can emerge that facilitate Legitimate Peripheral Participation, even being crucial to their success. How did such a "policy" or "rule" or "custom" come into being?
Any given attempt to analyze a form of learning through legitimate peripheral participation must involve analy-sis of the political and social organization of that form, its historical development, and the effects of both of these on sus-tained possibilities for learning
So what will the generalizable lessons be from LPP? Won't every community of practice have its own historical development, social organization,and political structure?
mov-ing from peripheral to full participation in communities of practice through either formal or informal apprenticeship
In these contexts, it is almost as if apprenticeship has become a way in helping individuals identify their identity. Apprenticeship in these two examples is spoken as a way of life.
If apprenticeship is a form of education in which work and learning are seamlessly re-lated, it is nonetheless a fonn in which the work and under-standing of newcomers bear complex and changing relations with ongoing work processes; the structure of production and the structure of apprenticeship do not coincide as a whole (though they may do so for given tasks, e.g., plot-fixing for the quar-termasters).
What else is a part of the structure of apprenticeship that is not necessarily part of the structure of production (or vice versa)? LW would definitely include identity formation...is there more?
Our intention is to show how learning or failure to learn in each of our examples of appren-ticeship may be accounted for by underlying relations of legit-imate peripheral participation.
Highlights well that LPP is a theory about how we learn (not just in schools or workplaces but also in our other CoP) not a description of a particular way of learning that can be applied
Where there is high volume] a division of labor among a relatively large number of workers increases efficiency. . . . In this situation, not only apprentices but journeymen, too, seldom learn the full range of tasks once proper to their trade
This is similar to Becker...a tradesman may not become a master but it doesn't mean he's not a worker in the trade. Lave and Wagner stress mastery as a goal.
Gain-ing legitimacy is also a problem when masters prevent learning by acting in effect as pedagogical authoritarians, viewing ap-prentices as novices who "should be instructed" rather than as peripheral participants in a community engaged in its own reproduction.
This quote really helped me to understand what Lave and Wenger mean by "legitimate" - the activity that the peripheral participants are doing has to be something that is meaningful or real. But legitimacy is also external, it needs to come from the "master" empowering and trusting the learner.
A learning curriculum is essentially situated. It is not some-thing that can be considered in isolation, manipulated in arbi-trary didactic terms, or analyzed apart from the social relations that shape legitimate peripheral participation. A learning cur-riculum is thus characteristic of a community.
There are strong goals for learning because learners, as peripheral participants, can develop a view of what the whole enterprise is about, and what there is to be learned. Learning itself is an improvised practice: A learning curriculum unfolds in opportunities for engagement in practice. It is not specified as a set of dictates for proper practice.
Important conditions to be met for LPP
In the process, newcomers learn how to make (some-times difficult) repairs, they learn the skills of war-story tell-ing, and they become legitimate participants in the community of practice.
This makes me believe that story telling allows apprentices to gain social knowledge on/about that community. Would this not be considered cultural learning?
Finally, assumptions of uniformity make it difficult to explore the mechanisms by which processes of change and transformation in communities practice and pro-cesses of learning are intricately implicated in each other.
As mentioned in class, the difference in teacher/learner ratio evident in classrooms vs. apprenticeship.
Acceptance by and interaction with acknowledged adept practitioners make learning legiti-mate and of value from the point of view of the apprentice.
Acceptance and interaction with all members of the CoP, not just the masters. (Ties back to section one when LW discussed importance of the learning that occurs between new-comers)
The key to legitimate peripherality is access by newcomers to the community of practice and all that membership entails.
Thus, for example, the butcher apprentices fail to learn and thus to become full participants, not because their legitimacy was denied, but because they weren't given full access.
opportunities for learning are, more often than not, given structure by work practices instead of by strongly asymmetrical master-apprentice relations.
Adds to the above discussion about where legitimacy comes from (who "gives" a new comer legitimacy)
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I enjoy the use of the word "interconnections"
Legitimate periph-eral participation refers both to the development of knowl-edgeably skilled identities in practice and to the reproduction and transformation of communities of practice. It concerns the latter insofar as communities of practice consist of and depend on a membership, including its characteristic biographies/tra-jectories, relationships, and practices. Legitimate peripheral participation is intended as a concep-tual bridge -as a claim about the common processes inherent in the production of changing persons and changing commu-nities of practice. This pivotal emphasis, via legitimate periph-eral participation, on relations between the production of knowledgeable identities and the production of communities of practice, makes it possible to think of sustained learning as embodying, albeit in transformed ways, the structural charac-teristics of communities of practice.
It's a long highlight, but I think it outlines LPP really nicely.
Or to put it the other way around, in a thoroughly historical theory of social practice, the historiciz-ing of the production of persons should lead to a focus on processes of learning.
I thought this was interesting, the connection between learning and identity formation.
As an aspect of social practice, learning involves the whole person; it implies not only a relation to specific activities, but a relation to social communities -it implies becoming a full participant, a member, a kind of person. In this view, learning only partly-and often incidentally-implies becoming able to be involved in new activities, to perform new tasks and functions, to master new understandings. Activities, tasks, functions, and understandings do not exist in isolation; they are part of broader systems of relations in which they have meaning. These systems of relations arise out of and are repro-duced and developed within social communities, which are in part systems of relations among persons. The person is defined by as well as defines these relations. Learning thus implies becoming a different person with respect to the possibilities enabled by these systems of relations.
This quotation really gets at the core of what I am interested in, how do learning experiences call upon - and cause people to evaluate - who they are in the world (and, to take it one step further, their values)?
Lave and Wenger are arguing that an LPP frame enables us to see the relationships between learners, and that it is precisely these relationships, and how learners view themselves in relationship to others. By understanding one's relationship with another, the learner is re-imagining their own identity, and that transformation is incredibly powerful and has incredible potential.
In a theory of practice, cognition and communication in, and with, the social world are situated in the historical development of on-going activity. It is, thus, a critical theory; the social scientist's practice must be analyzed in the same historical, situated terms as any other practice under investigation. One way to think of learning is as the historical production, transformation, and change of persons.
A lot of what I'm getting out of this is that context is crucial. They seem to be arguing that it is easier to understand how learning works by looking at it within the context(s) that it is happening in.
This also connects back to #resnick's ideas about symbol manipulation versus contextualized reasoning.