Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Jean Lave 151
with tailors’ apprentices and Japanese abacus experts found that there are no “general” skills.
“The specifics of each practice (whether schooling, tailoring, or candy selling) are inseparable
from the cognitive processes of the users of the system” (Lave, 1977, p. 865). Lave (1988) gave
us new ideas of thinking about learning through her situated learning model because it provided
a language for transfer that extends beyond the acquisition of basic skills in formal settings.
According to Lave and Wenger (1991), the two principles of situated learning maintain that (1)
knowledge needs to be presented in an authentic context and (2) learning requires social interaction
and collaboration. Since social interaction is a critical component of situated learning, learners
become involved in a community of practice. Lave and Wenger (1991) illustrate their theory on
community of practice by observations of different apprenticeships involving Yucatec midwives,
U.S. Navy quartermasters, meat-cutters, nondrinking alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous, and
tailors in an African community. At the beginning, people have to join communities and learn at
the edge or periphery. As they become more experienced, they move from the periphery to the
center of the particular community. Learning is therefore not seen as the gaining of knowledge
by individuals so much as a process of social participation. The nature of the situation impacts
significantly on the process.
Lave and Wenger propose that communities of practice are everywhere and that we are generally
involved in a number of them at any given time—whether that is at school, home, place of
employment, or in our personal and private lives. In some communities of practice we are key or
central members, and in others we are more at the periphery. Over time, this collective learning
results in practices that reflect both the goals of the group and the social relations of the group
members. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by
the sustained pursuit of a shared activity. It would follow, then, that these kinds of collaborating
groups are called communities of practice. Members are brought together by joining in common
activities and by what they have learned through their shared interactions in these activities. The
concept of practice is a combination of the activity and the shared interactions as the learner is
an apprentice to the practices of the group. Learning is therefore construed as an apprenticeship,
or legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice. In this respect, a community
of practice, formal or informal, is different from a community of interest or a geographical
community in that it involves a shared practice.
Lave and Chaiklin (1993) support both of Lave’s earlier works and develop notions of practice
by focusing on issues of context and, again, provide rich descriptions of everyday practices,
including navigation, psychotherapy, artificial intelligence, and being a blacksmith. Cumulatively,
these books have ushered in a new perspective in educational psychology, one that connects the
fields of education and psychology to anthropology, with many connotations for teaching and
learning.
SITUATED LEARNING AND IMPLICATIONS ON TEACHING
The implications on learning are many and growing due to situated learning’s broad and
interdisciplinary appeal. To begin, Lave and Wenger’s work on learning as apprenticeship in
communities of practice has been augmented by other researchers, and educators can now draw
some conclusions about when the transfer of learning from context to context is most likely to
occur. It appears that the main characteristics of transferable learning experiences occur in an
environment characterized by meaningful learning experiences, expert guidance, and knowledgebuilding
collaboration. These criteria for transfer are having huge impacts on instructional design
and learning.
As practitioners, we all have seen the effects of communities of practice in our own classrooms.
Research and textbooks are strongly pushing the concept of project-based learning, as the learning