In reaching this point, the concept has travelled a fair distance from its early days and bridged some remarkable chasms (Lave and Wenger 1990) … After all, the theory first developed as a theory of learning at the Institute for Research on Learning in Palo Alto [California]. It escaped seminars and personal presentations in a report written by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger published by the Institute in 1990. … Lave in her prior work and Lave and Wenger in ‘Situated Learning’ argued … that learning was not the process of replicating what others think – where what is to be learned and whether it has been learned are judged from the perspective of those ‘others’. Rather, it involved deploying through practice the resources – cognitive, material, social – available to you to participate in society, a process which, Lave and Wenger argued, was inseparable from the development of a social identity through legitimateperipheral participation in particular social forms.
To understand learning from this perspective, attention needed to shift, Lave and Wenger showed … to engagement in practice. Taking into account the learner’s perspective … is not an easy shift to make, particularly in the academy, where teaching is so important and its success judged by intellectual clones. It is also a hard shift for other kinds of formal organization, where learning is assumed to be manifest in the ability to follow rules … If, however, learning is replaced by the idea of engagement in social practice … then communities of practice represent the social loci of that engagement and, as is too often overlooked in discussions of Lave and Wenger’s work (my own included), the site of a continuous power struggle over ‘continuity and displacement’.
(Duguid, 2008, pp. 2–3)
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