I began the last post with the comment: “When we use the term legitimate peripheral participation Lave is referring to this as an analytical tool to look at the learning process” it would almost be better said that Lave has constructed a lens through her term of Legitimate Peripheral Participation rather than a method of education. This lens is measuring a collective approach to learning through the act of participation in a social learning context, and she is or will be proposing that this social context be placed into an educational community of practitioners that she refers to as a Community of Practice. Lave is looking at the model of apprenticeship and turning it into a theory of education in turn can be used in different contexts or educational models.
The idea that one learns only from an individual teacher would not be collective enough for Lave. What she discovered in the apprenticeship model was that while learning took place between the Master and the apprentice, the learning environment included different points of learning based on the interrelationship of different levels of knowledge among the practitioners, and one might add at across different levels of power distance. This concept will be explored in the next few chapters.
It is important to highlight from an intercultural studies viewpoint that Lave’s Situated Learning approaches learning through a collective lens that aligns with concrete relational cultures who are collective in nature. As we read through this preliminary study to set the stage for Communities of Practice, begin asking the question, could there be such a thing as Situated Discipleship? and if so, what would that look like?
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