Situated Learning

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger

Lave and Wenger each brings to the development of the model of situated learning rich, diverse academic preparation and professional research and experiences. Lave earned her PhD from Harvard University (1968) in social anthropology and is professor emerita of geography at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an expert in social learning, and her work in situated learning is strongly informed by her ethnographic studies in apprenticeship. Lave initiated development of the model that became situated learning by determining that housewives were able to conduct mathematical calculations while doing comparison shopping that they could not repeat in a classroom environment.

Etienne Wenger earned his PhD from the University of California, Irvine in artificial intelligence (1990). While Wenger was employed by the Institute for Research of Learning (now the Institute for Research of Learning and Development), he worked with Lave researching apprenticeships with individuals and in settings, including Yucatec midwives, Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia, naval quartermasters, meat cutters, and nondrinking AA members. Together the two derived additional principles and a more robust model of situated learning. Their seminal work, titled Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, was published in 1991.

Development of Situated Learning Model

Lave proposed that learning does not occur in isolation but rather occurs in relationship with others, through social interaction and spontaneous, appropriate activities within an authentic context. This activity is embedded within what Lave called a community of practice or CoP. A CoP serves as the authentic context and within it has tasks that align with real-world situations with a [Page 650]focus of being in some specifically identified and bound-aried domain. The activities, tools, interactions, and conversations within that CoP produce context-specific types of artifacts that are uniquely bounded by the culture of the CoP.

Lave’s model was deepened through collaboration with Wenger. In their 1991 book, they proposed the concept of legitimate peripheral participation, suggesting that those novices who seek entrance to a community of practice typically enter from the periphery, participating from a speak about rather than a speak within perspective.

In order to master skills more deeply and move toward expertise and central participation as an expert within the CoP, the individual must learn the contextual language, normative behaviors, and other contextual factors of the CoP. Their resulting thinking and behaviors will increasingly reflect the unique characteristics of the CoP.

According to Lave and Wenger, three factors must exist for situated learning to occur:

• 1.
  Domain: A domain or system of thinking and doing must be clearly identifiable.
• 2.
  Community of Practice: Wenger defines a CoP as people who share concerns about something they do and want to learn how to do it better. He further states that CoPs are formed by people who engage in collective learning in a shared domain of interest.
• 3.
  The Practice: There must be specifically, contextually placed interpersonal engagement and activity that results in the way things are done or practiced within the CoP.

Lave and Wenger also list the four keys to newcomer success within the

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