ucation of any kind is the positivistic problem-solution logic that shapes both the research and the discussions. In this logic, the idea that learning or teaching are processes is largely ignored because identifying a process as a problem, especially a process like learning, which is not scien- tifically understood, would not allow for the creation of a tidy list of solutions. Rather than see the processes or the lack of information about the processes as a problem, educational research and discussions may identify the people who represent those processes—student (learner) and teacher—as the problem and focus on proposing or evaluating solutions to improve the people not the processes in which they are involved.
Learning and teaching are processes, and they are processes that occur as part of a larger system of cultural processes. While cultural processes may have many non-manipulative purpos- es, like ensuring a given population’s ability to survive in a specific physical environment, cul- tural processes are also reflective of society’s use of power and knowledge as controlling sys- tems (Foucault, 1975). As Foucault and many others have shown, society’s controlling systems are created by those with the most power and are designed to maintain and reproduce the status quo (i.e., the idea that those in power are the natural or normal holders of such power). There- fore, educational research, which is typically produced by those who have educationally appren- ticed themselves to the institutions of power and knowledge and as such have the tendency to become consciously or unconsciously part of the supervisory or surveillance (Foucault, 1975) mechanisms of a society’s controlling systems, may truly reflect nothing more than ways to im-
prove the people’s ability to maintain and reproduce the processes so that no true social change occurs or even threatens to occur. Of course, educational research does not always do this, and many educational researchers explicitly try to avoid doing this. Because education is one of so- ciety’s controlling systems, any investigation of pedagogy, particularly critical and feminist ped- agogy, must carefully resist the socially acceptable temptation to focus entirely on the individual people of the teaching-learning situation, and instead, adopt a theoretical orientation to pedagogy that accounts for the processes or interactions that occur between and among the people of the teaching-learning situation.
One such theory is the socio-cultural theory of situated learning proposed by Lave and Wenger (1991) known as legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). This theory of learning, which was developed through ethnographic studies of learning in naturalistic environments in- volving apprenticeship, asserts that learning is a process of becoming or not becoming a member of a community of practice (CoP) (Lave & Wenger, 1991). According to the theory of LPP, a CoP is “a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 98). Newcomers
to a CoP may or may not become full-er participants by interacting with the other participants
(new and long-term), practices, and artifacts of the community. Over time, these interactions change the identity of newcomers who may or may not begin to perceive and respond to ideas or events in ways that are similar to long-term community members. As the newcomers’ identity changes, they may become reproductions of long-term community members, which, of course, maintains and reproduces the community. They may also through their own novel understand- ings of community practices interject growth and change into the community, or as their identity changes in relation to the community, newcomers may actively reject community membership or
be alienated from community membership by other members. In any case, Lave and Wenger (1991) assert that the process of becoming or not becoming is an organic process to human groups regardless of the situation.
As mentioned, membership is not a certain result simply because one is a newcomer or even because one actively desires membership. A key factor in LPP is the concept of legitimacy. Access to a CoP is governed by long-term participants’ willingness and ability to grant legitima- cy to newcomers (Lave & Wenger, 1991). If long-term participants do not acknowledge new- comers by providing access to other members, practices and artifacts of the community, new- comers will not be able to become long-term participants because they will not be able to learn to perceive and respond to events as long-term community members do. For example, Lave and Wenger (1991) discuss how the use of some artifacts in the community may be opaque (i.e., it may be unclear for newcomers how these artifacts are used, and long-term members may not ex-
plain their use for a variety of reasons), and this lack of communication may disallow full-er par-
ticipation to some newcomers.
According to Lave (1997), school communities may be especially opaque about their practices. As she illustrates, teachers and students, who are theoretically participating in the same community, may not be clear on what the goals or purposes of school communities are. She compares naturalistic communities like Weight Watchers to school communities with a third grade class learning math and finds that the newcomers’ dilemma identification shaped the learn- ing in both environments. If newcomers themselves decided that they did have a weight prob- lem, that is they identified their dilemma in a way that was similar to long-term members, they then also aligned themselves with the practices of the Weight Watchers’ community, and they became like long-term members in their perceptions and responses. On the other hand, if new-
comers like the third grade students identified their dilemma as winning the approval of the teacher (the long-term participant) while the teacher identified the dilemma as mastering a spe- cific new math strategy, the newcomers did not become like the long-term member. Instead, the newcomers used an old math strategy that they knew so that they could more certainly win the teacher’s approval with a correct answer. In effect, the newcomer participants (third graders) and long-term participant (teacher) of the classroom community had very different points of view about what practices would allow a newcomer to become more like a long-term participant, and these different points of view were the result of a lack of clarity or some might argue a lack of authenticity on the part of the teacher as to what the real purposes of school communities of practice are.
The original theory of LPP proposed by Lave and Wenger (1991) has experienced some mutations over the years. In particular, Wenger, one of the founding theorists of LPP, has pro- gressively focused more on the formation of CoPs rather than the LPP process (e.g., Wenger, 1998; Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). Wenger’s focus on the formation of CoP has re- sulted in educational research that attempts to manipulate the formation of CoPs (e.g., Barab, Barret & Squire, 2002; Haneda, 1997; Schlager, Fusco & Schank, 2002; Wenger, 1998; Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002). This has shifted the ideas of CoP in the direction of prescriptive solutions to people problems, which fits nicely with socially acceptable ways of looking at edu- cation. Lea (2002) critiques the recent types of emphasis on the formation of CoPs for trans- forming the concept CoP that originated in LPP from a heuristic for teaching and learning to a prescription for teaching and learning.
In this study, in accordance with Lea (2002), I utilized the original concepts of LPP and CoP (Lave & Wenger, 1991), which proposed that LPP is an analytical viewpoint. It is a view-
point that acts as heuristic indicating where I need to look and why I might need to look there if I want to know more about teaching and learning. To begin, LPP offers researchers, especially autoethnographic researchers, a set of sensible assumptions for looking at teaching and learning processes (i.e., interactions between people, practices, and artifacts) rather than individual people as problems in a process. If one accepts as Lave (1996) does that schools and classrooms are CoPs without entering into prescriptive evaluations of what makes them a CoP, the focus be- comes what identities (useful and un-useful) are being enacted and acquired in school and class- room CoPs and how are these identities being enacted and acquired in those CoPs. Lave (1996) suggests that those who truly want to do research on learning in schools should “…establish the locations in which and the processes by which the most potent identity-constituting learning con- junctions occur” (p. 162). She also suggests that LPP as a heuristic can be used to address social justice issues. For example, schools produce racialized identities, and Lave (1996) argued that LPP can be used as a heuristic to discover where and how this is happening in schools. Conven- iently, LPP (Lave & Wenger, 1991) suggests three specific areas in which to look - participants,
practices, and artifacts - for both the what and the how of identity enactment and acquisition.
In pedagogical research, LPP (often referred to as CoP) has provided researchers with in- teresting ideas about where to look for identity-constituting learning conjunctions and how to understand the processes that are found. For example, Morita (2004) looks at participant behav- iors, most especially second language newcomer-participants’ decision to be silent, when at- tempting to become full-er members of their new graduate class CoPs and finds both a sense of newcomer agency in the silence as well as long-term member obstacles that led to silence in the classroom practices. Similarly, O’Connor (2001) looks at newcomer-participants’ discourse, particularly their use of indexicals, in an intentionally manufactured CoP classroom community
and finds newcomer agency in newcomers’ resistance to the prescribed discourse of the fabricat- ed model of a CoP.
Toohey (1998) and Belcher (1994) used LPP to look at the practices of the academic community. Toohey (1998) finds that the spatial arrangement of L2 children (newcomer- participants) in a NS/L2 classroom, their borrowing and lending practices with one another, and the manner in which the teacher (most experienced long-term participant) managed the topic of copying leads to the systematic exclusion of the L2 newcomers, thereby denying them access to community membership. Belcher (1994) investigates the practices of advisors (long-term partic- ipants) and L2 graduate students (newcomer-participants) and finds that some practices by both types of participants decrease the potential for community membership and some increase the potential.
Canagarajah (2002) focuses on artifacts in his study of how L2 academic research writers in international settings (newcomer-participants) negotiate membership in an English language academic research community (long-term participants). He finds that newcomer-participants lack of access to artifacts of the community (e.g., books and journals) can be an obstacle to the newcomer’s ability to become a full-er member of the community through publication. Howev- er, he also finds that newcomer-participants can strategically use the artifacts to which they do have access to successfully negotiate a full-er membership.
Casanave (1998) and Freedman and Adam (2000) utilize LPP less as a source of infor- mation about where to look for identity learning and more as a way to explain how communities of practice manage membership. In Casanave’s (1998) investigation of the development of aca- demic writing identities in specific disciplinary communities - one North American and one Jap- anese - she finds that newcomer membership in both communities is negotiated through interper-
sonal relationships in different ways. Freedman and Adam (2000) compare the acquisition of workplace genres in school versus workplace settings, and find that the relationships in each set- ting affect the ways that newcomer-participants’ learn to produce community artifacts (e.g., gen- res). They, not surprisingly, find that newcomer-participants who are attempting full-er mem- bership in a classroom setting versus a workplace setting are enacting and acquiring different identities because they are joining different CoPs.
As previously discussed, critical and feminist pedagogy seeks inclusion for all in class- rooms and schools, and as such, must issue the call for others to notice and respond to the com- plex and often hidden ways that exclusion in classrooms and schools occurs. LPP complements the call-and-response function of critical and feminist pedagogy by providing a clear organiza- tional framework for understanding and calling out how classrooms and schools operate to pro- duce identities so that teachers and learners can respond. Among other things, LPP provides au- toethnographic critical and feminist pedagogy researchers with a way to understand their rela- tionship to and with learners. LPP provides specific areas of inquiry for researchers that are like- ly to affect the overall well-being of their CoPs. In addition, LPP supports the idea that re- searchers needed to be self-reflexive and build self-awareness as there is a strong likelihood that their own identities in other communities (e.g., institutional CoPs) may cause them to engage in practices that restrict access to the practices or perspectives needed for fuller participation in their own classroom communities, which could exclude newcomer-participants.