Lave and Wenger‟s idea of situated learning marks a significant departure from the
conventional ways of thinking about learning. In the conventional view, learning has
been considered as something that individuals do and as an acquisition of certain
forms of knowledge. But for Lave and Wenger (1991), it involved a deepening
„process of participating in communities of practice (p. 49)‟. According to them,
75 of them at work, school, home and other organisations in society. In some groups we
are core members and in others we are at the periphery.
The „central defining characteristic of the situated learning model of Lave and
Wenger is the process called legitimate peripheral participation. In Lave and
Wenger‟s words:
„Learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and the
mastery of knowledge and skills requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the socio-cultural practices of a community. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers and about activities, identities, artefacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. A
person‟s intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of learning is
configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a socio-cultural practice. This social process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills‟ (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 29).
In the process of participating in multiple communities of practice, individuals
develop personal identities that are shaped by and are formative of their activities in
the various communities in which they participate (Wenger, 1998).
Furthermore, „in contrast to learning as internalization, learning as increasing
participation in communities of practice concerns the whole person acting in the
world‟ (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p.49). Thus, the person in this community is not an
isolated individual, but a whole person acting in a socio-cultural community.
Learning is seen as a social process, which involves changing relationships between
76
practices. Learning is „an evolving, continuously renewed set of relations‟ (p.50). Thus Lave and Wenger‟s theory presents a relational view of the person and learning
(Tennant, 1997).
Tennant (1997) points out that this way of describing learning is something more than
simply „learning by doing‟ or experiential learning. The concept of situated learning
involves people becoming full participants in the world and generating meaning.
Lave and Wenger (1991) comment,
„For newcomers… the purpose is not to learn from talk as a substitute
for legitimate peripheral participation; it is to learn to talk as a key to
legitimate peripheral participation‟ (p. 108-9)
Therefore the discourse is not separated from practice; discourse itself is seen as
social and cultural practice (Tennant, 1997).
Lave and Wenger‟s theory also rejects the idea of acquiring schemata to understand
the world and proposes that learners acquire the ability to play various roles in
communities of practice. As pointed out by Hanks:
„The skilful learner acquires something more like the ability to play
various roles in various fields of participation. This would involve things other than schemata: the ability to anticipate, a sense of what can feasibly occur within specified contexts, even if in a given case it does not occur. It involves a prereflective grasp of complex situations
…..Mastery involves timing of actions relative to changing circumstances‟ (Hanks, 1991, p. 20)
77 The strength of this theory for understanding student „learning has its emphasis on the need to understand knowledge and learning in context, and how learning occurs
through participation in communities of practice‟ (Tennant, 1997, p.77) by socialisation into existing beliefs, values and practices. In the CoPT framework,
learning is a function of identity and success in an educational context which is
considered as full participation. The individuals adopt and engage in the valued
practices of the community while contributing to the community and modifying their
own practice and shifting values (O‟Donnell and Tobbell , 2007).
However, a number of problems arise in using this theory to analyse student learning
in the undergraduate course. One is related to the definition of the community and its
practice in which the students are involved. If we take the undergraduates and their
lecturers as the community‟ then the lecturers can be considered as the experts and
the students as the novices. But then there arises the problem of whether the students
and the lecturers are engaged in the same practice. If we consider that the lecturers‟ practice is characterised by teaching, research and dissemination of knowledge, then
is it right to consider that all the students are to become lecturers who are aspiring to
become experts in those areas? In reality, all students who participate in
undergraduate education do not aspire to become lecturers or academics. Their career
choices do not often bear a direct relation to the subject disciplines that they study
(Brennan and Osborne, 2008) and therefore they might not feel that they are part of
78 A second problem is the lack of clarity in Lave and Wenger‟s analysis, regarding how communities of practice respond to social and technological changes, where
newcomers, for example, have the knowledge and access to new technologies that
will displace traditional methods of practice (Tennant, 1997). It also does not explain
how we learn new practices or create new knowledge and what is learned in the
process of socialisation into existing beliefs, values and practices (Edwards, 2005a).
Thus, the communities of practice theory provides only a partial answer to my
question of how students regulate their learning in relation to the demands of the
context and their valued outcomes.
2.3.2 Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and its applicability to my