94: Situated Learning – Lave & Wenger - Talking About Organizations Podcast

With special guest Davide Nicolini

Situated learning is one of the three main streams of contemporary adult learning theories alongside experiential and social learning, but was the last of the three to gain momentum among contemporary learning scholars. In this episode, we explore the work that ignited new interest in ideas first laid out by Lev Vygotsky in the 1920s and 1930s – Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger’s Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, published in 1991.

This short but powerful book presents a new way of thinking about adult learning as a social activity in which experienced members of a group or community of practice share their knowledge with new members to perpetuate the group identity. They present five case studies – one by Lave herself with four from other researchers – to help broaden the perspective of how situated learning works. This is a form of growing through social involvement in which newer members are initiated through the exercise of low-risk or controlled tasks. As new members become more confident and experienced, they are encouraged to take on more complicated tasks until they have achieved some level of mastery and are prepared to initiate new members on their own. The key is that all members, including the new, have a stake in the outcome – unlike other forms of learning in which the new member is shielded from the effects of errors or misjudgments. The defining characteristic of this learning is called legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), which is not so much a pedagogy or educational method so much as an analytical tool for understanding how learning takes place as a social activity.

From the above, it is tempting to think that situated learning and apprenticeship are the same, but according to Lave & Wenger, they are not. Traditional apprenticeship is but one form, and there are many others that do not involve a formal master-understudy arrangement. Situated learning can employ any context in which there are experienced members shaping the learning of inexperienced members with the goal of perpetuating the knowledge and identity of the group – who may be formally defined or merely habitually associated together. This is demonstrated through the inductive nature of the book that derives situated learning and LPP from the case studies that include traditional-style apprenticeships (Vai and Gola tailors) with familial relationships (Yucatec midwives), professional certification (Navy quartermasters), and non-drinking alcoholics (Alcoholics Anonymous participants). The fifth case, of meat cutters, is a cautionary tale that situated learning is neither a panacea for educational ills nor a guarantor of success. As situated learning requires a certain level of power distance between the experienced and inexperienced, this power distance can become a barrier to learning.

We welcome Davide Nicolini who is Professor of Organization Studies at Warwick Business School and current co-director of the IKON Research Centre at Warwick, our first sponsor of the podcast. Davide was present at key events in 1980s and 1990s as the ideas of situated learning were presented and published, and provides us with some tremendous insights on the both their origins and what came of them as Lave and Wenger’s paths would later diverge.