An Analysis of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's Situated Learning : Legitimate Peripheral Participation

Social anthropologist Jean Lave and computer scientist Etienne Wenger’s seminal Situated Learning helped change the fields of cognitive science and pedagogy by approaching learning from a novel angle.Traditionally, theories of learning and education had focused on processes of cognition - the mental processes of knowledge formation that occur within an individual.Lave and Wenger chose to look at learning not as an individual process, but a social one.As so often with the creative thinking process, a small, simple shift in emphasis was all that was required to show things in an entirely different light.What Situated Learning illustrated - and emphasized - was that learning is dependent on its social situation.Even though the most effective way to learn is through interaction with experts and peers in a community organized around a common interest, the traditional cognitive learning model failed to account for the way in which learners interact with their ‘community of practice.’ The new