Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation

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Critical Summary Lave and Wenger’s “Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation” centers on the practice of legitimate peripheral participation, or how newcomers and old timers work together to develop knowledge and skills through full participation. In their process of understanding situated learning and legitimate peripheral participation, the authors reevaluated how apprenticeship, in a metaphorical sense, applies to these concepts and how situated learning is more than just learning by doing. Situational learning is a theory, so Lave and Wenger needed to look at apprenticeships from a theoretical perspective rather than viewing the different forms of apprenticeships throughout history. Their interpretation of situated learning …show more content…
In Lave and Wenger’s “Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation”, cultural mediation is presented through legitimate peripheral participation, which is an analytical viewpoint on learning to that somewhat combines situated learning and apprenticeship and where newcomers learn from oldtimers and through learning the newcomers become the oldtimers. While cultural mediation may not be explicitly mentioned in this article, one can take the ideas cited and apply it to this week’s concepts. Legitimate peripheral participation can be applied to family traditions. For example, every year, we have tamales for breakfast on Christmas day. My mom grew up with this tradition, passed down from her grandparents, and now we follow this tradition. My family’s culture and traditions have mediated my views and how I will always associate tamales with Christmas morning. I will likely pass on this tradition to my children in the future, therefore culture mediation will continue onto the future generations of my family. The oldtimer, my mom, taught me, the newcomer, a tradition, and now that I am well versed in this tradition, I have become and oldtimer. In Rogoff’s “Development of Participation in Cultural Activities”, Rogoff argues that “Culture is not static; it is formed from the efforts of people working together, using and adapting material and symbolic tools provided by predecessors and in the process creating new ones” (Rogoff 2003, 51). Based on this argument, learning is culturally mediated, but people mediate culture as well. We learn from the developments and history of our ancestors, or oldtimers, that had become cultural staples, but the way we, newcomers, utilize this culture and develop our own history mediates the culture for future