Before we get into the specifics about communities of practice as a learning model for apprenticeship we will need to talk about some key concepts related to Jean Lave’s Situated Learning (English copy is posted on the investigative research site.
For our purposes in the Indigenous Research Center I would like to highlight some cross overs of Situated Learning and the indigenous learning context.
1. Situated Learning is a social method of education that centers the learning activity in a learning community.
2. Situated Learning is contrasted to what I will refer to as “classroom” education in that the learning is situated in the context of the craft or learning objective, whereas classroom education is placed in an artificial setting where the learning of concepts related to the craft is separated from the context of the craft itself.
3. Situated Leaning uses the learning context as part of the agent of learning. For example in classroom education the teacher is the agent who transmits the learning, where in Situated Learning the teacher or master of the craft uses the learning context and other apprentices in addition to his own instruction as the agents to transfer learning.
4. Situated learning is related to the concrete-relational and field based-values that enable the student to connect their learning to their ministry context and practical world. This alone creates a learning model that promises greater effectiveness in both comprehension and practice for the indigenous student.
As the name suggests, Situated Learning views learning as a situated activity, that is an activity that is centered on the learning objective.
This situated activity thus has as its central defining characteristic a process that Lave calls Legitimate Peripheral Participation By Legitimate we refer to students or learners who have been accepted into the community (or educational program) and have a vested interest to learn. They are approved, like a registered student is registered has a right to or a place of standing in the program. In this case he is a member of the community. By Peripheral, we mean that students enter the educational community as a beginner, a students, or learner. They begin from the outside of a sphere, where the master of the craft or professor of the course has as their objective to impart knowledge through the social context of learning (that which we will refer to later as a community of practice) to the student. By participation, we refer to the act of the student's participation in the learning activity as an agent of learning.
Often in classroom education the student has a more passive role in their learning where his role is to receive instruction, with limited activities (such as questions or learning tasks) that tied to the artificial environment of the classroom, or where their active participation might be postponed to activities outside of the classroom, where the student might be assigned a project or an internship.
So when we refer to learning as a situated activity through legitimate peripheral participation, we draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural of a community.
Legitimate peripheral participation provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of 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 sociocultural practice. This social process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills. (Lave 29)
I would encourage you to review this concept in Jean Lave’s book on Situated Learning. Once we have this ground work laid we will move on to Dr. Etienne Wenger’s Community of Practice. Also these concepts are included but not in the same detail in the videos posted.
For those in our group who wish to work with me on the research team, I would encourage you to begin thinking about your students in a larger context of a learning community, and your specific classes or courses as a part of that community. Our end goal is not to eliminate classroom learning, but rather to broaden the classroom into the ministry context and an educational context of learning within a community of practitioners.
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