A very great musician came and stayed in [our] house. He made
one big mistake . . . [he] determined to teach me music,
and consequently no learning took place. Nevertheless, I did casually
pick up from him a certain amount of stolen knowledge.
[Rabindrath Tagore quoted in Bandyopadhyay, 1989: 45]
1 Operationalization vs Legitimization
One of the most persistent educational questions following discussions
of situated learning has been, How can these situated theories
be operationalized? (see Lave & Wenger, 1991, p.41.) In particular,
for those who share an interest in technology, the questions have
usually been of the sort: How can ideas of situated learning be
instantiated in educational technology? What sort of systems can
we build? What sort of system would be most appropriate to teach
x in a situated way?
We find it quite difficult to address these questions-not because
it is impossible to build technology to support learning, but
because that is a different problem from building technology for
teaching. Reconceptualizing learning, as situated approaches have
done, requires also reconceptualizing prevalent notions of teaching,
instruction, the learner, subject matter, technology, and system,
transforming these into something quite different and thereby
making it difficult to phrase new answers in old terms. The questions
to be asked become radically transformed.
For instance, in what follows, we try to provide some sort justification
for transforming the question, How do you operationalize situated
theory? into, How do you legitimize theft? We try to do this particular
transformation by contrasting a set of oppositional terms that
respectively underpin and undermine conventional notions of operationalization.
These are
instruction vs learning
explicit vs implicit
individual vs social
systems narrowly construed vs systems broadly construed
The implications of these oppositions will, we hope, justify our
transformation of the initial question.
We base our very brief account here on a longer analysis we did
elsewhere in the context of workplace learning, where most of
our own work is centered (Brown and Duguid, 1992). There are undoubtedly
very significant differences between schools and workplaces as
situations for learning. But there are also important though often
overlooked commonalities-commonalities that situated approaches
have brought to the fore. Consequently, we believe that by taking
a situated approach there is a great deal designers for either
situation can learn from each other.
2. Transforming Terms
2.1 Instruction vs Learning
The distance between the initial question ("How do you operationalize
this theory?") and our transformation ("How do you legitimize
theft?") can be illustrated most quickly by pointing to the
inversion implicit in the question. Where "situated learning"
talks of learning, questions about educational technology
tend to be framed around teaching and instruction. A
situated approach contests the assumption that learning is a response
to teaching.
It is undoubtedly a little unfair to accuse questioners of inverting
the order of things. It was actually one of the primary insightful
moves of Jean Lave's work on situated learning (Lave, 1988, Lave
et al., 1989) to invert established perspectives and to insist
on looking at learning not, as is conventional, from the pedagogical
perspective, but instead from the learner's perspective. Whether
the learner is a school kid, a carpenter, a cardiologist, or a
CEO, if you want to understand learning and what is learned in
any interaction you have to investigate from the point of view
of that learner. From that perspective it becomes immediately
clear that even if a learner did not learn what a teacher, or
educational technology, or workplace instructor attempted to teach,
it is not justifiable to conclude that nothing was learned.
The importance of shifting perspective can in part be explained
by the difference between the two implicit views of what learning
is. On the one hand, it is seen as the end result of a process
of transmitting knowledge. When teaching is successful, according
to this view, learners will "have" what the teacher
transmitted; when it is unsuccessful, they will not. Knowledge
then, is unchanging and transitive; learners and teachers, for
the most part are either competent or deficient. The knowledge
is either successfully or unsuccessfully taught and learned.
The alternative view sees learning as part of an inevitably unfinished,
but continuous process that goes on throughout life. Each event,
circumstance, or interaction is not discrete. Rather, each is
assimilated or appropriated in terms of what has gone before.
The process is not, then, like the addition of a brick to a building-where
the brick remains as distinct and self-contained as it was in
the builder's hand. Instead, it is a little like the addition
of color to color in a painting, where the color that is added
becomes inseparably a part of the color that was there before
and both are transformed in the process. Thus, what is learned
can never be judged solely in terms of what is taught.
Of course, this paint metaphor is still misleading. Learning is
not such a passive activity. The shade that events, circumstances,
or interactions take on in the process of learning are determined
through active appropriation. This appropriation is unlikely
to involve simply what an instructor hopes to impart. It is more
likely to involve many other peripheral features of which the
teacher might be unaware, but which collectively make sense for
the learner. For the act of appropriation is simultaneously an
act of sense-making in terms of the learner's view of the world.
The point is illustrated in our opening quotation from Tagore,
the Indian poet, musician, and Nobel laureate. Describing the
role of the instructor hired to teach him music, Tagore writes
"he determined to teach me music, and consequently no learning
took place"-at least, no learning in the terms laid out by
the teacher and his syllabus. But Tagore reveals with wonderful
insight that something important and profound did result from
interactions between these two: "Nevertheless, I did pick
up from him a certain amount of stolen knowledge"
(our emphasis). This knowledge Tagore "stole" by watching
and listening to the musician as the latter, outside his classes,
played for his own and others' entertainment. Only then, and not
in dismembered didactic exercises, was Tagore able to see and
understand the social practice of musicianship.
It is a fundamental challenge for design-for both the school and
the workplace to redesign the learning environment so that newcomers
can legitimately and peripherally participate in authentic social
practice in rich and productive ways to, in short, make it possible
for learners to "steal" the knowledge they need.
2.2 Explicit vs Implicit
Part of the need to "steal" arises because relatively
little of the complex web of actual practice can be made the subject
of explicit instruction. A great deal inevitably remains implicit
in practice itself, where it is always available, for those who
have access, to be stolen as required. The alternative, conventional
route of trying to render the implicit explicit is highly problematic.
In the first place, though certain implicit aspects of practice
can be made explicit for instruction, there is no such thing as
a "complete" account (see Suchman, 1987). Consequently,
a learner offered only explicit information faces an inevitably
partial and often incoherent account of practice. Furthermore,
in being explicated, the implicit loses its value as implicit
knowledge. The two-implicit and explicit-play two different roles.
Compared to abstracted, explicit knowledge the implicit aspects
of practice, while occasionally difficult to get in perspective,
have a dynamism by virtue of their very implicitness. They are
inherent in practice and change and evolve with it. By contrast,
abstractions, like signposts, can provide crucial clarification
and direction in confused situations. But like signposts, they
too can be made irrelevant by practice as it evolves and develops
new routes across the domain.
Because of its emphasis on the implicit in practice, situated
arguments have occasionally been accused of championing the implicit,
and denouncing the explicit and abstract as if these were somehow
antithetical to practice (e.g. Palincsar, 1989; see also Brown,
Collins, & Duguid, 1989b and Lave, in preparation). But explication
and abstraction are themselves situated social practices.
They are developed in the process of ongoing activity of one sort
or another. Thus they cannot be inherently antithetical to it.
They do, however, have to be understood in terms of the specific
social practice in which they play a part. Being socially located,
though abstract, they are not universal. Problems arise, then,
not through abstraction per se, but rather through the
detachment of abstractions from the practices in which they were
created. In particular, problems arise from the imposition on
one practice of abstractions developed in another.
Put more generally, abstractions become problematic when their
own historical and social locations as practice are ignored. They
need to be kept close to and reflect actual, ongoing practice.
As Etienne Wenger's (in press) work on the use of expert systems
suggests, technologies whose representations of the complexities
of practice are misleadingly partial may make that practice difficult
or even impossible. In terms of workplace design for learning,
then, it is important both to honor the implicit aspects of practice
and to ensure that abstractions, as they are needed, are a function
of that practice, not an intervention from outside.
2.3 Individual vs Social
Practice, like abstraction and explication, is not universal.
On the other hand, none of these is individual. Rather, all three
are contained within social milieux that Lave and Wenger (1991)
identify as "communities of practice". It is implicitly
in the context of these that learners make sense of practice.
It is almost impossible to make enduring, coherent sense if the
individual is cut off from the practice in which his or her particular
activity makes sense.
Even though individual instruction is extensive, if the social
context is missing confusion and disillusion are likely. By contrast,
even though instruction is minimal, quite complex practices can
be learned effectively and easily where the social context is
evident and supportive.
For example, people who are judged unfit to learn to operate relatively
simple tools or who fail to learn rudimentary domestic appliances
usually learn to operate an enormously complex machine that presents
users with a hazardous and continually changing environment and
an enormous array of increasingly sophisticated technology-the
car. Cars are socially so well integrated that the learning becomes
almost invisible. The success of learner drivers-with or without
instruction-should undoubtedly be the envy and the object of many
who design far less complex consumer or workplace appliances.
Consider, by contrast, the triumphal despair with which people
frustratedly boast that they can't use their VCR.
The important distinction here is that driving is a fundamentally
social practice. Almost everyone in our society who learns to
drive has already spent a great deal of their lives traveling
in cars or buses, along roads and highways. They begin to learn
to drive with an implicitly structured social understanding of
the task. Then, even if the task is decomposed, the learner need
never lose sight of the overall practice. The social world provides
scaffolding-and a highly dynamic, versatile scaffolding at that.
In fact, something similar is true of the VCR. Most can use their
machine to play tapes. What they find difficult is recording.
Here, as with learning to drive, a central distinction between
these two functions is that one is often a social act, the other
highly individual. You might invite a group over to watch a movie,
but you are unlikely to invite a group over to watch you record.
To get over the learning problems that have emerged from increasing
isolation -an isolation that often results from modern technologies-user
groups have flourished in recent years providing people living
or working alone with some efficient access to social periphery
that can help support and make sense of use.
To relate this again to the design of technology for learning,
it seems important not simply to fragment or decompose tasks to
make them didactically tractable on their own and for individuals.
Any decomposition of the task must be done with an eye not to
the task or the user in isolation, but to the learner's need to
situate the decomposed task in the context of the overall social
practice. The presence of the full context gives the learner the
chance to "steal" whatever he or she finds most appropriate.
It is vitally important not to fragment the social periphery.
One of the missions of technological design should be to provide
the glue for this social periphery and to design with an eye both
to using the social periphery, and where possible, to enhancing
it.
2.4 Systems Narrowly Construed vs Systems Broadly Construed
Finally, if it is important not to cut the individual learner
off from a larger perspective on the encompassing social practice,
similarly it is equally important not to isolate the technology.
Boundaries around technologies tend to be remarkably tightly drawn.
"Peripherals," "software," and even "users"
tend to be defined by exclusion. The technology comes thus to
be seen in splendid isolation, to be described in terms of "self-containment,"
"self-explanation," or "context-independence."
Isolation of technology undoubtedly has it attractions: it appears
to eliminate the thorny problem of context. But, in fact, isolation
ultimately makes both design and use overwhelmingly hard tasks
because nothing is self-explanatory. There is no universal, autonomous,
and indubitable language of explanation. Designers keep things
simple not by isolating artifacts, but by embedding them in the
context in which they will be used. This is the system broadly
construed embracing not just the technology, but also the practices,
and the communities of practice.
The system in the conventionally narrow sense of the term needs
to be connected to this broader system-to the material, technological,
and social system that surrounds the practice of which the individual
technology forms just one part. Then, a learner can look beyond
the immediate object into its periphery to find the means to make
sense of a particular task to find-in Tagore's words, which piece
of knowledge it is most appropriate to steal.
3 LPP as Legitimate Theft
These ideas about what learning is and how it occurs, make it
difficult for us to talk in standard terms of "operationalization"
and instructional technology. For us what is required is summed
up in Lave and Wenger's (1991) notion of "legitimate peripheral
participation." In the context of their work, on which we
rely heavily, a few more points are probably worth making. The
first is simply and briefly to direct people whose interest we
might have aroused to Lave's and Wenger's own work (e.g., Lave,
1991, 1992; in preparation; Lave et al., 1992; Lave & Wenger,
1990, 1991; Wenger, forthcoming). This work unfolds a rich, complex
picture of what a situated view of learning needs to account for
and emphasizes, in particular the social, rather than merely physical
nature of situatedness.
Next, a few clarifications are probably helpful. First, as Lave
(1991) herself notes, the situation is not simply another
term for the immediate, physical context. If it is to carry any
significant conceptual import, it has to be explored in social
and historical terms. Two people together in a room are not inevitably
identically situated, and the situated constraints on practice
do not simply arise in and through such isolated interactions.
The people and the constraints importantly have social and historical
trajectories. These also need to be understood in any situated
account.
Second, community of practice denotes a locus for understanding
coherent social practice. Thus it does not necessarily align with
established communities or established ideas about what communities
are. Community in Lave & Wenger's view is not, a "warmly
persuasive term for an existing set of relations" (Williams,
1977). Communities can be, and often are, diffuse, fragmented,
and contentious. We suspect, however, that it may be this very
connotation of warm persuasiveness that has made the concept so
attractive to some.
Third, legitimate peripheral participation (lpp) is not
an academic synonym for apprenticeship. Apprenticeship can offer
a useful metaphor for the way people learn. In the end, however,
in part because of the way apprenticeship has historically been
"operationalized," the metaphor can be seriously misleading.
As LPP has occasionally been located somewhere between indentured
servitude and conscription.
As Lave and Wenger put it:
Legitimate peripheral participation is not itself an educational
form, much less a pedagogical strategy or a teaching technique.
It is an analytic viewpoint on learning, a way of understanding
learning. We hope to make it clear that learning through legitimate
peripheral participation takes place no matter which educational
form provides a context for learning, or whether there is any
intentional educational form at all. Indeed, this viewpoint
makes a fundamental distinction between learning and intentional
instruction. [1991: 40]
One of the powerful implications of this view is that the best
way to support learning is from the demand side rather than the
supply side. That is, rather than deciding ahead of time what
a learner needs to know and making this explicitly available to
the exclusion of everything else, designers and instructors need
to make available as much as possible of the whole rich web of
practice-explicit and implicit-allowing the learner to call upon
aspects of practice, latent in the periphery, as they are needed.
This is certainly not a trivial challenge-particularly for schools.
The workplace, where our work has been concentrated, is perhaps
the easiest place to design because, despite the inevitable contradictions
and conflict, it is rich with inherently authentic practice-with
a social periphery that, as Orr's (1990) or Shaiken's (1990) work
shows, can even supersede attempts to impoverish understanding.
Consequently, people often learn, complex work skills despite
didactic practices that are deliberately designed to deskill.
Workplace designers (and managers) should be developing technology
to honor that learning ability, not to circumvent it.
The classroom presents a quite different challenge. Classroom
conditions are often assumed to be the ideal place for all forms
of learning. In our view they are, in fact, highly problematic.
There is undoubtedly ongoing practice in the classroom, and there
is learning. But the gap between these and the didactic goals
of education is often severe. We have protested against attempts
to deal with workplace learning by taking people out of the workplace
and putting them in classrooms.
Goldman's (1992) work illustrates the richness of the interpersonal
interaction that is usually either overlooked or deliberately
disrupted in the classroom. She, like Eckert (1989), shows how
the primary activity in a classroom is the student's construction
of their identities. This activity is generally viewed as an aberration
or a distraction. Yet it offers a rich resource. Goldman points
to the overlapping worlds in the context of which students,
in conversation with one another, construct their understanding
and their identities. If these are curtailed, then so is much
of the learning potential. Students, she notes, are eminently
capable of "accomplishing work with each other," but
this is importantly, "on their own terms." Their social
work, she emphasizes, is
not counterproductive to the accomplishment of their science work
and may even be a necessary prerequisite. . . . When
the group engaged in conceptual learning conversations they became
very close, focussed and unified. [1992: 7]
Roschelle's (in press) work follows similar lines. He too saw
conceptual change arising out of collaboration. The students he
studied worked, like Goldman's, with a physics microworld. And
their insights too came not so much through studying the simulation
as through talking about it. In conversation-supported by the
technology which allowed them to test their hypotheses, illustrate
their inchoate thoughts, and review and revise their developing
understanding-the students converged on a shared, articulated
understanding.
The means to build connections between learners and to
the world of full-blooded practice are essential. In the workplace,
learners can, when they need, steal their knowledge from the social
periphery made up of other, more experienced workers and ongoing,
socially shared practice. The classroom, unfortunately, tends
to be too well secured against theft. The actual practices under
study can often neither be stolen nor constructively discussed.
Only replicas and not the real thing are on display. The more
educational technology is constrained to "essentials"
and "individuals" the more it resembles a nugatory "delivery
system," the more it risks becoming theft proof. If Tagore
had had to survive on what was given in isolation, rather than
what he took in company, he might never have learned as he did.
A preferable goal, it seems to us, is to design technology that
provides an underconstrained "window" onto practice,
allowing students to look through it onto as much actual practice
as it can reveal, to see to increasingly greater depths, and to
collaborate in exploration. The closer such technology can come
to making theft possible, the better it is likely to be.
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