The situated nature of learning, remembering, and understanding is a central fact. It may appear obvious that human minds develop in social situations, and that they use the tools and representational media that culture provides to support, extend, and reorganize mental functioning. But cognitive theories of knowledge representation and educational practice, in school and in the workplace, have not been sufficiently responsive to questions about these relationships. And the need for responsiveness has become salient as computational media radically reshape the frontiers of individual and social action, and as educational achievement fails to translate into effective use of knowledge.

This series is born of the conviction that new and exciting interdisciplinary syntheses are under way, as scholars and practitioners from diverse fields seek to analyze and influence the new transformations of social and mental life, and to understand successful learning wherever it occurs.

Computational media include not only computers but the vast array of expressive, receptive, and presentational devices available for use with computers, including interactive video, optical media such as CD-ROM and CD-I, networks, hyper-media systems, work-group collaboration tools, speech recognition and synthesis, image processing and animation, and software more generally.

These technologies are dramatically transforming the basic patterns of communication and knowledge interchange in societies, and automating the component processes of thinking and problem solving. In changing situations of knowledge acquisition and use, the new interactive technologies redefine – in ways yet to be determined – what it means to know and understand, and what it means to become “literate” or an “educated citizen.”

We now can begin to turn the observations of the previous chapter into objects to be analyzed. In the following sections, we recast the central characteristics of these several historical realizations of apprenticeship in terms of legitimate peripheral participation. First, we discuss the structuring resources that shape the process and content of learning possibilities and apprentices' changing perspectives on what is known and done. Then we argue that “transparency” of the sociopolitical organization of practice, of its content and of the artifacts engaged in practice, is a crucial resource for increasing participation. We next examine the relation of newcomers to the discourse of practice. This leads to a discussion of how identity and motivation are generated as newcomers move toward full participation. Finally, we explore contradictions inherent in learning, and the relations of the resulting conflicts to the development of identity and the transformation of practice.

STRUCTURING RESOURCES FOR LEARNING IN PRACTICE

One of the first things people think of when apprenticeship is mentioned is the master–apprentice relation. But in practice the roles of masters are surprisingly variable across time and place. A specific master–apprentice relation is not even ubiquitously characteristic of apprenticeship learning. Indeed, neither Yucatec midwives nor quartermasters learn in specific master–apprentice relations. Newcomers to A. A. do have special relations with specific old-timers who act as their sponsors, but these relations are not what defines them as newcomers.

Until recently, the notion of a concept was viewed as something for which clarity, precision, simplicity, and maximum definition seemed commendable. We have tried, in reflective consonance with our theoretical perspective, to reconceive it in interconnected, relational terms. Thus the concept of legitimate peripheral participation obtains its meaning, not in a concise definition of its boundaries, but in its multiple, theoretically generative interconnections with persons, activities, knowing, and world. Exploring these interconnections in specific cases has provided a way to engage in the practice–theory project that insists on participation in the lived-in world as a key unit of analysis in a theory of social practice (which includes learning), and to develop our thinking in the spirit of this theoretically integrative enterprise.

There has crept into our analysis, as we have moved away from conventional notions of learning, an expanded scale of time and a more encompassing view of what constitutes learning activity. Legitimate peripheral participation has led us to emphasize the sustained character of developmental cycles of communities of practice, the gradual process of fashioning relations of identity as a full practitioner, and the enduring strains inherent in the continuity–displacement contradiction. This longer and broader conception of what it means to learn, implied by the concept of legitimate peripheral participation, comes closer to embracing the rich significance of learning in human experience.

I first encountered these ideas in spring of 1990, when Jean Lave spoke at the Workshop on Linguistic Practice at the University of Chicago. There were about a dozen of us, mostly working on problems in language use and interaction; mostly anthropologists, linguists, or hybrids; several with research commitments to a non-Western language. I had just completed a study of reference as a social practice, in which I analyzed Yucatec Maya language use in its linguistic, indexical, and cultural contexts (1990). One of the central issues being pursued in the workshop was the relation between context and literal meaning or, in somewhat more technical terms, the role of indexicality in semantics. Coming from this angle, Lave and Wenger's work was really exciting because it located learning squarely in the processes of coparticipation, not in the heads of individuals. The analogy to language was just below the surface, only occasionally made explicit during several hours of very fruitful discussion, and yet many of us felt that we had gained new insights into problems of language. We had already been exploring speech as interaction, trying to take meaning production out of the heads of individual speakers and locate it in the fields of social interaction. The 1990 presentation, and Jean Lave's ability to engage intellectually in the issues it raised, provoked some of the best discussion we have enjoyed.

Actual cases of apprenticeship provide historically and culturally specific examples which seem especially helpful in exploring the implications of the concept of legitimate peripheral participation. As we have insisted, however, the concept should not be construed as a distillation of apprenticeship. Ethnographic studies of apprenticeship emphasize the indivisible character of learning and work practices. This, in turn, helps to make obvious the social nature of learning and knowing. As these studies partially illustrate, any complex system of work and learning has roots in and interdependencies across its history, technology, developing work activity, careers, and the relations between newcomers and old-timers and among co-workers and practitioners.

We have already outlined some reasons for turning away from schooling in our search for exemplary material, though schooling provides the empirical basis for much cognitive research on learning and also for much work based on the notion of the zone of proximal development. Such research is conceptually tied in various ways to school instruction and to the pedagogical intentions of teachers and other caregivers. In this context, schooling is usually assumed to be a more effective and advanced institution for educational transmission than (supposedly) previous forms such as apprenticeship. At the very least, schooling is given a privileged role in intellectual development. Because the theory and the institution have common historical roots (Lave 1988), these school-forged theories are inescapably specialized: They are unlikely to afford us the historical–cultural breadth to which we aspire.

Learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process that we call legitimate peripheral participation. By this we mean to 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 practices 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 new comers 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.

In order to explain our interest in the concept of legitimate peripheral participation, we will try to convey a sense of the perspectives that it opens and the kinds of questions that it raises. A good way to start is to outline the history of the concept as it has become increasingly central to our thinking about issues of learning. Our initial intention in writing what has gradually evolved into this book was to rescue the idea of apprenticeship. In 1988, notions about apprenticeship were flying around the halls of the Institute for Research on Learning, acting as a token of solidarity and as a focus for discussions on the nature of learning.

All theories of learning are based on fundamental assumptions about the person, the world, and their relations, and we have argued that this monograph formulates a theory of learning as a dimension of social practice. Indeed, the concept of legitimate peripheral participation provides a framework for bringing together theories of situated activity and theories about the production and reproduction of the social order. These have usually been treated separately, and within distinct theoretical traditions. But there is common ground for exploring their integral, constitutive relations, their entailments, and effects in a framework of social practice theory, in which the production, transformation, and change in the identities of persons, knowledgeable skill in practice, and communities of practice are realized in the lived-in world of engagement in everyday activity.

INTERNALIZATION OF THE CULTURAL GIVEN

Conventional explanations view learning as a process by which a learner internalizes knowledge, whether “discovered,” “transmitted” from others, or “experienced in interaction” with others. This focus on internalization does not just leave the nature of the learner, of the world, and of their relations unexplored; it can only reflect far-reaching assumptions concerning these issues. It establishes a sharp dichotomy between inside and outside, suggests that knowledge is largely cerebral, and takes the individual as the nonproblematic unit of analysis. Furthermore, learning as internalization is too easily construed as an unproblematic process of absorbing the given, as a matter of transmission and assimilation.

lam very much in your debt for all the trouble you put yourself to for my sake, and for the concern you show yourself to have for my interests. But since I have far less of the latter than you, I should think myself guilty of an injustice if I did not beg you to ignore completely whatever you may hear against me, and not even bother to listen to it, or write to me about it. For my part, I have long known that there are fools abroad in the world, and I have so little regard for their judgement that I should be extremely sorry to lose a single moment of my leisure or my peace and quiet on their account.

As for my Metaphysics, I have completely stopped thinking about it since the day I sent you my answer to Hyperaspistes – so much so that I have not picked up the work since then. So I cannot answer a single one of the queries you sent me in your letter last week, except to say that I beg you not to give them any more thought than I do. In publishing the book I did what I thought I had to for the glory of God and to satisfy the demands of my conscience. If my project has failed, and there are too few people in the world capable of understanding my arguments, it is not my fault: the arguments are no less true for that. But it would be my fault if I got angry, or used up more time answering the irrelevant objections of those who have been in touch with you . . .

TO BEECKMAN, 24 JANUARY 1619

I have received your letter, which I was expecting. On first glancing over it, I was delighted to see your notes on music. What clearer evidence could there be that you had not forgotten me? But there was something else I was looking for, and that the most important, namely news about what you have been doing, what you are doing, and how you are. You ought not to think that all I care about is science, I care about you, and not just your intellect – even if that is the greatest part of you – but the whole man.

As for me, in my usual state of indolence I have hardly put a title to the books which, on your advice, I am going to write. But you should not think me so lazy as to fritter away all my time. On the contrary, I have never been more usefully employed – but on matters which your intellect, occupied with more elevated subjects, would no doubt despise, looking down on them from the lofty heights of science, namely painting, military architecture and above all, Flemish. You will soon see what progress I have made in this language, for I am coming to Middelburg, God willing, at the beginning of Lent …

If you look carefully at what I wrote on discords and the rest of my treatise on music, you will find that all the points I made on the intervals of harmonies, scales and discords were demonstrated mathematically; but the account I gave is too brief, confused, and not properly worked out.

This volume completes the project, begun in the 1980s, to provide an authoritative and comprehensive new English translation of the philosophical writings of Descartes, based on the original Latin and French texts. The first two volumes of the translation, which appeared in 1985 (known as ‘CSM’), contained the Early Writings, Rules for the Direction of our Native Intelligence, The World and Treatise on Man, Discourse and Essays, Principles of Philosophy, Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, Description of the Human Body and The Passions of the Soul (Volume One); and the Meditations, Objections and Replies and The Search for Truth (Volume Two). But for scholars and students of Descartes there is, in addition to the large corpus of his published works, another formidable body of source material which is indispensable for a proper understanding of his philosophy: the correspondence. This third and final volume of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes is devoted to Descartes' letters.

Descartes himself attached great importance to his letters – an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging body of detailed commentary and analysis covering every aspect of his philosophical system. Apart from a handful of letters, most of this material was not available to English readers until the publication in 1970 of Anthony Kenny's Descartes: Philosophical Letters (known as ‘K’). This valuable anthology, which has gained wide currency among Anglophone Cartesian scholars, is now out of print; but we are extremely fortunate in that it has been possible to incorporate it in its entirety into the present volume.