Learning as a Social Practice

I created this critical commentary for my graduate theories of human development class at the University of Rochester. The professor asked us to read Chapters 2 and 3 from "Situated Learning" by Lave and Wegner (1991), which discusses learning as a social practice. My critical commentary is below.

Learning as a Social Practice

Lave & Wenger present the perspective that learning is inherently a social practice. According to Lave & Wenger, knowledge cannot exist outside of a sociocultural and historical context. Learning therefore is not simply an individual’s internalizing of external knowledge, but actually an act of participation in becoming part of a community. Knowledge is a kind of social action. One begins as a newcomer, a peripheral participant, and then, if successful, gradually moves to the center of the community as they achieve mastery. Furthermore, just as any individual is changed by the process of learning and participating in a community, the social community and all its constituents are also changed as new members participate in it. This is the process of community reproduction.

Lave & Wenger assert that instead of making the individual irrelevant, their model of viewing the individual as a participant actually allows us to see the “whole person”, giving a more complete view of the individual that includes their society, culture, history and artifacts and no longer a teacher student dyad but a richly diverse field of essential actors.

When looking at behavior such as alcohol use, coping with mental illness, eating disorders, failing in school or delinquency there are many lenses we could study these behaviors with. If we were to adopt Lave & Wenger’s situated practice approach we could say that these behaviors were failed attempts to participate in a sociocultural historical community. In “Situated Learning”, “Chapter 3 - Midwives, Tailors, Quartermasters, Butchers, Nondrinking Alcoholics”, Lave & Wegner give us case studies of situated learning in practices of apprenticeships. One example given is that of a failed attempt to participate in a community through the apprenticeship of meat cutters. Some of the reasons for the failure in learning and participation cited are having authoritarian masters, inauthentic and insincere teaching methods, irrelevant instructions misaligned to on the job work, a heavy focus on profits leading to the use of the apprentice as free labor on menial and repetitive tasks and little to no opportunity to interact with master butchers or even peers. Each reason for failure cited by Lave & Wenger is attributed to the sociocultural structure, rather than the individual pursuing the meat cutting apprenticeship.

Reflecting further on alcoholism, one might use Lave & Wenger’s lens to hypothesize that an individual turns to drinking to cope with rejection from their social community. Potentially their community is not welcoming to newcomers, they may have masters within the community who are authoritarian and potentially fearful of being replaced by newcomers so try to prevent community reproduction or interaction between members. The community’s teaching practices may be inauthentic and aligned more to carrying out the semblance of teaching to appease the masters rather than truly caring about learning outcomes and the community. Therefore, from Lave & Wenger’s perspective, it could be argued that the community itself creates the alcoholism. This may lead to disenfranchisement and disillusionment on the part of the alcoholic, or maybe lashing out at themselves, others or society, for example, suicide or acts of public violence like shootings.

If we view these behaviors as individual, then we are saying that each person has a lot more responsibility. We are saying we believe in the person and don't see them as dependent, subject to a hostile world. We are weighing in on an individual's ability to affect change in themselves and the world. We would study them by listening to their personal story and helping put it in context, administering psychometric tests to see where they stand on certain spectrums. For interventions we could look to new technologies in science like neuroscience and gene technology that can pinpoint individuals predisposed to alcoholism or other behaviors listed and cure it. We could give hope to people via positive psychology and motivational interviewing and we can use stories of people who have overcome individual troubles to encourage people to take responsibility for their behaviors as a first step then they can begin the process of making change.

If we view the behaviors as social, we could study these by learning extensively about the society, cultures and histories involved. Both via written accounts but also by first hand interactions where possible. Interventions we would look to use to initiate social change would be many and varied. We could lobby the government for policy change and funding for programs to improve social situations. We could build communities as task forces to work together to affect social change on the ground. By disseminating information publicly to promote beliefs to convince others to support. To capture consciousness through the media so that ideas of change are seen. This could extend to marching, rallying, or rioting to overthrow the government by any means necessary, as advocated by Marx, who, unlike Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., was not opposed to the use of force.

In the work of Lave & Wenger, much like their predecessor Vygotsky and Marx before him, we see that the community is changed by the individual. Yet the emphasis of their study is still the community, not the individual's role in affecting change. Vygotsky does this too, he claims that his theory is a dialectic between individual and society, but Vygotsky did not study the internal capabilities of the child, only when the child was assisted. Thus, it appears these theorists pay lip service to a true dialectic, but in reality, they favor theories that place the social above the individual.

To add to this, from my personal perspective, I wonder if each community must have it’s outcasts. Is it the nature of life that more variations of type occur than can be fit into any one system of organization? Will there always be the outcast? The people in the minority? Mathematically there will always be the people > +1 or < -1 z-score on the “Standard Normal Distribution”. How, then, does a community handle these outcasts? I hypothesize that a community creates taboos within their social norms that censor discussion on certain topics. Doing this it protects the status quo and the reigning ideology from being overthrown as it relegates anyone who doesnt fit in as misfits, disgusting, dangerous or the like, it removes their voice by making the topic of their plight taboo and external to the community, and thus outsources their behavior to being an individualistic fault of theirs only, or of “them” and the “other”, that is, a community in opposition to their own. Whatever is taboo at any given time is simply a product of power within a community. Anyone attempting to liberate you might just be trying to establish their new regime and set of taboos over the old ones. A proposed solution, ensure each community practices a minimum level of basic needs provision for each individual, tolerance towards people and communities who differ, and invest in enabling easy access for individuals to migrate to a community who wants them where they will thrive, instead of forcing them to stay where they are.