Learning and Everyday Life

Access, Participation, and Changing Practice

Jean Lave author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:21st Mar '19

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Learning and Everyday Life cover

An incisive study of situated learning, analyzed through a critical theory of social practice as transformational change in everyday life.

An incisive study of situated learning as transformational change in everyday life, aimed at students and researchers in the social sciences, social anthropology, anthropology of education and social theory. Lave's critical theory of social practice takes assumptions about learning as key to theory and the practice of social change.Written by world-renowned social anthropologist, Jean Lave, with an afterword by Brazilian anthropologist Ana Maria R. Gomes, this book weaves together ethnographic accounts of work and learning, apprenticeship and everyday life, through a critical theory of practice. Each chapter explores in different ways the proposition that learning is a collective, transformative process of change in the historically political complex relations of everyday life. At the same time, the book demonstrates the changing character of Lave's own research practice over two decades. Lave addresses work practices and everyday life and discusses the problem of context and decontextualization. Analyzing two decades of ethnographic studies of craft apprenticeship, she explores teaching as learning and examines the reciprocal effects of theories of everyday life and learning.

'In this extraordinarily good book, Jean Lave takes us on a journey to make sense of what it means to learn in - and as - changing practice. Against patronising or static conceptions of everyday life and against educational psychologists' abstractions of the mind, Lave questions the conflictual, changing and contradictory ways in which people become apprentices to their own changing practice. In so doing, she points to the conditions of possibility for revolutionising practice, developing a particularly powerful understanding of the potential within a dialectically framed philosophy of praxis.' Alex Loftus, King's College London
'Jean Lave is back - if she ever went away! The author of Cognition in Practice has influenced fields as diverse as science and technology studies, critical psychology, and ontological anthropology with her uncompromising critique of the intellectualist theories of cognition at the heart of the social sciences. In these essays, a new generation of readers can learn from her cunning practice of learning as it has transpired from the 1980s to the present.' Peter Skafish, Collège de France
'In this original, quintessentially Lavian collection of essays, Jean Lave's commitment to explicating her own participation in an ongoing/changing scholarly practice is an integral thread, woven elegantly throughout the text. The result is an invaluable synthesis of Jean Lave's unique anthropological contribution to learning as everyday practice.' Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University

ISBN: 9781108727433

Dimensions: 228mm x 153mm x 12mm

Weight: 290g

192 pages