Learning and Everyday Life
Access, Participation, and Changing Practice

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

Jean Lave (Author), Ana Maria R. Gomes (Afterword by)

9781108727433, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 21 March 2019

192 pages, 1 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.2 cm, 0.29 kg

'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

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.

Introduction: the long life of learning in practice
1. The savagery of the domestic mind
2. The problem of context and practices of decontextualization
3. Ethnographies of apprenticeship
4. Teaching as learning in practice
5. Production schools
6. Everyday life: logical operator, social zone or social practice
7. Situated learning: historical process and practice
Afterword: learning together: new challenges and ethnographic scenarios Ana Maria R. Gomes.

Subject Areas: Educational psychology [JNC], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Social theory [JHBA]