Teaching, as Learning, in Practice

TitleTeaching, as Learning, in Practice
Publication TypeJournal Article
AuthorsLave, Jean
JournalMind, Culture, and Activity
Volume3
Issue3
Pagination149-164
ISSN1074-9039, 1532-7884
Notes'Lave 1996 \n“The logic that makes success exceptional but nonetheless characterizes lack of success as not normal won\'t do. It reflects and contributesto apoliticsby which disinheritedand disenfranchised individuals, whether taken one at a timeor in masses,are identified as the ds-abled, and thereby made responsible for their \"plight\"”\n“It seems imperative to explore ways of understanding learning that do not naturalize and underwrite divisions of soci*dinequality in our society.”\n“we have moved in the last quarter century from implicit to explicit theory, increasing our ability to reflect critically on our own research practice.”\n“More recently I have come to the conclusion that the \"informal\" practices through which learningoccurs in apprenticeship are so powerful and robust that this raises questions about the efficacy of standard \"formal\" educationalpractices in schools rather than the other way around”\n“The argument developed by Etienne Wenger and myself (Lave & Wenger, 1991) is that learning is an aspect of changing participation in changing \"communities of practice\" everywhere.”\n“it may seem phadoxical to turn to studiesof apprenticeship in developing a perspective on teaching, when apprenticeships deploy many resources for effective learning, but in most cases teaching is notthe defining or most salient of these, and rather often it appearsto shape learninglittle or not at all.”\n“general learning transfer”\n“From a perspectivebased on apprenticeship I have also argued against the assumption that teaching, or \"intentional transmission,\" is necessarily prior to.,or a precondition for, learning, or that the apparent absence of teaching calls processes of learning;into question.”\n“Such theories assume that possibilities for creative activity and the production of new \"knowledge\" are limited to certain kinds of education.”\n“Again the process of mastering the art was what gave learning its order.”\n“Mitchell has captured in his analysisof the mosque schoolsthe integral characterof learning in the practice (of law), and he shows us just how various dimensions of life are saturated with the significant patterns of law practice, so thatit was partof many aspectsof social lifefor its participants. This work, which goes against the grain of common readings of educationalpractice both then and now, offers an extraordinarily delicate and insightful perspective on learning as social practice.”\n“Presumeablythesearecommon parts of all effective learningpractices, breaking down distinctions between learning and doing, between social identity and knowledge, between educationand occupation, between form and content.”\n“at the sametime Teaching,asLearning, in Practice Jean Lav”\n“they suggest that intricately patterned relations between practices, space, time, bodies, social relationships,lifecourses-ubiquitous facetsof ongoingcommunities of practiceareboth the content and the principle of effectivenessof learning.”\n“In short, given dualist beliefs about apprenticeship in contrast with school learning,the asymmetrical value placed on the two sides shifted to a view that valued apprenticeship positively.”\n“it led to the view that better understandingof learning in apprenticeship settings might be a resource in better understanding how learning transpires in other historical circumstances,including U.S. schools today.”\n“,onecentral point of the apprenticeship research is that learning is the more basic concept, and that teaching (transmission)is something else. Teaching certainly is an object for analytical inquiry, but not an explanation for learning. Indeed, whole apparatuses of explanation for learning become merely culturalartifactsabout teaching-in need of explanation-when learning is taken to be thebasic concept. Our understanding of both learning and teaching are thus problematic, inviting new analysis,which in turn requires novel analytic units and new questions”\n“Ar~dfurther, if there is no other kind of activity except situated activity, then there is no kind of learningthat can be distinguished theoretically by its \"de-contextualization,\" as rhetoricpertaining to schooling and school practices so often insists.”\n“It did impel me to golooking for ways to conceptualizelearning differently,encouraged by those three interconnected transformations that resulted from the project: (1) a reversal of the polar values assumed to reflect differing educational power for schooling and \"other\" forms of education; (2) a reversalin perspective so that the vital focus of research on learning shifted from transmitters, teachers or care givers, to learners; and (3) a view of learning as socially situated activity.”\n“What are theories of learning \"about?\" What is a theoryof learning? Whatwould happen if westoppedreifying learning andbegan tothinkof learning as something historically specific?”\n“What seemed far more startling is theincredibly narrow, pervasive history of philosophical and later psychological treatments of \"learning\" as wholly an epistemological problem-it was all aboutknowing, acquiringknowledge,beliefs, skills,changingthe mind, movingfrom intuitionsto rules,or the reverse, and that was all.”\n“At minimum, he proposed,a theory of learningconsistsof three kinds of stipulations: a telosfor the changesimplied in notionsof learning; the basic relation assumed to exist between subject and social world; and mechanisms by which learning is supposed to take place.”\n“We found this a liberating analytic tool. It consisted of a set of questions for interrogating anything claiming to be an example,or for that matter a theory,of learning. It provided a way to organizeour understanding around an inventory of things it seemed essential to know in every case.”\n“Any way you look at it, subject-world relations are at the crux of differentiation of one theory of learning from another.”\n“Instead, the telos might be described as becoming a respected,practicing participant among other tailors and lawyers, becoming so imbued with the practice that masters become part of the everyday life of the Alley or themosque forotherparticipantsand others in turn become part of their practice.”\n“\"identities in practice.\"”\n“\"Knowing\" is a relationamong communities of practice, participation in practice, and the generation of identities as part of becoming part of ongoing practice”\n“Great teaching in schools is a process of facilitating the circulation of school knowledgeable skill into the changing identities of students. Teachers are probably recognized as \"great\" when they are intensely involved in communities of practice in which their identities arechanging with respect to (other)learnersthrough their interdependent activities.”\n“The \"teaching\" that \"learning research\" is research on has no recognizable relationship to the creative, productive work that arouses admiration for great teachers. Yet it seems likely that mostpeoplewho devote their lives to educationdo soin part because they have been deeply affected by one or more.”\n“It may be worth inquiring how it is that most of us are able to remember great teachers,but do not have routine ways to talk about what great teaching is. And if we cannot even talk about it, it issurely difficult to build into researchlpractice on learning.”\n“This disastrous shortcut equates learning with teaching8 It reduces teaching to narrowly specificprescriptionsfor what should be transplanted into the heads of kids. It takes the teacher out of the teaching. It reducesteaching to curriculum, to strategiesor recipes for organizingkids to know some target knowledge. It also takes learners learning out of the picture.”\n“f we intend to be thorough, and we presume teaching has some impact on learners, then such research would include the effects of teaching on teachers as learners as well”\n“n what central ways do bodies, trajectories, timetables, daily practices, and changing careers create registers of identity-changing activity among learners in American schools?”\n“One powerful multiply-sited,intersecting,identity-producingeffectof school communitiesof practice isracialization. Thegeneration of identities,knowledge and meaning in racialterms is so salientin theU.S. thatracial meanings are generated both in the presence and in the absence of given ongoing activity”\n“Racialization,gender-,social class-, and sexual orientation-making are aspects of American adulthood that kids are deeply engaged in constituting among themselves.”\n“The notion of schooling as the major means to integrate/assimilate immigrant populations led first,to the creation of common schools nearly two centuries ago and then to the introduction of tracking in comprehensive high schools a century later (Olsen, 1995). So the historicalstructuringof schools in many ways embodies practices of \"Americanization.\"”\n“In general,with brave exceptions, the school administratorsand almost all the teachers are silent to each other and tothe students about racial segregation, racism, and sexism.”\n“Among other things, she asked groups of students, immigrant and non-immigrant, to make social maps of the school.\'2 Their maps displayed no tracks-they didn\'t register activities in classrooms at all. Their maps had no (immediate) congruence with the teachers\' maps.”\n“or immigrant students, then, Americanization, or \"assimilation,\" is firstand foremost a processof racialization through the practices of their daily lives, whether in the official sites of tracked classrooms or in the students\' social sites of gathering and socializing.”\n“One such example is to be found in work begun by Margaret Carlock a few years ago to generate a chemistry program aimed at non-wizard students in an East Bay high school.”\n“This involved a complex process of transforming the chemistry lab space into one whose social organization was very much shaped by the students, with laboratory and class work collaboratively developed with students, breaking lines between teaching and learning as all learners became tutors; drawing students in throug:h tutoring arrangements that created opportunities for kids to engage with chemistry first for purposes of helping others and through that, to deepen their engagement with chemistry as anobject of study.”\n“Shesuggests that the way to evaluatethe results is by how much talk there is aboutchemistry among studentsin the cafeteiria.”\n“But instead of \"teaching chemistry\" she engaged in a different kind of \"learning practice,\" making it possible for chemistry to become part of the hard work of learners who were becoming gendered, racialized, classed adults-in this case adults with an impressive interest in chemistry.”\n“Where better to engage in a process of deniystifying the central tenets of theory and society alike than from the suppressed poles of the dualisins that justify contemporary denigrating practices”\n“Ethnographic research is a goodway to cometo understand learning as part of practice. It is usefulfortrying to focus on the specificsof changingparticipation in changingpractices,most especially on learners\' changing conditionsand ways of participating. At the same time it requires commitmentto an inclusivefocus on all participants equally, as each contributes to the making of differences of power, salience, influence, and value of themselves and other participants”\n“For researchers whose major identity is in research on the teaching of high culture in school settings, the key questions revolve around how to make pedagogic situations (organized to produce deeper scholasticunderstanding) effectively available to the school-specific,identity-changingparticipation of kids together in their own lives”\n“Those most concernedwith relations between learningand teaching must untangle the confusions that mistakenly desubjectify learners\' and teachers\' positions, stakes, reasons, and ways of participating, and then inquireanew about those relations.”\n“And for researchers concernedmost especially with theconditions and effects of public schoolingpractices of xenophobia, racism, sexism,and homophobia on what is learnedin schools, the argument made here recommends research on understanding how schools in particular ways, ways not identical with the xenophobia, racism, sexism, and homophobia structuring other social institutions, make the learning of these divisions in practice ubiquitous.”\n\n - prerna.srigyan'
URLhttp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327884mca0303_2
DOI10.1207/s15327884mca0303_2