The View of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP) on Learning

Traditionally, the mainstream cognitive psychologists’ conceptualization of learning is regarded as an individual achievement. During the early ‘90s, Lave and Wenger’s (1991) revolutionary situated learning theory extended learning to involve the social nature of learning. For them, knowledge is not incrementally stored in the mind, but is the result of becoming involved in activities and located in societies.

Haneda (2006) interpreted Lave and Wenger’s idea in a very comprehensive way by saying that,

[I]ndividuals do not simply receive, internalize, and construct knowledge in their minds but enact it as persons-in-the-world participating in the practices of a sociocultural community. Accordingly, learning is an intrinsic and inseparable aspect of any social practice, not the goal to be achieved, and it occurs when people engage in joint activity in a CoP, with or without teaching.

(p. 808)

Such learning is what Lave and Wenger (1991) defined as legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). ‘Legitimate’ indicates that anyone could potentially become a member of a community of practice or in a discourse community. ‘Peripheral’

explains how the marginal participants, starting from peripheral to central, acquire knowledge through their involvement (i.e., participation) with activities or practices.

Gaining knowledge thus is viewed as a process, not a product. Therefore, treating learning as legitimate peripheral participation implies that learning is regarded as

“itself an evolving form of membership” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 53). Lave and Wenger view learning as an integral part of social practice. In their theory, learning cannot be separated from social context. Apprenticeships, which they regard as “a

common structured pattern of learning experiences” (p. 30), illustrate their theory of learning. They both believe that knowledge is not taught, nor examined, and neither is the apprentice of a mechanical copier of patterns. Learning is part of the apprentice’s everyday existence which does not happen in a formal educational setting.

Based on this rationale, Lave and Wenger (1991) gave examples of CoP from various scenarios: Vai and Gola tailors, Yucatec midwives, and meat cutters to explain how learning could possibly occur.

Through multiple social networks, relations and interactions with other members in a situated community, Lave and Wenger also argue that “identity, knowing, and social membership entail one another” (p. 53). In 1996, Lave further elaborated discourse on the fact that this connection entails that “crafting identities in practice becomes the fundamental project subjects engage in” (p. 157). This concept of multiple social networks also corresponds to what has been discussed elsewhere in the previous section, i.e., that first language socialization emphasizes the importance of formal education, whereas researchers in second language socialization, especially in a community-of-practice perspective, consider learning as occurring everywhere.

To summarize the above, socialization is not a matter of learning pre-determined knowledge or skills, but a back-and-forth process involving negotiating interactions, activities and practice; it is expected that learners can finally become a full-fledged member in the community of practice. Their relationship can be depicted as follows in Figure 2.4.

Figure 2.4 How Learning Occurs from a Community of Practice Perspective

From this figure, we can see that newcomers are seen as peripheral participants in their respective new communities who move from partial participation to full participation by means of the guidance provided by more experienced CoP members (referred to as “old-timers” in Lave and Wenger’s CoP theory). In the present study, we can view the instructor and experienced presenters as “old-timers”. However, traditional models of expert-novice relationships have been questioned, since the assumption that experienced individuals are experts and newcomers are novices.

But as Wenger’s (1998) later elaboration on multimembership indicated, community of practices can be accomplished through mutual engagement, joint activity involving a collective process of negotiation, and shared repertories. Why is the concept of

(a continu al process)

Central participants:

old-timers

Peripheral participants:

newcomers

Practices & activities

Social network

Interaction with others who are in this

community

Negotiating identities

A situated community

Emerging Constituent of Learning

The way to gain mem bership &

identity of mastery

CoP essential to the present study? First, the rationale of multimembership helps explain the blurred line between experts and novices. One may be an expert in one community but a novice in another community. With various identities in different communities, what is typically recognized as the expert-novice relationship is challenged. Therefore, it seems more appropriate to think of people’s negotiations in terms of their participation in multiple communities of practice.

To some extent, this viewpoint helps better define the dynamic negotiation relationship and shifting position between the instructor and students in the present study because of the nature of oral presentation and discussion tasks. In other words, the teacher is not regarded as the only authority and students are not viewed as playing only a passive role in learning. Since these students are socialized into many overlapping communities concurrently and equipped with several memberships at the same time, for example, different English-learning experiences, disciplinary communities with interns or in-practice doctors, or institutional or student associations in their own department, they thus may have several overlapping community identities. When students bring their own language proficiency, life experience, effort put in the course, and any other related professional medical knowledge to this class, they have their own expert perspectives. On the other hand, the instructor, who is typically regarded as the only authority in the traditional education model and the only socialization agent, has her own limitation (e.g., professional medical knowledge). Therefore, the interaction among the student presenter, student audience and the instructor, both inside and outside classroom, becomes an interesting issue to explore. At different times and on different issues, is their interactional mode uni-directional, bi-directional, or even multi-directional? In terms of language proficiency, the instructor owns her profession in academic language, but what about the content matter? When the instructor is not the only

resource, who takes over the status? By incorporating the literature of classroom interaction with the concept of multimemships of CoP, it is expected to shed light on a different view to re-examine the role of learners and instructors, as proposed as the second research question in this thesis, since such an issue is not touched upon by other language socialization studies.