Learning and Everyday Life Access, Participation, and Changing Practice

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.

Jean Lave is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a social anthropologist and critical theorist. Her books include one of the most cited works in the social sciences Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (with E. Wenger, Cambridge, 1991) as well as the prize winning Understanding Practice (with S. Chaiklin, Cambridge, 1993).