Learning by taking part in real work

In one line: a lot of learning happens by taking part in real work alongside other people, starting with small jobs at the edge and moving towards the centre.

What they did

This isn’t an experiment. It’s a short book that offers a new way of looking at learning.

Jean Lave, an anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, then a researcher in computing and learning, were struck by how people learn in apprenticeships. They looked at five cases, one from Lave’s own fieldwork and the rest from other researchers’ studies: midwives in Mexico, tailors in West Africa, navy navigators, supermarket meat-cutters in the United States, and people who had stopped drinking, in a recovery group. Across these cases, learning came mainly from taking part, not from being taught. Where newcomers were kept away from the real work, as with the meat-cutters, they learned much less.

What they found

• Newcomers learn by taking part. Lave and Wenger called this legitimate peripheral participation. It’s a mouthful, so take it a word at a time.
• Legitimate: newcomers are real members of the group, with real jobs, not just observers waiting for their turn.
• Peripheral: they start at the edge, with simpler, lower-risk tasks and more support, and move towards the centre over time.
• Participation: they learn by doing the work, not just by being told about it.
• Learning is tied to where it happens. Knowledge isn’t just something you carry from one place to another. It is shaped by the setting, the people and the tools around it. This may be one reason classroom learning doesn’t always carry over to the ward.
• Groups who share a practice. They used the phrase community of practice for a group who share real work and learn from each other, such as a ward team. They left it loosely defined. Wenger set out its features later, in 1998.

How much should you trust it?

A respected way of understanding learning, based on studies of apprenticeship; not a teaching method, and not tested as one.

• Lave and Wenger said plainly that this is a way of looking at learning, not a teaching method. Turning it into a method is other people’s step, not theirs.
• It draws on five case studies, four of them by other researchers. It describes and explains; it doesn’t measure or compare.
• The apprenticeships they studied mix learning and work more tightly than most healthcare training does. Busy wards and clinics may need a lot of adapting.
• Taking part isn’t always good learning. Newcomers can also pick up poor habits and unhelpful attitudes from the people around them.

If you need to convince someone

In our words (a paraphrase, not a quotation): people learn a job largely by being let in to do real parts of it, alongside people who already do it. Teaching that ignores the real setting misses much of how learning works.

What it means for you

1. Start from what people need to do, where they’ll do it. A short teach in a handover, on a real case people have just seen, is closer to how learning happens at work than a slide talk on the same topic.
2. Give newcomers real jobs at the edge. A new starter on shift can do safe, useful parts of the work with support, and take on more as they’re ready.
3. Design for the real place. Plan for the noise, the interruptions and the kit that’s actually there, not for an ideal teaching room.
4. Watch what the work itself is teaching. If newcomers learn mainly by joining in, the habits around them are teaching them too, good or bad.

How it appears in Teaching That Lands

Lave and Wenger are why Session 2’s main design task is set where the teaching really happens. Participants make ten minutes of their own session active, in its real setting: a ward corridor, a handover, a sim room. They plan for what’s actually there and what happens if they’re interrupted, then pitch it to the group.

The small print

• “Not a teaching method”. In the book, Lave and Wenger say legitimate peripheral participation is not itself an educational form or a teaching technique, but a way of analysing learning (p. 40).
• The quote people use. A line often quoted as theirs, “learning is an integral and inseparable aspect of social practice”, is one we couldn’t find in the book in that form. Their own wording is that learning is “an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world” (p. 35).
• Community of practice. In 1998, in his book Communities of Practice, Wenger set out three features: people engage with each other, share a joint aim, and build up shared ways of doing things. The phrase is now used so widely that many groups given the label don’t have these features.
• Situated learning is the wider name for this family of ideas: that learning can’t be fully separated from the setting and the people it happens with.