Learning is an Active Social Experience

Legitimate peripheral participation. What a mouthful! However, the idea behind it is pretty solid and interesting. Humans – like all social species – learn information in regard to reality and the practicality of such information in a social setting. Surprisingly though, we are often presented with data and chances to learn in school where we, in an abstract way separated from the practice of such information, are expected to learn.

Even so, like our authors say, school is not completely separate from legitimate peripheral participation because we are still a part of a social group where we become immersed in learning even if sometimes the learning is not exactly the learning we were sent there to receive. Undoubtedly, many of us learned very early in our lives acceptable public social behavior and what behavior was bound to get us made fun of in school. Even if we don’t remember each and every thing we were taught as subjects in our classes, we still all learned in school as a part of the society of people who socialized there.

Lave and Wenger assert that “legitimate peripheral participation is not itself an educational form… (it is) a way of understanding learning, (31).” This I believe is important to learning how to teach while like they said is not necessarily instructions on how to do so. Instead, it lets us as teachers take a larger look at what is going on in the world of learning.

I have thought of this a lot in regard to my internship. Students in that workshop are asked to actively engage in their learning and communicate with one another ideas for how to approach the subject of their class. The setting feels more casual than a normal class setting, hoping to invite students to become their own teachers in a way and share their ideas and experiences with the other students instead of being only lectured. There are only about ten or less people in the room too, so we are a smaller group where it’s easier to be inclusive. That does not mean that all of the students are willing to participate though, and even sometimes students who seem like they are not actively participating may be doing so in a more quite and observant fashion. After all, like Lave and Wenger mentioned, LPP is not something that is absolute and polar – there are all sorts of levels of engagement with learning.

We two interns tended to aid in discussions mostly so far, exchanging our ideas and engaging with the students. We haven’t done too much yet so it’s hard to predict where we will be going with our internships, but so far it seems that we are almost a brainstorm session where we spawn ideas and discuss the use and ideas behind them, as thinking about how students can use these ideas to relate to literacy and language. Students mostly use their technology to watch videos and make blog posts pertaining to what they are learning; this combines the ideas of the classroom as well as people in the outside world.

Anyways, I hope I get the chance to relate my studies to the classroom more as time goes on. It’s hard to judge it based off of only two meetings. I always thought of learning as truly a communal effort and what we are studying only helps me fill in the gaps a little bit better. Even if I do have to read it more than once!