Lave, Jean. Learning and Everyday Life: Access, Participation, and Changing Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 187 pages

Are ethnographers of apprenticeship, work, or education—particularly those who consider contexts, practices, and relations as crucial to understanding these fields—necessarily less inclined to decontextualizing their own research trajectories and identities as learners? Jean Lave, well-placed to address this question, thinks not. On one level, Learning and Everyday Life cautions against the continued hold of decontextualization practices over our conceptions of learning. On another level, this book gradually turns towards a dialectical approach to and a social practice theory of learning. On yet another level, it returns us to Lave’s Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice (2011), and its processual account of her journey as ethnographer and scholar. While both these works are fashioned as vehicles for Lave’s revisit of her earlier studies, Learning and Everyday Life appears as a preamble of sorts to the previous book, which is how Lave characterizes each of her ethnographic projects (4). It transports its readers back to a concluding moment in Apprenticeship, when Lave contends with the standard view of an apprentice as someone learning what they do not know from those who do. Organized to give a sense of how and what Lave has learned about learning, the book more fully develops the alternative she offered, that “we are all apprentices, engaging in learning to do what we are already doing” (2011, 156). It accounts for the learning that spans many decades and takes in Lave’s well-known empirical and theoretical contributions to the study of learning and apprenticeship. These include her ethnographic research on apprenticeship among Liberian Vai and Gola tailors, and on quantitative practices of weight-watchers and shoppers in the US, as well as on concepts such as situated learning and legitimate peripheral participation. Also included are extended discussions on notions of context, practice, and everyday life. Lave’s central aim is to reiterate that learning is neither an individual nor a psychological phenomenon, but is an ongoing practice, a situated activity, by persons as they engage with the material world and different institutional arrangements and with other persons and in different “communities of practice” or situations. One aspect of this goal is to identify and overcome the dualisms, such as apprentice/master, teacher/taught, teaching/learning, formal/informal, knowing/doing, abstract knowledge/everyday knowledge, and universal/situational, that do disservice to the concept of learning. Lave also seeks to emphasize that theory itself is a situated practice. This includes a recognition of the social/historical situatedness of practices that value knowledge the more abstract, generalizable, and universal it appears and the more sharply distinguishable it seems from everyday life. Holding the book together is a trifold formulation for identifying the premises in every description, illustration, analysis, or theory of learning. Developed in collaboration with developmental psychologist Martin Packer, it involves posing three important questions. The first queries the telos, the “direction of movement or change expected through learning,” the second attends to the subject—world relations inhering in the account, while the third looks into “learning mechanisms [or the] ways by which learning comes about” (p. 94). The formulation is meant as a guide for researchers to identify the underlying premises of their own theoretical problematic, while being especially illuminating in the case of any move that decamps learning from everyday life. To this end, Lave primarily draws on her own ethnographic and theoretical practices. The book is mostly a collection of Lave’s writings from the 1990s to the present. Lave begins each of the chapters, authored at various moments in her trajectory as an ethnographer—apprentice, with a separate and detailed introduction. Interspersed, also, are Lave’s detailed acknowledgements of her collaborators and colleagues. Packer, for instance, is credited for the …