J. Lave and E. Wenger. Situated Larning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1991.

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In this volume, Lave and Wenger undertake a radical and important rethinking and reformulation of our conception of learning. By placing emphasis on the whole person, and by viewing agent, activity, and world as mutually constitutive, they give us the opportunity to escape from the tyranny of the assumption that learning is the reception of factual knowledge or information. The authors argue that most accounts of learning have ignored its quintessentially social character. To make the crucial step away from a solely epistemological account of the person, they propose that learning is a process of participation in communities of practice, participation that is at first legitimately peripheral but that increases gradually in engagement and complexity.