The transition point, from periphery into the principal stripof activity, hinges not on the spatial distribution of the participants, or evensimply on the character of the conduct, but rather through the ways thatactions are treated as sequentially responsive and prospectively relevant

Educationally sig-nificant interactions do not involve abstract bearers of cognitivestructures, but real people who develop a variety of interpersonal re-lationships with one another in the course of their shared activity in agiven institutional context."

In AA,pcrsorl:llsffuteo;··an'-tolcrfor the explicit, stated purpose of providing an understanding of alcoholism,

continual participation

tries to help the drinker see herself as an alcoholic if she is ''ready.'' [Members] claim that telling their own sto-ries to other alcoholics, and thus helping other alco-holics to achieve sobriety, is an important part of maintaining their own sobriety. [At the same time] telling a personal story, especially at a speaker's meet-ing or on a Twelfth Step call, signals membership be-cause this "is the time that they [members] feel that they belong enough to 'carry the message'.''

structure of the A. A. story, the newcomers must also learn the cultural model of al-coholism encoded in them

Stories do not just describe a life in a learned genre, but are tools for reinterpreting the past, and understanding the self in terms of the A. A. iden-tity.

Usually, unless the intetpretation runs counter to A. A. beliefs, the speaker is not corrected. Rather, other speakers will take the appropriate parts of the newcomer's comments, and build on this in their own comments, giving parallel accounts with different interpretations, for example, or expanding on parts of their own stories which are similar to parts of the new-comer's story, while ignoring the inappropriate parts of the newcomer's story.

Any given attempt to analyze a form of learning through legitimate peripheral participation must involve analy-sis of the political and social organization of that form, its historical development, and the effects of both of these on sus-tained possibilities for learning

mov-ing from peripheral to full participation in communities of practice through either formal or informal apprenticeship

If apprenticeship is a form of education in which work and learning are seamlessly re-lated, it is nonetheless a fonn in which the work and under-standing of newcomers bear complex and changing relations with ongoing work processes; the structure of production and the structure of apprenticeship do not coincide as a whole (though they may do so for given tasks, e.g., plot-fixing for the quar-termasters).

Our intention is to show how learning or failure to learn in each of our examples of appren-ticeship may be accounted for by underlying relations of legit-imate peripheral participation.

Where there is high volume] a division of labor among a relatively large number of workers increases efficiency. . . . In this situation, not only apprentices but journeymen, too, seldom learn the full range of tasks once proper to their trade

Gain-ing legitimacy is also a problem when masters prevent learning by acting in effect as pedagogical authoritarians, viewing ap-prentices as novices who "should be instructed" rather than as peripheral participants in a community engaged in its own reproduction.

A learning curriculum is essentially situated. It is not some-thing that can be considered in isolation, manipulated in arbi-trary didactic terms, or analyzed apart from the social relations that shape legitimate peripheral participation. A learning cur-riculum is thus characteristic of a community.

There are strong goals for learning because learners, as peripheral participants, can develop a view of what the whole enterprise is about, and what there is to be learned. Learning itself is an improvised practice: A learning curriculum unfolds in opportunities for engagement in practice. It is not specified as a set of dictates for proper practice.

In the process, newcomers learn how to make (some-times difficult) repairs, they learn the skills of war-story tell-ing, and they become legitimate participants in the community of practice.

Finally, assumptions of uniformity make it difficult to explore the mechanisms by which processes of change and transformation in communities practice and pro-cesses of learning are intricately implicated in each other.

Acceptance by and interaction with acknowledged adept practitioners make learning legiti-mate and of value from the point of view of the apprentice.

The key to legitimate peripherality is access by newcomers to the community of practice and all that membership entails.

opportunities for learning are, more often than not, given structure by work practices instead of by strongly asymmetrical master-apprentice relations.

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Legitimate periph-eral participation refers both to the development of knowl-edgeably skilled identities in practice and to the reproduction and transformation of communities of practice. It concerns the latter insofar as communities of practice consist of and depend on a membership, including its characteristic biographies/tra-jectories, relationships, and practices. Legitimate peripheral participation is intended as a concep-tual bridge -as a claim about the common processes inherent in the production of changing persons and changing commu-nities of practice. This pivotal emphasis, via legitimate periph-eral participation, on relations between the production of knowledgeable identities and the production of communities of practice, makes it possible to think of sustained learning as embodying, albeit in transformed ways, the structural charac-teristics of communities of practice.

Or to put it the other way around, in a thoroughly historical theory of social practice, the historiciz-ing of the production of persons should lead to a focus on processes of learning.

As an aspect of social practice, learning involves the whole person; it implies not only a relation to specific activities, but a relation to social communities -it implies becoming a full participant, a member, a kind of person. In this view, learning only partly-and often incidentally-implies becoming able to be involved in new activities, to perform new tasks and functions, to master new understandings. Activities, tasks, functions, and understandings do not exist in isolation; they are part of broader systems of relations in which they have meaning. These systems of relations arise out of and are repro-duced and developed within social communities, which are in part systems of relations among persons. The person is defined by as well as defines these relations. Learning thus implies becoming a different person with respect to the possibilities enabled by these systems of relations.

In a theory of practice, cognition and communication in, and with, the social world are situated in the historical development of on-going activity. It is, thus, a critical theory; the social scientist's practice must be analyzed in the same historical, situated terms as any other practice under investigation. One way to think of learning is as the historical production, transformation, and change of persons.