Situated learning

Situated learning is the theory that learning is fundamentally embedded in the social and physical context in which it occurs, rather than being a process of abstract knowledge transfer from expert to novice. Developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger through ethnographic studies of apprenticeship, the theory holds that knowledge is not a commodity to be acquired but a mode of participation in the practices of a community. The learner begins at the periphery and gradually moves toward full membership through legitimate peripheral participation — a process that involves not just skill acquisition but identity transformation.

This perspective challenges the cognitivist paradigm that dominates formal education, where knowledge is treated as decontextualized information to be stored and retrieved. Situated learning suggests that the apparent failure of school knowledge to transfer to real-world settings is not a transfer problem but a category error: the knowledge was never abstract to begin with, and attempting to teach it as if it were produces only inert knowledge — information that can be recalled on tests but cannot be mobilized in practice.