In order to understand Legitimate Peripheral Participation one must consider what a Community of Practice entails.
"A community of practice is a social learning environment in which everyone learns through mutual engagement and non-authoritarian interactions for learning" (Inoue, p.109).
"The basic assumption is that learning takes place as you interact with a group of people in the community who are entitled to give you informal inputs and guidance" (Inoue, p. 109).
How does this relate to Legitimate Peripheral Participation?
Lave and Wegner postulate that "learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community”(Lave and Wegner, 1991).
Legitimate peripheral participation” provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artifacts, and communities of knowledge and practice" (Lave and Wegner, 1991).
Strengths & Weaknesses
I can see how this approach would help students in foreign language lower their affective filter which can impede on a students ability to learn. My biggest criticism is that I don't see a lot of room from students to explore independently without the direction of the master or in my case the teacher.
