Jean Lave

Jean Lave is a social anthropologist who theorizes learning as changing participation in on-going changing practice. Her lifework challenges conventional theories of learning and education.

Education and career Lave received a Bachelor's from Stanford University, and completed her doctorate in social anthropology at Harvard University in 1968. She taught at the University of California, Irvine and is currently a professor emerita of geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1988, Lave published her first book, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life. In it, she explores how arithmetic is used outside of school contexts, with implications for sociological understanding of the relationship between cognition, practice, culture, and society. For instance, she shows that grocery shoppers in Orange County, California who could successfully do the mathematics needed for comparison shopping were less able to do the same mathematics when they were presented with the same problems in a formal test. The work is considered a critique of learning transfer theory and challenges the drawing of sharp boundaries between theories of rationality and theories of everyday thought.

Honors and awards In 1989, Lave was named a Spencer Senior Scholar of the Spencer Foundation. In 1994, Lave received the Sylvia Scribner Research Award from the American Educational Research Association.

She holds honorary degrees from both Aarhus University, awarded in 2008, and the University of St Andrews, awarded in 2015.

Selected publications Lave's published books include: Learning and Everyday Life: Access, Participation, and Changing Practice (2019) Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice (2011) History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities (edited with Dorothy Holland, 2000) Understanding Practice (co-authored with Seth Chaiklin, 1993) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (co-authored with Etienne Wenger, 1991) Cognition in Practice (1988)