The Centre for Science Studies promotes interdisciplinary research across the boundaries of science, technology, and public policy.
Everyday Life and Learning
A lecture by Jean Lave, Professor Emeritus, University of California at Berkeley
Date: 23 November 2011
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Universities are sites of formative, institutionally inscribed, exceptionalist assumptions about learning. They are also sites of our everyday working lives, with their embodied, passionately lived, collective common sense understandings of 'learning'. A century-long tradition has defined theoretical work on 'learning' in cognitive terms, limited to the discipline of psychology. But all theoretical problematics across the social sciences include assumptions about learning, whether explicitly or not. Learning is integral to conceptions of knowledge, inquiry, revolution, and changing practice, to name a few. Accordingly, social scientists have substantive stakes in the issue - historical, cultural, spatial, political, and social. In engaging questions of learning, I find it useful and interesting to start from that multiply excluded but always central foil, 'everyday life'.
