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Video recording from a conference lecture in 2010 I think, with Jean Lave speaking about learning as a social practice. Much as I recall her Copenhagen seminars back in 2000 The first minutes of audio are quite bad, but I think it gets better. "Jean Lave, PhD en antropología social de la Universidad de Harvard y teórica ampliamente reconocida en el campo del aprendizaje social, dictó el 21 de abril la conferencia Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice, realizada por el Departamento de Psicología de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de los Andes."

In this extended meditation, Jean Lave interweaves analysis of the process of apprenticeship among the Vai and Gola tailors of Liberia with reflections on the evolution of her research on those tailors in the late 1970s. In so doing, she provides both a detailed account of her apprenticeship in the art of sustained fieldwork and an insightful overview of thirty years of changes in the empirical and theoretical facets of ethnographic practice. Examining the issues she confronted in her own work, Lave shows how the critical questions raised by ethnographic research erode conventional assumptions, altering the direction of the work that follows. As ethnography takes on increasing significance to an ever widening field of thinkers on topics from education to ecology, this erudite but accessible book will be essential to anyone tackling the question of what it means to undertake critical and conceptually challenging fieldwork. Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice explains how to seriously explore what it means to be human in a complex world-and why it is so important.

The long awaited book where social anthropologist Jean Lave shares her research study from Liberia, of tailor boy apprenticeship (where they learn not from their master directly, but from being inlcuded in everyday chores and observing their peer apprentices, a litte more advanced than themselves). JeanLve spent considerable time on location doing this study. In 2000 she was a guest teacher at the University of Copenhagen where I had the pleasure to follow a dozen lectures. With my study companion's courage, we were allowed to have a one hour long conversation with Jean Lave, planned as an interview but never published, to my regret. The book can be purchased as an e-book for 30 days, at the reasonable price of $6, or full price $27 (same as in print).

From summary of thesis: The issues discussed in the current thesis grow out of many years of practical work in various development projects within the field of labour market politics. The explicit aim of many of these projects is to change or adjust current work practices. However, I have often encountered a mismatch between the well-documented experiences of success within a project on one hand, and the fact that project experiences are only rarely and to a limited extent successfully transferred to and applicable outside the project. This schism formed the initial backdrop for the work presented in this thesis. The aim has been firstly to develop a better understanding for the learning processes made possible through development projects, secondly to clarify why problems occur when this new learning is to be implemented in and brought back to those labour market organisations (job centres, unemployment funds, educational institutions, local authorities etc.) that the development project targeted. In the thesis, implementation is therefore primarily discussed in terms of these labour market institutions, that is, they form the primary horizon for the experiences and the learning resulting from the project. The thesis contains an empirical and theoretical analysis of the process establishing a specific development project, the learning of the participants through the project, and the implementation of their experiences both in the day-to-day work and within the organisation at large. Yrjö Engeström is, therefore, introduced since his concept of expansive learning precisely captures the combination of novel practice and different forms of learning. With their notion of community of practice Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger provide, furthermore, an analytical concept of immediate relevance for project work. I have been much inspired by their approach while collecting empirical material documenting the later part of the project. I have, however, come to realise that t

Interesting blog entry. Great graphic.