Jean Lave is a social anthropologist whose career has been centred at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has been a professor in the School of Education. Her trajectory as a scholar was shaped by a persistent discomfort with the cognitive psychology dominant in educational research during the 1970s and 1980s, which she regarded as artificially decontextualised, ideologically individualist, and blind to the social relations within which all learning takes place. To generate an alternative account, Lave turned to ethnographic fieldwork: in the 1970s she spent extended periods in Liberia studying Vai and Gola apprentice tailors, observing how young men acquired complex craft skills not through instruction in abstract principles but through structured participation in the ongoing life of a tailor's workshop. This research, which she later set against a parallel study of how American supermarket shoppers performed arithmetic in the course of their weekly grocery rounds, led to the theoretical framework for which she is best known — situated learning. Lave's intellectual formation was deeply influenced by the critical tradition in social theory, particularly by Marx, Gramsci, and Vygotsky, and she has consistently framed her work not simply as a contribution to learning theory but as a political project: an attempt to denaturalise the institutional arrangements that schooling takes for granted and to reveal the class interests and power relations they serve. Her collaborations with Etienne Wenger, particularly the jointly authored Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991), brought her ideas to an audience far beyond anthropology and set the terms for a generation of research on workplace learning, professional development, and communities of practice.

Lave's foundational claim is that learning is not the acquisition of abstract, decontextualised knowledge that can subsequently be transferred and applied across settings. Learning is, rather, always and irreducibly situated: it is inseparable from the activity, the context, the tools, and the social relationships within which it occurs. This position emerged directly from her fieldwork: the tailors she studied in Liberia did not learn tailoring by memorising rules about cloth and pattern; they learned by progressively participating in the work of real tailors, handling real garments, observing masters at work, and gradually taking on more central and complex tasks. Similarly, the shoppers she studied in California performed sophisticated proportional reasoning while comparing unit prices in the supermarket aisle, even when they could not execute equivalent problems on a school mathematics test. The divergence between in-school and out-of-school performance was not a sign of failed transfer but of the fundamentally different character of cognition in different settings. Learning, on this account, is not inside the head; it is distributed across persons, tools, and the social and physical environment.

The concept of legitimate peripheral participation, developed jointly with Etienne Wenger, provides the analytical mechanism through which situated learning is understood to occur in apprenticeship and other informal learning settings. Newcomers to any practice — a craft workshop, a legal firm, a Alcoholics Anonymous group, a naval ship's navigation team — begin as peripheral participants: they observe, assist with simple tasks, and are present at but not yet responsible for the full complexity of the practice. Their participation is legitimate insofar as it is genuine — they are doing real work, not exercises or simulations — but peripheral in that they engage with the practice from its margins rather than its centre. Over time, as competence grows and relationships deepen, participation becomes more central. Learning, in this framework, is precisely this movement from periphery toward full participation; identity and knowledge develop together as the learner becomes progressively a different kind of person — a tailor, a sailor, a lawyer — not merely someone who knows more facts.

The theoretical framework of communities of practice, which Lave and Wenger introduced in Situated Learning (1991) and which Wenger elaborated in Communities of Practice (1998), describes the social structures within which legitimate peripheral participation unfolds. A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion for a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise by interacting on an ongoing basis. What holds such a community together is not a formal institutional membership but a shared practice — shared ways of doing, talking about, and making sense of the world. The concept has been enormously influential beyond its anthropological origins, shaping research and policy in organisational learning, professional development in medicine, law, and education, and the design of collaborative digital environments. Lave herself has been notably critical of the ways in which the concept has been domesticated and depoliticised in many of its applications, stripped of the analysis of power and class relations she regards as essential to any genuine understanding of learning in social life.

A central and polemical strand in Lave's work is her sustained critique of the assumption — foundational to most educational policy and much cognitive psychology — that knowledge acquired in formal schooling can and should transfer to out-of-school settings. Her research suggests that school knowledge and everyday knowledge are not merely different levels of the same thing but qualitatively different kinds of activity, shaped by different social relations, different purposes, and different evaluative structures. The school's insistence on individual, decontextualised, testable performance not only fails to reflect the social and material character of genuine competence but actively misrepresents it. This critique has radical implications for education: if the activities distinctive of schooling do not correspond to the activities that produce competent practice in the world, then the entire institutional architecture of formal education may require fundamental rethinking rather than incremental improvement.

Lave has consistently framed her theoretical work as part of a broader political project traceable to the critical tradition in social theory. She is interested not only in how learning occurs but in what counts as learning, who is judged competent, and how those judgments serve the reproduction of existing social hierarchies. Her later work, particularly Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice (2011) and Learning and Everyday Life (2019), develops a Marxist-inflected analysis of everyday practice and a critique of the ways in which dominant approaches to learning — including some appropriations of her own earlier concepts — have served to naturalise and reproduce the social relations of capitalism. For Lave, a genuinely critical learning theory must not only describe how people learn within existing social arrangements but must interrogate those arrangements and ask whose interests they serve.

• Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life (1988)
• Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991, with Etienne Wenger)
• Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context (1993, edited with Seth Chaiklin)
• Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice (2011)
• Learning and Everyday Life: Access, Participation, and Changing Practice (2019)