• Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1991. (Chapters 3)

• Oliveira, Gabrielle and Hervé Varenne "Mothers, educating themselves about their children's futures in Mexico and the United States" (Chapter 7 of Educating in life: ethnographies of challenging new normals. Routledge (2019).)

1. Adulthood as a beginning (rather than an end product)

   Towards a critique of education as the production of adult "human capital"

   1. The implication of Lave's work as it notices the work of adults to learn
      1. apprenticeships seen not only as a deliberate form of training the young, but also as a task for adults, and also as a situation in which all adults will find themselves again and again.
         1. midwives
         2. tailors
         3. quartermasters (note the passage on the role of machines as trigger and limits to learning)
         4. butchers
         5. alcoholics
2. but do note, as mentioned p. 84, some of these apprenticeships are not formalized, thereby making even more salient the issue of political control of access, permission to practice, acknowledgment of expertise.
   1. note for example that when midwives practice, they also teach the laboring woman what is also at issue during labor and delivery beyond the obvious matters of the operation of the body as biological entity.
   2. Thus leading to Lave's generalization of her research in the model of "legitimate peripheral participation" and the ever-to-be-renewed movement towards fuller participation (unless this is blocked)
3. Occasions and settings for education(beyond formal/informal or school/not school)
   1. schooling, of course, but also
   2. contexts of schooling (family, etc.)
   3. peers and contemporaries ("consociates" Plath 1980), for example
      1. genderings (Holland & Eisenhart): finding out the paradigmatic connotations of the sexes, cautionary tales, and other forms of representation (e.g. body displays -- see Garfinkel on 'Agnes')
      2. race-ings: the representation of the 'Black' (Muslim, etc.) in the media and one's own body.
      3. courtings: Hanunoo literacy (Conklin 1949)
      4. technology in every day life (and perhaps even in mechanic shops, factory floors, etc.)
         1. cooking
         2. cars
         3. games (including no-toy-games children make-up)
         4. everything computer
            1. turning it on
            2. using programs
            3. programming
   4. other professionals as one needs them (lawyers, physicians and surgeons)
      1. on learning on a neurological intensive care unit(Varenne 2018)
      2. on the stages of dying in a hospital (Glaser 1965)
   5. the media and the other "teachers" of adults
4. thus: Ongoing adult education

   ongoing discovery of particular forms of ignorance leading to localized education (finding out, being told, practicing). Whether this leads to "learning" should remain an open question, as well as the relevance of learning something one might never encounter again.

   What adults may have to learn as they face situations they have never been in:

   1. transitions
      1. weddings
      2. childbirth
      3. special days
      4. festivals (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Passover, etc.), including "one's own" and that of one's "others")
   2. adult reconstruction (repair? constitution of the new) and its implications
      1. math in supermarkets: "just plain folks" (jpf) in situ

         Note that "jpf" is a different kind of labels than "working class" or "white." It indexes a social structural position: that of the non expert (think Rancière), as well as a setting (no testing, no school failure)

         1. from abstract cognitive processing
         2. to the social fields within which "arithmetic activity is enabled though not determined" (p. 121)
         3. to building relationship with the rest of one's life (available cash in various checking accounts), dieting, etc. (p. 136 and the division of income)
      2. Bartlett (2008, 2010) on shame, literacy, and the personal production of new practices for adult tasks.
      3. Kalmar on teaching English
      4. Oliveira on the ongoing production of children's among other children, and in preparation for some future (social [=re?-]production
      5. aging, illness, and death
         1. the times of life, their connotations, narratives, rights and privileges, problems, etc.
         2. the social structuring of sickness
         3. dying , burial, memorials
5. Political problems that are also educational problems
   1. political orderings (from the Constitution, to the parties, to "my" party identification
   2. political discourses and decisions from the most general (e.g. how to speak about whom using what discursive forms--from pronouns to labels and interpretations) to the most local of conversations (e.g. with spouses or children)
   3. new international events (wars, terrorism)