An examination of the construct of legitimate peripheral participation as a theoretical framework in literacy research

• Today's contexts of literacy require a review of legitimate peripheral participation.
• Complications in the construct of practice need parsing in studies that use LPP.
• Studies varied in how well the constructs of LPP and community of practice fit.
• Apprenticeship experiences and relegated positions of newcomers vary widely.
• Principles are offered for evaluating studies that claim LPP as a central construct.

This review critically examines the use in literacy research of Lave and Wenger's (1991) construct of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), a view of learning as participation by which newcomers adopt a group's ways, moving from periphery to the center of a practice. From a search through 10 literacy-relevant journals from 1991 to the present, we purposively selected 20 pieces that relied centrally on LPP and analyzed these for ways in which practice and apprenticeship were instantiated. Regarding practice, we inquired about legitimacy and engagement; regarding apprenticeship, we asked about the deployment of experts' attention and the cost of newcomers' mistakes. Using the benefit of the 20+ years since the original publication, our critique offers six principles to evaluate researchers' use of LPP and community of practice as constructs to describe learners' experience, and summarizes how some of our 20 studies made felicitous use of the constructs and others less so.