Field note
Reading your way into the work
Legitimate peripheral participation, which is a long phrase for hanging around the real thing.
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s Situated Learning (1991) describes how people enter a practice from the edge: legitimate peripheral participation. You do a real task that is small, among people who do the whole task. Apprenticeship is the old word. A reading group can be a thin version. A volunteer shift in the archive is a thicker one.
Books matter, and they are not the practice. Susan Orlean’s The Library Book will not make you a librarian. It can tell you whether the room attracts you. The next step is a Saturday in an actual room, doing a job someone needed.
If a field on your map is only a stack of books, mark it as reading. Then pick one peripheral task. The chart gets more honest after you have been slightly useful.