ICT in Education

Thoughts on: Situated cognition and the culture of learning (Brown, Collins & Duguid)

April 25, 2007

Brown, J., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, Jan/Feb, 32-42.

I’m not sure whether these articles are making more sense to me now because I’m getting a stronger grasp on the underlying theories or if it’s just that they are better written. Probably a bit of both.

Brown, Collins and Duguid present their ideas about why content is more meaningful to learners when it is put into context in an easily understandable way, using plenty of examples as well as some very effective analogies. Their approach seems much more anchored in chalkface experience and constantly focusses on educational practice in schools, rather that making lofty prognostications about what approaches might be beneficial for learners.

Key points:

“Many methods of didactic education assume a separation between knowing and doing, treating knowledge as an integral, self-sufficient substance, theoretically independent of the situations in which it is learned and used.”

We should “embed learning in activity and make deliberate use of the social and physical context”

Learning vocabulary with a dictionary and a few example (but out of context) sentences is different to the way words are learnt in day to day life – through use in normal conversation and reading. “Experienced readers implicitly understand that words are situated. They, therefore, ask for the rest of the sentence or the context before committing themselves to an interpretation of a word”

“All knowledge is, we believe, like language. It’s constituent parts index the world and so are intextricably a product of the activity and situations in whch they are produced”

“A concept, like the meaning of a word, is always under construction”

“It may be more useful to consider conceptual knowledge as, in some ways, similar to a set of tools. Tools share several significant features with knowledge – They can only be fully understood with use and using them entails both changing the users view of the world and adopting the belief system in which they are used.”

“People who use tools actively rather than just acquire them, by contrast, build an increasingly rich implicit understanding of the world in which they use the tools and of the tools themselves. The understanding, both of the world and of the tool, continually changes as a result of their interaction”

“Learning how to use a tool involves far more than can be accounted for in any set of explicit rules. The occasions and conditions for use arise directly out of the context of activities of each community that uses the tool, framed by the way members of that community see the world… Thus carpenters and cabinet makers use chisels differently”

“Activity, concept and culture are interdependent. No one can be totally understood without the other two. Learning must involve all three”

“(Students) need to be exposed to the use of a domain’s conceptual tools in authentic activity – to teachers acting as practitioners and using these tools in wrestling with the problems of the world. Such activity can tease out the way a mathematician or historian looks at the world and solves emergent problems. (But maths is a tool used in different ways by different practitioners – eg mathematician vs statistician vs engineer – how do you apply context there – perhaps by looking at the content being covered and seeing who it is most applicable to?)

“Activity also provides experience, which is plainly important for subsequent action”

“Knowledge… indexes the situation in which it arises and is used. The embedding circumstances efficiently provide essential parts of its structure and meaning”

“By beginning with a task embedded in a familiar activity, it shows the students the legitimacy of their implicit knowledge and its availability as scaffolding in apparently unfamiliar tasks”

“By allowing students to generate their own solution paths, it helps make them conscious, creative members of the culture of problem-solving mathematicians. And, in enculturating though this activity, they acquire some of the cultures tools – a shared vocabulary and the means to discuss, reflect upon, evaluate and validate community procedures in a collaborative process”

“Collaboration also leads to the articulation of strategies, which can then be discussed and reflected on. This, in turn, fosters generalising, grounding in the students situated understanding”

“… teachers or coaches promote learning, firstly by making explicit their tacit knowledge or by modelling their strategies for students in authentic activity. Then, teachers and colleagues support student’s attempts at doing the task. And finally they empower the students to continue independently”

“An intriguing role in learning is played by ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, where people who are not taking part directly in a particular activity learn a great deal from their legitimate position on the periphery”

“This peripheral participation is particularly important for people entering the culture. They need to observe how practitioners at various levels behave and talk to get a sense of how expertise is manifest in conversation and other activities”

“Collective problem solving: Groups are not just a convenient way to accumulate the individual knowledge of their members. They give rise synergistically to insights and solutions that would not come about without them”

“Displaying multiple roles: Successful execution of most individual tasks requires students to understand the many different roles needed for carrying out any cognitive task. Getting one person to be able to play all the roles entailed by authentic activity and to reflect productively upon his or her performance is one of the monumental tasks of education. The group, however, permits different roles to be displayed and engenders reflective narratives and discussions about the aptness of those roles” – Is it enough for people to be able to discuss the tasks that someone else undertook in a group task for them to understand what is really involved without having done it?

“Groups can be efficient in drawing out, confronting and discussing both misconceptions and ineffective strategies”

Overall, a lot of interesting ideas here – it got a little more abstract as it continued and the concepts got more advanced but most of it makes sense.

Entry Filed under: 911, collaboration, constructivism, discussion, e-learning, eLearning, education design, pedagogy, strategies. .