1. Situated Cognition And The Culture Of Learning: Development

Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.Under this assumption, which requires an shift from empiricism, situativity theorists suggest a model of knowledge and learning that requires thinking on the fly rather than the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. In essence, cognition cannot be separated from the context.

Instead knowing exists, in situ, inseparable from context, activity, people, culture, and language. Therefore, learning is seen in terms of an individual's increasingly effective performance across situations rather than in terms of an accumulation of knowledge, since what is known is co-determined by the agent and the context. This perspective rejects, being conceptually similar to, and 's. Young-Barab Model (1997)The Young-Barab Model (1997) pictured to the left, illustrates the dynamics of intentions and intentional dynamics involved in the agent's interaction with his environment when problem solving.Dynamics of Intentions: goal (intention) adoption from among all possible goals (ontological descent). This describes how the learner decides whether or not to adopt a particular goal when presented with a problem. Once a goal is adopted, the learner proceeds by interacting with their environment through intentional dynamics.

Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. John S Brown; Allan Collins; Paul Duguid; BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN INC CAMBRIDGE MA.; - In an earlier paper (Collins, Brown and Newman, in press), cognitive apprenticeship was proposed as an alternative and richer view of learning than that suggested by didactic education.

There are many levels of intentions, but at the moment of a particular occasion, the agent has just one intention, and that intention constrains his behavior until it is fulfilled or annihilated.Intentional Dynamics: dynamics that unfold when the agent has only one intention (goal) and begins to act towards it, perceiving and acting. It is a trajectory towards the achievement of a solution or goal, the process of tuning one's perception (attention).

Each intention is meaningfully bounded, where the dynamics of that intention inform the agent of whether or not he is getting closer to achieving his goal. If the agent is not getting closer to his goal, he will take corrective action, and then continue forward. This is the agent's intentional dynamics, and continues on until he achieves his goal.Transfer There are various definition of transfer found within the situated cognition umbrella. Researchers interested in social practice often define transfer as increased participation. Ecological psychology perspectives define transfer as the detection of invariance across different situations. Furthermore, transfer can only 'occur when there is a confluence of an individual's goals and objectives, their acquired abilities to act, and a set of affordances for action'.

Embodied cognition. Main article:The traditional cognition approach assumes that perception and motor systems are merely peripheral input and output devices. However, posits that the mind and body interact 'on the fly' as a single entity. An example of embodied cognition is seen in the area of robotics, where movements are not based on internal representations, rather, they are based on the robot's direct and immediate interaction with its environment. Additionally, research has shown that embodied facial expressions influence judgments, and arm movements are related to a person's evaluation of a word or concept. In the latter example, the individual would pull or push a lever towards his name at a faster rate for positive words, than for negative words.

These results appeal to the embodied nature of situated cognition, where knowledge is the achievement of the whole body in its interaction with the world.Externalism As to the mind, by and large, situated cognition paves the way to various form of. The issue is whether the situated aspect of cognition has only a practical value or it is somehow constitutive of cognition and perhaps of consciousness itself. As to the latter possibility, there are different positions. David Chalmers and Andy Clark, who developed the hugely debated model of the extended mind, explicitly rejected the externalization of consciousness. For them, only cognition is extended. On the other hand, others, like Riccardo Manzotti or Teed Rockwell, explicitly considered the possibility to situate conscious experience in the environment.Pedagogical implications Since situated cognition views knowing as an action within specific contexts and views models of knowledge transmission as impoverished, there are significant implications for pedagogical practices. First, curriculum requires instructional design that draws on apprenticeship models common in real life.

1. Learning and cognition, it is now possible to argue, are fundamentally situated. In this paper, we try to explain in a deliberately speculative way, why activity and situations are integral to cognition and learning, and how different ideas of what is appropriate learning activity produce very different results.
2. Situated Cognition. Learning does not consist of abstract processes; learning occurs in specific life contexts; cognition develops out of and occurs within the context of a particular individual activity; cognition develops out of and occurs within the context of a particular cultural setting.

Second, curricular design should rely on contextual narratives that situate concepts in practice. Classroom practices such as and would qualify as consistent with the perspective, as would techniques such as Case Base Learning, and.Cognitive apprenticeship Cognitive apprenticeships were one of the earliest pedagogical designs to incorporate the theories of situated cognition (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Cognitive apprenticeship uses four dimensions (e.g., content, methods, sequence, sociology) to embed learning in activity and make deliberate the use of the social and physical contexts present in the classroom (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). Cognitive apprenticeship includes the enculturation of students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). The technique draws on the principles of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984; 1989) in that a more knowledgeable other, i.e. A teacher, engages in a task with a more novice other, i.e.

A learner, by describing their own thoughts as they work on the task, providing 'just in time' scaffolding, modeling expert behaviors, and encouraging reflection. The reflection process includes having students alternate between novice and expert strategies in a problem-solving context, sensitizing them to specifics of an expert performance, and adjustments that may be made to their own performance to get them to the expert level (Collins & Brown, 1988; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). Thus, the function of reflection indicates 'co-investigation' and/or abstracted replay by students.Collins, Brown, and Newman (1989) emphasized six critical features of a cognitive apprenticeship that included observation, coaching, modeling, fading, and reflection., Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Greeno, 1989. Greeno & Moore, 1993. ^ Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989. ^ Suchman, Lucy (1987).

Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication. Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press. ^ Suchman, Lucy (January 1993). 'Response to Vera and Simon's Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation'. Cognitive Science. 17: 71–75.

^ Lave & Wenger, 1991. Brown & Duguid, 2000; Clancey, 1994.

Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). Young, 2004.

Barsalou, L. Grounded Cognition (2008) Annu.

S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18, 32-41.Key ideas:1.

The activity in which knowledge is developed and deployed is not separable from or ancillary to learning and cognition. Nor is it neutral. Rather, it is an integral part of what is learned. Situations might be said to co-produce knowledge through activity.

Situated Cognition And The Culture Of Learning: Development

Learning and cognition are fundamentally situated. Concepts are like tools. Like physical tools, it is quite possible to acquire a conceptual tool but to be unable to use it. People who use physical 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. 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.

The community and its viewpoint, quite as much as the tool itself, determine how a tool is used. 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 are too often asked to use the tools of a discipline without being able to adopt its culture.

i.e., acquire conceptual tools but not use them in authentic ways p.337. The ways schools use dictionaries, or math formulae, or historical analysis are very different from the ways practitioners use them (Schoenfeld, in press). Thus, students may pass exams-(a distinctive part of school cultures) but still not be able to use a domain's conceptual tools in authentic practice. Authentic activities are defined simply as the ordinary practices of the culture.

P35Examples of authentic activity (p35)a. Weight-watchers: take 3/4 of 2/3 cup of cottage cheese. Mathematically 3/4 of 2/3 cup is 1/2 cup (.75 x.6666 =.500). But the dieter solved this problem by measuring out 2/3 cup of cottage cheese, dividing the portion into 4 parts, and removing one part.9.

Authentic activity is important for learners, because it is the only way they gain access to the standpoint that enables practitioners to act meaningfully and purposefully. It is activity that shapes or hones their tools. Most school experiences encourage students to learn about a subject rather than learn a subject with understanding (surface learning vs. Deep understanding, low meaning vs. High meaning)Example of teaching multiplication using authentic activity approach: Lampert (1986) p38+ First phase of teaching starts with simple coin problems, such as 'using only nickels and pennies, make 82 cents.' With such problems, Lampert helps her students explore their implicit knowledge.+ Second phase of instruction: the students create stories for multiplication problems.

They perform a series of decompositions and discover that there is no one, magically 'right' decomposition decreed by authority, just more and less useful decompositions whose use is judged in the context of the problem to be solved and the interests of the problem solvers.+ Third phase of instruction: gradually introduces students to the standard algorithm, now that such an algorithm has a meaning and a purpose in their community. The students' procedure parallels the story problems they had created. Eventually they find ways to shorten the process, and they usually arrive at the standard algorithm, justifying their findings with the stories they created earlier.11.

Characteristic of cognitive apprenticeship approach to teaching: p38+ beginning with a task embedded in a familiar activity+ stress that multiple solutions are possible+ allowing students to generate their own solution paths+ by enculturating through activity, learners acquire some of the culture's tools-a shared vocabulary and the means to discuss, reflect upon, evaluate, and validate community procedures in a collaborative process.12. Craft apprenticeship enables apprentices to acquire and develop the tools and skills of their craft through authentic work at and membership in their trade.

Through this process, apprentices enter the culture of practice. this might be a better way to train teachers than traditional teacher prep programs p.3913.

In this model, the relationship of the teacher to the student is one of master to apprentice does this requires the avg. K-12 teacher to 'know' a lot more and/or be better trained than most K-12 teachers to teach this way p.40.