Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989
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Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning
Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning, Educational Researcher, 18, 32-42.
Summary:
In this densely rich ground-breaking research leading to an era of revolutionary practices in education, Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) researched learning in general and what implications it has on the institution of formalized education in schools. They provided application of Lave and Wenger’s ideas on Situated Learning to classroom teachers. They further argued that conceptual knowledge is gained in context of specific situations. If teachers only provide narrow learning activities and do not allow for opportunities for students to transfer learning to other domains, this strategy is less useful. Schools teachers often disregard the influence school culture can have on the learning taking place in individual classrooms.
Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) claimed that [at the time this article was written] most educators didn’t realize the relationship between knowledge and doing an activity. Essentially that knowledge comes from experiencing situations. Knowledge was seen as separate entity from everyday life activities, as something for books, but not everyday life. Schools were viewed as institutions to transfer this knowledge without putting it into context of student’s lives. This would be what is referred to often as making Real-World connections. The context into where a student learned knowledge was helpful, but not seen as a key component as it is today. Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) challenged this concept and further argued that knowledge needs to be imbedded in a situation for transfer of learning to occur. They stated that knowledge is a product of everyday life. Learning takes place in everyday activity and thus the teacher needs to take in account the applications and culture of the school when implementing assignments. Teachers will defeat the purpose if not providing useable, applicable examples of knowledge.
An example was given of how school teachers gave vocabulary lessons in which students memorized definitions and used the words in a few sentences. This is not the way they learn language outside of school in their everyday life and thus ignores the situated nature of learning. What is taught in this manner becomes useless when students try to use it themselves. Teaching from books instead of everyday life assumes that the knowledge within the book is self-contained. Dictionaries are most useful to an experienced reader who refers to them with a specific context already in mind.
Learning concepts are situated and developed through activities. Conceptual knowledge is likened unto a set of tools. Like knowledge, tools can only be understood through use. Knowledge as tools lie unused if students cannot use them. Students may be able to manipulate knowledge for classroom use, but never use it in a true application situation and thus never know the concept truly. Learning is a life-long process of acting in situations. Since tools reflect years of a culture in which they were developed, the user must also understand that culture. How students learn is more a product of the situation and culture in which it is learned rather than as a result of teaching. Students need authentic opportunities to apply their knowledge gained in a classroom, not only the traditional school manner in practice. Students should witness teachers practicing using the tools as knowledge in problems they encounter in the world. Traditionally many of the activities school children undertake are not authentic to the culture in which a learning activity originates and thus limits the supporting clues to learning a student would have from the contextual surrounding culture.
Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) claimed that when authentic activities are transferred to the classroom setting, their context is lost in classroom procedures. Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) gave the example of how students in math classes can be intimidated by the formulae of problems without understanding the context in which math is used in Real-world applications. An example of a Weight Watchers dieter was given in which he had to measure out an amount of cottage cheese. Even though he had experience and taken calculus in college, he measured out an amount and then cut it into fractions instead of using a formula to solve and then measure. This is how practitioners in the real-world solve problems, by doing. He was not able to use formulas since he had learned them out of context. When given a task, he still resorted to manual measurement instead of use of the formula.Students tend to lean on whatever context is available to solve problems, if none is explicitly provided.
Examples of math teachers:
Schoenfeld’s math students bring problems to class that they investigate mathematically. Few students get this kind of opportunity to see a teacher engaged in mathematical practice. In Schoenfeld’s classes, solutions are developed by the class, not the teacher. Thus the students take an active part in problem solving. Lamperts 4th grade students who learn multiplication through making their own stories of examples with coins. These examples were intentional in that coins are important to 4th grade students and they had first hand experience with them from their everyday lives. She was able to embed mathematical tasks into familiar activities from students everyday lives.
Resnick (1988) noted that most people have problem-solved collaboratively most of their lives, not individually as they are asked to do in school. Examples of collaborative school work was given with aforementioned math teachers, reciprocal teaching of reading, all employing some form of social interaction and collaboration amongst student learners. Students need to be prepared to work collaboratively.
Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) closed by warning against attempts at making real-world concepts explicit for the sake of embedding concepts into the curriculum. The danger comes in making more things to learn instead of seeing school as relevant and useful learning tools for students lives. Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) suggested future studies on explicit knowledge and the link to implicit learning.
Reflection:
Science textbooks should also therefore be used for reference and the learning take place in context with laboratory activities. It seems that Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) hint towards to the problem we science teachers now face: Our tested, mandated, state and federal learning standards don’t test what we know students need to learn or the manner in which they learn. In most classes you are considered accomplishing mastery when you use a technique to find an answer to a problem.
