‘Situated learning’, ‘distributed
cognition’: Do academics really need to know?
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‘Situated learning’, ‘distributed
cognition’: do academics really need to know?
The dominant approach to the study of learning
throughout most of the twentieth century was to view learning as
cognitive only, as if it were a process contained in the mind of
the learner, decontextualised from the lived-in world. There is
now, however, a growing interest in the study of learning as <i>situated</i>
in a specific time, place and social activity – as ‘situated
learning’ – and to view the locus of learning not as
in the brain of the single individual (person-solo) but as ‘distributed’
among person, language, artefacts, activities and environment (person-plus)
(see Lave and Wenger, 1999;
Salomon, 1993; Brown, Collins and Duguid, 1989).
What have been emerging in the last twenty years are ideas
about learning which conceptualise the relationships between person,
activity, situation and artefacts in a process of learning without
necessarily encompassing each concept in a theoretical entity. What
is being sough, rather, is a more inclusive, intensive development
of the socially situated character of learning activity in theoretically
consistent terms (Chaklin
and Lave, 2003).
In these new ideas it may not be sufficient to say that designated
cognitive theories of learning can be ‘amended’ by adding
a dimension of ‘situatedness’ or ‘distribution’,
for instance, and by forcing a connection between theories from
psychology and theories from sociology. The emergent theories of
situated learning and distributed cognition essentially do not separate
action, thought, feelings and values ‘from their collective,
cultural, historical forms of located, interested, conflictual,
meaningful activity’ (ibid.),
but in doing so are both a synthesis of some existing ideas about
the nature of learning together with new ways of conceptualising
it.
If we follow the logic of this argument we might, then, doubt the
definition of learning as cognitive acquisition alone – whether
of facts, knowledge, problem-solving strategies or metacognitive
skills – and we might regard learning more as a construction
of present versions of past experiences for several persons acting
together. We might also, then, reconceptualise notions about ‘bodies
of knowledge’ and about the transmission of such bodies of
knowledge in formal learning settings. We might furthermore concede
that knowledge always undergoes construction and transformation
in use, and that learning is always complexly problematic. Thinkers
about education such as Rogoff
(1990) and Salomon
(1993) have given us new conceptualisations and a revised language
to express these concepts. Lave and Wenger
(1991), for example, hold that knowledge and learning will be
found through the complex structures of person-acting-in-settings:
therefore learning cannot be pinned down to the head of the individual,
or to assigned tasks, to external tools or to environment, but lies
instead in the distributed relations among them.
Essentially then, in this new conceptualisation of learning, the
physical and social experiences and situations in which learners
find themselves and the tools they use in that experience are integral
to the entire learning process (Merriam
and Cafferella, 1999).
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