I have to admit that I don’t think I fully understand the Brown, Collins, Duguid piece. As I was reading the original piece I felt like a lot of what they were saying has already been said before, that students learn by doing. I felt relieved when I read Palinscsar’s review since she thought the same thing. It seemed like the authors were building on what has already been said by Dewey and Vygotsky.
I think what I’m most confused about is how situated cognition is related to learning. The way I interpreted what the authors were saying was that when in a given situation we are going to recall what we know and apply it to that given situation. Like in the cottage cheese example, the man relied on his previous knowledge to figure out the problem. To me he was using what is a result of learning, which is knowledge. So how does situated cognition relate to the process of learning when the explanation of it deals more with the result of learning?
I was also bothered by the authors viewpoint that learning only occurs through “authentic activity” and that to participate in “authentic activity” students should be apprentices. Does this mean that lab activities we have are students participate in to learn a valuable skill is not an “authentic activity” because they are not acting like scientists? Also, how is it feasible to have a teacher act as a practitioner to a classroom of 25 or more “apprentices”? An apprenticeship is usually one on and one, not one to 25.
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I know I was probably supposed to write this response before class today, but now I’m glad I waited as long as I did. A lot of my discussions today were “what is this authentic activity we’re talking about?” I’m not saying that I have any idea at this moment in time, but I feel like I’m a lot closer after today’s class than I was after reading the articles/chapters. Whatever this authentic activity is, it sounds appealing and engaging. I want to get involved in that.
I think the lab activities most science students participate in are pretty useless, and I do believe this could be remedied by making them more authentic. For example, I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal evidence supporting organic chemistry labs that are actually synthesis research projects. This way, learning how to run a column, etc are peripheral learning accomplishments to the far more interesting task of creating a brand new organic molecule. Not only that, but the lack of a clear synthetic plan forces students to be creative and draw upon a large body of chemical knowledge.
I agree completely about the question of apprentices in classrooms of 25 or more — I’m not really sure how (practically) we’re supposed to think of taking that on. I know we’re not supposed to get hung up on the practical stuff, but when the suggestion seems to be that we move to a 1:1 student teacher ratio, it’s hard not to question it a little bit.
I got a little different lesson from the cottage cheese incident, though — the person had clearly learned at some point how to multiply fractions (given the mutterings about calculus). But they were unable to access that knowledge in the setting they were in at the time. Brown and the rest did go on to praise the problem solving that was done, but I also took away a question around how effective teaching is when it isn’t done in the context people use the information in. Maybe we’ll find out more about it today…