This reading says that in order to full engage ourselves in the learning process, we have to fully involve ourselves with the society around us. Why does this even need to be said? Was there some point in time where this was thought to be otherwise? I consider myself a pretty strong individualist, but even I can admit that society is necessary for certain things, especially the type of learning about which this article is written.
I desperately need class this week to clear this reading up. I’m really not understanding what I’m supposed to take from this. I am able to understand what is implied by situated learning. But I am having a very difficult time figuring out what the difference is between this and legitimate peripheral participation. Does this just mean we view what people in our environment are doing in order to learn? That’s the best I can come up with.
“learning is not merely situated in practice – as if it were some independently reifiable process that just happened to be located somewhere; learning is an integral part of generative social practices in the lived-in world.”
This sort of confirms what I believed. We need to keep our eyes open to social practices in the world around us. This could be a fancy way of saying what I said…maybe…I feel like this stuff would be so much easier to understand if the authors didn’t use so much darned jargon. Why the term legitimate? Is there illegitimate? This article claims there isn’t, so why include the term legitimate anyway?
As I continued reading the article at least the term “legitimate peripheral participation” received explanation. But it doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable with the term. I don’t want to say I disagree with or disapprove of the arguments made in this article, because from the bits and pieces I’ve understood I actually find it pretty sufficient.
However, I am not sure of how I feel about their decision to exclude schools from their discussions. I get what they mean by describing it as a multi-layered system, but doesn’t that mean that this theory should at least be included or considered in schooling theory? If it is an “analytical viewpoint of learning,” doesn’t that imply its necessity in schooling theory?
Tags: thegroup
It’s interesting that you see a theory of learning as something that is necessary to schooling theory. I sort of addressed this in my blof too. I think the idea is that we need to understand how children learn in order to teach, but a theory of learning is not the same thing as a theory of teaching. Additionally, I personally feel that I need to stop generating a new teaching model every time I learn about a new learning theory. While every learning theory generates deeper understanding of learning, no single model wraps things up in a neat little package. This is why it’s dangerous for me to try to revamp my entire teaching theory all the time. (I’m such an extremist.) What I really need to do is allow all of my own theories to develop over time, with moderate influence from these types of readings.
I’m with you, there is too much jargon in this article and it made it near impossible for me to understand what they were trying to say. The one main thing I got from it, which you pointed out, was that society aides in learning. And as we watch and observe, we learn, and then eventually we become the teacher, or “old timer”.
One of the areas I thought this reading was lacking in was in discussing examples of what they are talking about or in linking to experiments or statistics that show their description of learning makes more sense than other descriptions. I would guess that the authors would reject the entire idea of what I’m saying above, given the way that they frame their discussion of their theory. But reading this, I was excited when I saw I was getting to a chapter on applications — maybe I’d finally get a sense of what they were talking about. But instead it just felt like a rehash of the earlier chapters, with the occasional sentence about midwives or AA members.
That’s all a long way of saying that I agree that it was hard to follow their arguments, and I think if they had provided more explicit examples and pointed to how legitimate peripheral learning showed us something new or different about the process, it would have helped out more. I didn’t get a clear sense of that, though.