Each of the three readings for this week provided three distinct perspectives on how people learn. I enjoyed reading some articles that were out of my normal scope of curriculum and instruction. Attending to the theoretical frameworks used in the articles helped me connect what we have been talking and reading about for class to actual educational research. It was helpful to get more examples of how authors actually used different theoretical frameworks to shape their studies. I will discuss the articles and their corresponding theoretical frameworks in order of how we learned the theories in class: from cognitive to situated.
Though the Gutwell and Allen article states “learning in museums is a fundamentally social experience, often taking place in multigenerational groups that draw on each member’s interests and expertise as the group interacts with exhibits” (Gutwell and Allen 2009, pg. 711), the authors take a cognitive view of learning. They do stress, however, the importance of the individual in a social setting. The authors talk of “prediction and metacognition” as well as grounding their theories in “cognitive science” and “sociocultural theory.” Some of the authors’ goals include supporting metacognition as well as minimizing cognitive load on museum visitors learning inquiry skills. Also, the authors recognize that each individual may have specific learning agendas and focus on these as a goal rather than increasing participation in a community. Ultimately, the authors’ are trying to implement cognitive skill sets to aid inquiry through game play. Though I’m not exactly sure on the separation between quantitative and qualitative data analysis (for example, is it qualitative analysis when you quantify qualitative data, such as ranking interview responses?), this article seemed to focus heavily on statistical analysis and contained pages of data tables, which we learned in class are more indicative of a cognitive theoretical framework than a situated framework.
The second article by Zimmerman et al. seemed to pick and choose from both the cognitive and situated camps. The authors use an “Everyday Expertise” framework to ground their study. They state, “We argue that individual and cognitive aspects of learning are fundamentally connected to the social and cultural aspects of learning; therefore, we analyze the intertwining role of individual cognitive resources, situated activities, and cultural toolkit resources that support learning interactions and processes.” (Zimmerman et al. 2009, pg. 478) They claim belief in both cognitive and situated learning within the same statement. Throughout the article, the authors pull from both views almost equally. They write “Finally, there are studies in many fields of individual and social aspects of learning taken separately; our work, in contrast, uses ethnographic methods and an Everyday Expertise analytical framework to connect individual and social perspectives.” (Zimmerman et al. 2009, pg. 479). This viewpoint confused me, because, I thought you weren’t allowed to agree with both cognitive and situated theoretical frameworks at the same time. We are sort of expected to choose (and argue) one or the other, but Zimmerman et al. seem to use both simultaneously. I thought that individual cognitive and situated cognitive theories can’t just be swapped out for the other depending on the situation, or am I just confused?
The last article by Roth and Van Eijck was extremely interesting. I have never heard of the “Whole Life” theoretical framework before. Roth writes “In the totality of life, thought reproduces itself just-in-time and then disappears again when the relevant and salient episode recedes into the past to be recounted and accounted for in stories…” (Roth and Van Eijck 2010 pg. 1018) Though Roth and Eijck reject previous theoretical frameworks, their argument is definitely based on the situated cognition end of the individual/situated spectrum. Instead of learning occurring in communities of practice, however, learning cannot be reduced to just the community; the entire life of a person needs to be considered when viewing how people learn, not just their relation to a particular community. Though Roth and Van Eijck do not present any data ( this article is a commentary, not a study), they do present lengthy anecdotes. The authors present a Utopian view of “whole life” learning which may break down when pushed to further study. I am wondering how you could really go about studying someone’s learning through the perspective of his entire life. You could make a lot of claims to fit your argument, but how difficult would it be to collect the data?
Seems that we are all seeing the same things in your blog: a combination of both the cognitive and situated camps. This would seem to support Dr. McDonald’s claim that education is “messy”.
I agree with your comments about the cognitive and situated approaches. I also thought, especially after last week’s articles, that the cognitive and situated approaches couldn’t be mixed, but I also think that learning falls somewhere in between the two. I find it interesting that, even if one approach is favored over another, it seems so difficult to use language of only that approach, and not mix language of other approaches into descriptions of learning.
Your perspective on the acceptance of both the situated and cognitive view of learning from the Zimmerman article is interesting. I pinned them to falling in the middle, not sort of split to both ends. I’ll think about it some more but we should talk about this in class!