Chinese teacher and philosopher Confucius said, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” I believe this quote, in some respects, is a simplistic way to think about the cognitive apprenticeship approach to learning discussed by Brown, Collins, and Duguid in the article Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Throughout the reading, I was aligned with their analogy of knowledge being a tool and the expert being the teacher who passes down the necessary skills to use the tool. What I could not quite envision however, is how the expert or teacher does not only share knowledge about practices but puts the practices in context with the culture and community in which the tools will be applied. “To learn to use tools as practitioners use them, a student, like an apprentice, must enter that community and its culture” (p. 33, Brown). This is a form of socio-cultural learning.
Thinking about this in relation to a classroom comprised of students with knowledge and experiences specific to their communities and culture, my ability to pass down traditions and methods would be novice at best. Perhaps, I am thinking too concretely and literally in interpreting the application of situated cognition. Further as was pointed out by Palinscar in the article Less Charted Waters, “The authors never provide a cogent explanation about what in a practitioner’s culture must be taught to students” (p. 6, Palinscar). What if that culture conflicts with the knowledge and traditions the students bring with them to the classroom?
These questions, and my admission to worrying about being an “expert” in my trade of teaching physics, encouraged me to search for an understanding in NRC’s Chapter 3 of A Framework for K-12 Science Education. I appreciated the outlined practices and in-depth explanation of the core practices provided as well as the two subsequent subsets of goals and progression. It makes sense to me that the practices “stress that science in scientific inquiry requires coordination both of knowledge and skill simultaneously” (p. 42, NRC). That being said, I can correlate this statement with the analogy used by Brown, Collins, and Duguid in their article. I believe knowledge is the tools we give our students, and subsequently practice is the experiences and activities we create in our classrooms.