SCIED 552: Science Teaching and Learning Developing Models of Science Teaching

In this week’s three articles, the authors fill in some gaps from previous learning theories, largely focusing on how learning is both an individual and social process. The connections within these three articles, as well as between these articles and the learning theories we’ve discussed, were so numerous that it was difficult for me to choose where to focus. Hopefully I can make some sense of the common threads and divergences here…

Pintrich et al. argue for a sociocultural or situated model of conceptual change, in contrast to Posner’s cognitive model of conceptual change. They call this a social or constructivist position of conceptual change (p. 170), calling to mind Vygotsky’s theories. There are also strong connections to Lave’s communities of practice model, including an emphasis on the importance of students making choices about problems and how/if to solve them. Pintrich also seems to build on legitimate peripheral participation, exploring how students’ motivational beliefs affect participation, as well as building on Lave’s discussion of roles in a community of practice, through exploring “…how the role of the individual in a learning community sustains or hinders conceptual change through instruction” (p. 191). Pintrich does not, however, see eye to eye with Brown’s model of cognitive apprenticeship, arguing that a classroom and students cannot realistically be modeled after a scientific community due to the numerous other social factors and motivational beliefs at play (p. 173). 

A.L. Brown et al. seem to align with Pintrich on this criticism of cognitive apprenticeship, and they further argue that schools should seek to create a community of practice of learners: to make students expert learners, so that they can continue to learn about anything, regardless of a specific knowledge/content base, after they leave school.  To me, it feels that A.L. Brown fills in many gaps that J.S. Brown left about applying the cognitive apprenticeship theory to school settings. There are certainly also threads from Lave’s communities of practice and newcomers learning together within A.L. Brown’s theories of mutual appropriation and negotiation. I hadn’t heard of reciprocal teaching previously, but I have used jigsaws (p. 197) with high school students and in my experience it does seem to be an effective way of distributing expertise and inciting students to ask more questions and/or prompt them to go back to the text. However, I also noticed that it much more effective when students are motivated and/or interested, which makes me consider Pintrich’s perspectives on motivational beliefs…

Driver et al.’s theories, while including some of J.S. Brown’s enculturation and Lave’s legitimate peripheral participation (p. 6), called a lot of Vygotsky’s framework to mind for me. Driver argues that “scientific knowledge is both symbolic in nature and also socially negotiated” (p. 5), describing scientific concepts as constructs, or signs in Vygotsky’s terms. They also emphasize discourse as a primary means of science learning – a perspective that I believe aligns strongly with Vygotsky’s discussions of the social nature of signs and the importance of language. Driver explored an interesting thread of Posner’s conceptual change, focusing on the role of prior knowledge in the form of informal science learning (aka misconceptions?), which they argue are socially constructed as well. 

Many pieces of these three articles reminded me of the Framework and the NGSS. A.L. Brown discusses the inclusion of crosscutting themes (concepts) and considering depth not breadth when choosing ideas to explore (disciplinary core ideas) (p. 208). Both A.L. Brown and Driver also emphasize the role of discourse in science learning – an idea that may translate to the “science talk” that plays a large role in modern curricula. I noticed that these articles also included more about the teacher’s role than we’ve seen in some previous models. A.L. Brown described that the role of teachers “demands competence and confidence” – a statement that prompted me to wonder how the motivational beliefs of teachers affect their role or participation in a classroom…

Pintrich et al. raise a great point about how science classrooms end up utilizing science labs. “In fact, in the science education literature there is evidence that many science labs are verification, not problem solving, exercises and are seen as something to complete and to get the right answer on, rather than as a process by which one might learn something new” (Pintrich et al. 1993, P. 181). How do we scaffold meaningful labs and field activities that foster the true nature of science, not a school-driven idea about what science is? Is it through providing less structure and more guidance in the form of a general goal, or is it reshaping the content, etc.? I wonder about these things because I can recall so many of the labs in middle school and high school where it was obvious where the lab was intending to go, or we’d learn the principle first and use the lab to verify it, and it fast became less about discovery, but about simply confirming what we were already told. Maybe I just answered my own question in writing this paragraph- maybe with a conceptual change framework, students discover and form the principles themselves and aren’t directly told as much conceptually about what they are doing.

I still have several questions after this reading. One of the systems Pintrich et al. advocate for, project/problem-based-learning, identifies some of these aspects, but I am unclear about something. Having learned about PBL in other classes, I know there is emphasis on the authentic nature of PBL and why it is necessary. This to me makes it sound closer to legitimate peripheral participation. So is PBL the bridge between conceptual change and LPP, or is there more overlap between both categories than this one application? Also, in a broad sense, they talk about student motivations playing a mroe critical role than previously considered in conceptual change, but I’d like to understand this more at a level that benefits us as educators. What factors do we need to consider when it comes to motivation, and how to use it to benefit our students?

I dont have many questions about Brown et al. especially since this paper covered the application of the communities of practice ideas we talked about last week. Whereas I felt last week it was framework focused, this article helped explain communities of practice in much greater detail and in ways that are just as relevant and less abstract to us as educators or educational theorists. It was helpful to see a solid breakdown of what processes guide the community of learning, like mutual appropriation. With regard to Driver et al., my main question is how is social constructivist teaching steered? Is it similar to how we use talk moves in AST or do we need different methods and tools in order to prevent the students from operating rudderless? The constructivist perspective feels similar in principle but I feel I might be missing a piece of the puzzle.

In Driver et al. (1994), they take on a new view of how learning and knowledge is constructed within an individual.  They acknowledge that both the ideas of conceptual change and of legitimate peripheral participation (communities of practice) are insufficient in their explanations of how learning occurs.  They unite the ideas of conceptual change occurring within a framework of social interactions.  I consider one of the more interesting concepts put forth in this paper was the idea of pragmatism being a driving factor in how ideas are processed and judged.  Furthermore, “ideas are judged in terms of being useful for specific purposes or in specific situations, and, as such, they guide people’s actions” (Driver et al. 1994, p. 8).  Thus, the way that knowledge is utilized in everyday life (commonsense) in specific circumstances is distinctly different from scientific reasoning which “strives for models with the greatest generality and scope” (Driver et al. 1994, p. 8).

In Pintrich et al. (1993), they introduce the idea that a learner’s motivation can very much affect how learning occurs.  Furthermore, the motivations of a learner may not be constant, and can even fluctuate on vastly different timescales (i.e. months, days, minutes).  The main distinction they draw between kinds of motivation/academic achievement goals is: intrinsic vs extrinsic orientations.  In general, intrinsic (mastery and task-involved) orientations were associated with deeper learning; while extrinsic (performance and ego-involved) orientations were associated with more shallow processing (Pintrich et al. 1993, p. 177).  Their discussion was interesting as it involved how outside influences, such as classroom activities, grading schemes, or climate, could reinforce certain orientations.  One thing I began to consider when reading this paper was how school, and especially college, environments tend to foster and even force students into the adoption of an extrinsic orientation.  This is due to the fact that now more than ever before, financial pressures can cause students to adopt the mindset: “can’t afford to fail”.  This mindset, which may have once been metaphorical, has become literal.

In A. Brown et al. (1993), the authors argue that “schools should be communities where students learn to learn” (A. Brown et al. 1993, p. 190).  This take on what education should be, stands in a slight distinction from cognitive apprenticeship which seemed to only value those activities deemed “authentic” in the eyes of the culture of practice.  However, A. Brown et al. (1993) state that “this may be the desired state of first-rate graduate school education, but it is surely not a reasonable expectation for grade school” (A. Brown et al. 190).  They also go on to explicitly say that the zone of proximal development not only includes people of differing levels of expertise, but also includes artifacts, such as books, videos, and other various multi-media (A. Brown et al. 1993, p. 191).  To me, this raised a question in my mind: if the zone of proximal development includes the use of artifacts, do we ever truly exist separate from this “zone” in real life as we seem to always have some kind of access to supplemental information?  If this is true, then do school environments sometimes artificially and needlessly simulate a lack of this zone?  Then, if this is true, what is the point of assessing knowledge in this way?

Finally, as I was reflecting on each of these papers, I noticed a central theme that each touched on: the importance of teachers.  In A. Brown et al. (1993), they dedicate an entire section to the unique role of teachers in their classroom framework.  Specifically, they discuss how the teacher’s most difficult job is knowing how and when to intervene when students are struggling.  A quote that I really liked that encapsulated their feelings on this balancing act an instructor must strike was: “determining the region of sensitivity to instruction for the whole class, a subgroup, or an individual child, on-line and unaided, if it is not magic, is certainly a work of art” (A. Brown et al. 1993, p. 207).  In Driver et al. (1994), they mention that a teacher’s job is essential to both “[providing] appropriate experiential evidence and [making] the cultural tools and conventions of the science community available to students” (Driver et al. 1994, p. 7).  This is to say, that the teacher is in charge of being the bridge that allows students to become enculturated in the scientific community.  Finally, in Pintrich et al. (1993), they discuss how “individuals’ goal orientations are dependent on and situated within a classroom context” (Pintrich et al. 1993, p. 177).  Therefore, the decisions a teacher makes within their classroom have deep and far-reaching effects on students’ motivations, and thus their capacity for learning.  This importance placed on teachers and the roles they must fulfil in order for the most optimal learning to occur stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Skinner who believed that teachers, at best, are inefficient and replaceable by machines.

References:

Brown, A. L., Ash, D., Rutherford, M., Nakagawa, K., Gordon, A., & Campione, J. C. (1993). Distributed Expertise in the classroom. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 188-228). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Driver, R., Asoko, H., Leach, J., Mortimer, E., & Scott, P. (1994). Constructing Scientific Knowledge in the Classroom. Educational Researcher, 23(7), 5-12.

Pintrich, P. R., Marx, R. W., & Boyle, R. A. (1993). Beyond Cold Conceptual Change: The Role of Motivational Beliefs and Classroom Contextual Factors in the Process of Conceptual Change. Review of Educational Research, 63(2), 167-199.

The articles this week really rounded out my incomplete picture of learning…like when you’re working on a puzzle and you find (and place) all the edge pieces first. I hope that’s what’s happening in my brain.

The Pintrich article connected to our earlier class discussions of conceptual change. The article defines it as cold (which does seem fitting) and also defines motivation, control beliefs, and self efficacy in the same conversation. They critique this chilly model by nothing that it “focuses only on student cognition without considering the ways in which students’ motivational beliefs about themselves as learners and the roles of individuals in a classroom learning community (167)”. The Pintrich proposed model is said to take a “constructivist position that the process of conceptual change is influenced by personal, motivational, social, and historical process (170)”.

The Brown article hit on a particular sticking point from one of our (group) discussions about school as a particular learning environment. Brown tells us by suggesting the schools be a place for students to learn to learn. The approach of students learning how and when to apply their knowledge (vs learning whether or not they have learned/memorized knowledge) is better- but still doesn’t address the issues of the problem prior. This way of approaching school doesn’t address the critiques of schools as environments more focused on control (training issues, disciplinary issues) like problems of power and structural barriers etc. I appreciate the (implied) acknowledgment that a new approach was needed in that regard. Brown focuses on where students are in their learning process- where is learning taking place so it can be most authentic, most effective?

The Driver article said something super important. They told us that the “role of the authority figure has two important components.  The first is to introduce new ideas or cultural tools where necessary and to provide the support and guidance for students to make sense of these for themselves.” As Phoebe (and others), have mentioned before- the ability to think about and approach science as a lone individual is of the utmost importance. We are in an age in which the shape of the Earth is a “debate”, an age in which controlled fires (which have been successfully practiced for thousands of years) are eschewed and we are left with outrageous uncontrollable fires, and an age in which climate change is unacknowledged or outright denied by many. This quote from Driver hammers home that the ability to learn and to reason is the ultimate goal in learning.

Always bringing this back around to what is learning… Brown’s knows that focusing on where students are in the learning space is ideal (so much research out there about the benefits of learning in nature much less learning about conservation/animals while in nature!). Even if the logistics of having class/learning take place in the environment in which the skills would be practiced requires completely upending our education system and the arranged set up- we need to do that anyway, so… Nonetheless, that means that the challenge  (another one!) falls to that of our teachers so we’re told. (The science of learning so deeply intertwines with the structural design of and barriers within our system…) The teachers must create an environment where student learn to learn, learn to face challenges and navigate processes, and support student’s application of these skills into life. (From what IS learning to what is BEING learned?)

Favorite Pithy Quote:
Children are apprentice learners, learning how to think and reason in a variety of domains (190).

This weeks blog will cover three readings that aim to fill in the gaps of what we have discussed so far in class. While reading this week I was happy to see that all of our readings thus far were, in some capacity, integrated in to the three pieces this week. It was nice to have that previous knowledge when the authors directly referenced works we have read this semester. Now I just have to try and piece them all together!

In the Pintrich et al. paper (1993) I picked out a new idea that we haven’t yet discussed in any of the previous models – motivation. The authors describe motivation as “…goal orientation, values, efficacy beliefs, and control beliefs that can serve as mediators of this process of conceptual change and are likely candidates for research on how assimilation and accommodation processes might operate in conjunction with student motivation in conceptual change instruction.” (pg  192). While teaching intro level biology courses at a small R3 university, every semester I worked with students who told me they were there to satisfy a requirement only, that they “weren’t good at science”. This was the most difficult to overcome – when the students have absolutely zero motivation to learn the material, how do instructors overcome that? In the paper, Pintrich et al. (1993) explain “At the classroom and task level, there are a number of features that could increase students’ situational interest-such as, challenge, choice, novelty, fantasy, and surprise”, however, I am curious what this would actually look like in the classroom. This also brings me back to the Posner et al. (1982) paper we read for conceptual change – the authors explained that the the process of conceptual change requires dissatisfaction with previous knowledge. How does this integrate with motivation?

In Brown et al. (1992), the authors argue that learning environments should be communal. By creating a community, the students are self-motivated to learn. It seems like the ‘learning’ is the process and not necessarily about getting the right answer, which we’ve seen a few times this semester. To me this is very similar to my experiences learning in grad school. While going through my MS and two years of a different PhD program, I learned that it isn’t always about being an expert at something, but more about knowing how to gain certain knowledge. This to me, prepares students more throughly for future learning because they’ve learned how to learn, which can be applied to infinite situations as a human in this world, not just learning STEM. Brown et al. name these “intelligent novices” – which in the cognitive apprenticeship model, would make them journeyman? I’m not sure if I have interpreted that right, but the idea of an intelligent novice, again, is how I feel grad school is preparing me. 

Driver et al. (1994) argue that learning in science classrooms is something that happens both individually and socially. In their conclusions (pg 11) they argue that the instructor plays two roles in the classroom; first, they introduce new ideas and cultural tools if needed, and secondly, they listen to how the students are interpreting information and tool use, and guide them if off track. Again, thinking back on my own education, this isn’t really something I experienced until graduate school, which begs the question why? Driver et al. state that the challenge here is how to develop students critical perspective on scientific culture – this seems like it would require in-depth teacher training. 

Brown, A. L., Ash, D., Rutherford, M., Nakagawa, K., Gordon, A., & Campione, J. C. (1993). Distributed expertise in the classroom. Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations, 188–228.

Driver, H., Asoko, H., Morimer, E., & Scott, P. (1994). Constructing Scientific Knowledge in the Classroom. Educational Researcher, 23(7), 5–12.

Pintrich, P. R., Marx, R. W., & Boyle, R. A. (2016). Beyond Cold Conceptual Change : The Role of Motivational Beliefs and Classroom Contextual Factors in the Process of Conceptual Change, 63(2), 167–199.

The articles this week did a good job of tweaking some of our earlier theories of learning.  These tweaks, I think, included a shift towards situated knowledge and constructivist ideas overall.  While I was reading, I went back through my notes to each of the base theories to see what we had said maybe needed more thought on.  So, for this post, I want to highlight some of those areas, and see how these articles address those issues.

In my notes for conceptual change, we discussed the overall procedure for learning (dissatisfaction, fruitfulness, etc) to be very rational.  The idea was that no one really does this with every idea, it just isn’t very realistic.  The Pintrich article defines this as ‘cold conceptual change’ which is appropriate.  They then suggest that instead of this overly rational process for motivation, that motivation is complicated.  The factors that relate to motivation need to be examined, but I am having trouble differentiating between two of them.  Self-efficacy and control beliefs, to me, seem too similar.  They explain the difference is that self-efficacy is a personal belief about oneself, and control beliefs are about environmental factors.  To me, it seems like control beliefs affect self-efficacy beliefs, so I am not sure why they are considered their own category.  This might not be important to their argument, but it was a question that came up for me.

The Brown article highlighted a problem we talked about regarding teachers.  I remember us discussing who would make the best teachers for authentic activities, and this is where the issue emerged.  Practitioners that are actively participating in a discipline would have knowledge about the practice, but may not be able to communicate this effectively with grade school students, for example.  Likewise, products of practitioners (people who studied the science but never practiced it) may be able to communicate this, but never fully practiced the discipline, so are not fully authentic.  This article ‘solves’ this issue by proposing schools be a place for students to “learn to learn.”  For example, science class in school should be a place where students learn how to solve scientific problems, not if they can solve them.  This is an interesting idea to me, because I think AST also tries to do this, although AST focuses less on the ‘expert’ in the room.

The Driver article included a section that I wanted to talk about.  On page 7, Driver discusses something that we have called in other classes as ‘teacher talk moves.’  Saying things like: “How did you do that?” , “What do you mean?” , “Can you give an example?”  are all teacher talk moves.  There are different categories of these moves that I am still learning when to use, but I think they are very effective in building students’ knowledge.  I only choose to highlight it here because it is something I have seen in other classes.

I found this week’s readings very interesting. In Driver’s paper I found attractive the position (against constructivism) that “the teacher’s intervention is essential” and that “there is no way in which a human being could possibly master that world without the aid and assistance of others” (Vygotsky). I find this point very important because a lot of times I see the risk for a teacher to think that students can learn by themselves. This is explained very well by Brown when he talks about the need for a “guided discovery”. This article states that the main characteristic of an authentic community is that people have a base of common knowledge but that then they specialize and communicate what they know to each other. Again, I had an experience of what they describe in the article in Montessori schools. I saw in that context how creative and interesting the environment becomes when some children become experts in something and teach others and how they benefit from the interaction with experts outside the classroom. I have seen students going to ask questions to a history professor at the university, to ask a Shakespeare’s teacher to review their play, etc.. In all these cases learning became something fascinating because it was not something just in the classroom. Talking about interest, I found very important the emphasis Pintrich gave to motivation as a mediator of conceptual change. I have observed multiple times that if interest of any kind is not present, there is not really learning. It makes sense the distinction he gives between different kinds of motivations and that “students who are focused on the task with a learning orientation are more likely to process the information in a way that increases the probability that the 4 conditions necessary for conceptual change will occur”.

At this point, I feel like a big mix in my mind about all these theories. I want to understand what I think is appropriate but it is not so easy. I see that AST has some aspects of the community of practice but it lacks things that I have seen in Montessori as the articles we read describe. At the same time now I see limits in the Montessori approach that I did not see years ago. I just hope I can make some order in my mind.

In reading the three articles this week, I noticed a theme of increasing contextualization of many of the theories. I tend to associate the complexity of a theory with the ratio of internalization to externalization used to explain thought (i.e. conceptual change is “more complex” than Skinner). I’m not sure if that’s correct or not, but that’s how I’ve been thinking as the weeks pass. So when I read Pintrich et al., their proposal that conceptual change includes “motivational and contextual factors” (Pintrich pg. 168) adds a new layer to the theory.

As I prepare for writing the precis and practice fairly critiquing the theories, I’m taking special notice on how authors justify their choice of theory. Pintrich et al. write, “Of course, there are other perspectives on knowledge change and development, such as nativist views on the origins of knowledge…but we focus on conceptual change because of its relevance to conceptual understanding in schools” (Pintrich pg. 169). In my head, I’m relating that sentence to one of the papers I wrote in grad school. I studied new battery chemistry and applied for a lot of fellowships from different energy sectors. Similar to the authors, I have to justify my choice to focus on magnesium batteries instead of the many other possible battery chemistries being developed. Each chemistry has its own (dis)advantages, and one chemist couldn’t possibly study all the batteries, so they have to make a choice. Similar to how conceptual change is relevant to conceptual understanding in schools, in a grant to NASA I might write about how my battery chemistry is relevant to them because it works at weird outer space temperatures, and is relevant over other chemistry. I’m sorry if this is obvious to others, but explicitly drawing this analogy helps stop myself from falling into the fallacy of unfairly comparing theories like Scott mentioned in class.

My other thought while reading this week was on my question about the “point” of situated learning theory. I think bother articles from Driver et al. and Brown et al. show how communities of practice and situated learning can lead to understandings on expertise in the science classroom. The notion that knowledge must be situated in a social activity has direct implications for the way science is taught. Driver et al. argue that “scientific knowledge is both symbolic in nature and also socially negotiated” (Driver, pg. 5), which suggests learning science shouldn’t be an individual activity. If science is always contextualized, learning science is more a form of enculturation than discovery, the authors argue. LIkewise, Brown et al. start to develop rules of teaching from theory and emphasize collaborative learning as a main feature of the classroom. My point here is that these theories can inform teaching practices, and more specifically can help students construct knowledge (a big goal of AST).

I’m curious about this quote – “If students are to adopt scientific ways of knowing, then intervention and negotiation with an authority, usually the teacher, is essential.” (Driver, pg. 11) At first, I disagree because I felt the quote put too much emphasis on the teacher’s power in the classroom. Should this authority and power over knowing be a classroom norm? Then, I thought about how Brown et al. might say that the classroom is a community of practice and in many ways prepares students for the real world in a “power dynamic” level, even if not in a “scientific community of practice” level. And unfortunately, the teacher-student dynamic is mirrored many places. I wonder though, if it is indeed necessary to adopt specifically the Euro Western way to scientific knowing that we are all familiar with?

There were several things about this article that I found to be unique in terms of things we’ve read thus far.  The main thing I found interesting was the idea of telling stories as a “tool of diagnosis and reinterpretation” (Lave & Wenger 1991, p. 109).  In telling stories within a community, “[the story’s] communal use is essential to the fashioning of an identity” (Lave & Wegner 1991, p. 109).  This method of informal communication is vital to one’s continued learning and participation within a community.  Some examples I can think of include when someone tells you to avoid a certain professor or tells you that someone would be a good resource to use.  These sorts of stories contribute significantly to legitimate peripheral participation within a community as it allows for the passing of knowledge that is only truly accessible to “old-timers”.  In addition to this, the idea that telling stories helps with the forming of an identity could add some kind of accountability in who you are and what people should come to expect of you within the community.

The other interesting point that was brought up in this paper is that they acknowledge something that is a potential problem–not with their model, but one that is a direct consequence of assuming their model.  This problem lies in both accessibility of communities, or lack thereof, and certain power dynamics between “old-timers” and newcomers (Lave & Wegner 1991, p. 116).  This speaks to the idea that communities may only tend to let those of a similar mind or those that resemble themselves participate in a community.  This of course brings to mind how many branches of science were virtually closed off from participation of gender and racial minorities for a significant portion of history.  If true participation within a community is where learning occurs, then it no longer is an issue of how learning occurs, but who is allowed or even able to participate.

References:

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Learning in doing: Social, cognitive, and computational perspectives. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.

Lave and Wenger’s theory focused on the idea that learning occurs as we interact with others in our social world.  This idea is in contrast to the other studies that centered on individuals in isolation and changes in their brains.  One key points made in the article is that learners (newcomers) inevitably participate in communities of practice, and through this participation they learn from experts (old timers) and eventually develop into full participants themselves.  As with Vygotsky, their sociocultural theory emphasizes learning by doing, rather than observing.  “This view also claims that learning, thinking, and knowing are relations among people in activity in, with, and arising from the socially and culturally structured world” (p. 51, Lave & Wenger).

Lave and Wenger’s article shares field examples of how midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butcher’s and Alcoholic Anonymous participants enter their respective learning areas as peripheral participants and through legitimate practice, they develop their skills and knowledge to move from novices to experts.  These examples, in my opinion, were aligned with Vygotsky’s finding in his belief that parents, caregivers, peers, and the culture at large are responsible for developing higher-order functions.  That being said, I have categorized Vygotsky, Brown, Lave and Wenger within the construct of social constructivism.

Through my experiences in reading and discussing sociocultural theories, I have started to reflect on my practicum at PFMS and the AST framework.  This reflection is my attempt to build a bridge between what I am learning and what these concepts looks like in communities of knowledge and practice, as well as, identities and activities.  Starting with my observations at PFMS, I have observed a “learning curriculum” in contrast to that of a traditional “teaching curriculum”.  Here, situated learning opportunities are used as resources in everyday practice in ways that are to be viewed from the perspective of leaners as newcomers to the community in which “community implies participation in an activity system about which participants share understandings concerning what they are doing and what that means in their lives for their communities” (p. 98, Lave & Wenger).  Moreover, the teacher embeds learning in authentic activities of practice that engage students in increasingly more complex tasks.  I have been observing these activities and am able see first-hand the interactions occurring between peers and teacher.  This engagement among peers and teacher, I believe, is necessary for learning to be effective.

Similarly, AST establishes a community of practice which Lave & Wenger define as “a set of relations among persons, activity and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice” (p. 98, Lave & Wenger).  I now better understand that AST is not a prescribed list of how to teach embedded in the content of a “teaching curriculum”, but instead are the teaching practices embedded in the structure of the classroom’s community and its members.   Lastly, I have reflected on this class in and of itself.  I believe our community reflects what Lave & Wenger have proposed.  Clearly we are a mix of new comers, members, and an old timer.  We are peripheral participants as we post our reflections and discuss our reading activities.  Transparency is being used in connection with technology.  As said by Lave & Wenger, “transparency when used here in connection with technology refers to the way in which using artifacts and understanding their significance interact to become one learning process” (p. 102-103, Lave & Wenger). Similarly, we are peripheral participants in classroom activities that engage us in conversations, questioning, and a sharing of ideas.  It is through such relational elements that we, as individuals, are going to develop our knowledge, skill, and discourse.