Recent Changes

Dewey, John. The School and Society. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980
Thesis: School has the responsibility to teach democratic education through lab schools. Assimilation.
Criticism: white, ethnocentric; elite; homogenization of society.
EDPL 348
Steve
April 13, 2004
Dewey’s Fundamental Problem of Education
John Dewey (1859-1952) was one of America’s great philosophers, educators and child psychologists, writing some 40 books and 70 articles. Dewey and others who were labeled progressive educators were strongly influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau
(1712-1778) who believed that a child was naturally innocent and would need a map and guide for his or her journey of development. This radical idea of Rousseau and this group of educators pointed out that children are not small versions of adults. “Humanity has its place in the scheme of things. Childhood has its place in the scheme of human life. We must view the man as a man and the child as a child.”[i] Jean Piaget Swiss biologist, philosopher and child psychologist 1896-1980 later developed the concept that childhood is distinct from adulthood to the extent that the child undergoes four specific stages of development.
The purpose of this essay is to illustrate how Dewey distinguished children from adults and the quandary in which he found education: “Since students and teachers are disconnected by being in different stages/phases of life, just how can an adult teach a child?” Dewey referred to this situation as a fundamental problem with education or a case of the curriculum versus the student.[ii]
To address this question, we need to first determine how is a child different from an adult, i.e., do they really live in different worlds? Dewey believed that each did live in different universes, so to speak, but that the difference was a matter of degree rather than a difference in kind; consequently, a solution was possible. But just what are these differences?
A child is concerned about play, where an adult is concerned about work and finances. The life of a child is one of joy, while an adult always has a sober, somber and serious side.
The world of a child is personal, subjective and intimate—the world revolves around the child— everything integrates together well in the child’s world. “The child lives in a somewhat narrow world of personal contacts. Things hardly come within his experience unless they touch, intimately and obviously, his own well-being, or that of his family and friends.” [iii] If something doesn’t happen in the child’s world, it just doesn’t happen as far as the child is concerned.
The world of the adult is more impersonal and objective where decisions are made based on reasoning, intelligence, facts and laws. A child makes decisions based on personal interests and feelings at that point in time. The child is concerned with sympathy and affection not with facts and truth. Certainly if a child leaves his usual environment by what would seem to be a small distance to an adult, the child feels either lost or on an adventure.
The adult even has difficulty determining just who the child really is! “The child has his own instincts and tendencies, but we do not know what these mean until we can translate them into their social equivalents.”[iv] Even though the universe is always changing for the child, his world is concrete, tangible and immediate, not abstract, cerebral or intellectual like the adult. Being outwardly expressive, he is different from the at-times introspective adult.
For the child everything is now; he is worried only about the present life around him. Concepts such as the past and future, while important to adults are foreign or unimportant to the child. Memory is only short-term for a child, linked to those things that recently happened. The child remains active in his thinking and behavior, not passive at times like an adult. “Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think.”[v] While the adult’s world is built on order, stability, specialization, facts and categories, the world of the child is disorganized, continuously changing, fluid and oftentimes built on imagination and make-believe.
Yes, the worlds of the child and the student are different; but as Dewey is cited from Schools of To-Morrow “the very meaning of childhood is that it is the time of growing, of developing…a progress of natural growth.”[vi] Since this is such an important period of development, how are the teacher and school going to interrelate to the child or student? Where does the educator start?
“The child’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education.”[vii] In Schools of To-Morrow, Dewey states that children should enjoy school; [viii] school should not consist of preparation for the future based on concepts presented by the teacher, memorized by the child yet not related to anything in the child’s understanding.[ix] The key is to link up with the endless interests and curiosity of the child;[x] the key is to build on the world of experience, since we truly learn from experience or from things that are related to experience.[xi]
Dewey stressed that all must be tied to experience; it must be, as Dewey termed, psychologized. [xii] “The legitimate way out is to transform the material; to psychologize it…to take it and to develop it within the scope of the child’s life.”[xiii] The teacher needs to tie all activities and subject matter to experience and ignore the concept of being scholastic[xiv] or being tied to the traditional subject-based curriculum and methodology.
The only way educators can succeed in teaching a child is to have the school activities intersecting with (or linked to) the child’s experience, otherwise either little in a positive sense will be experienced by the child or even in some cases the child can be negatively impacted where he becomes unmotivated and uninterested in hearing about, discussing or learning anything new or unfamiliar to them.[xv] The subject matter must grow “out of his own past doings, thinkings, and sufferings, and grows into application in further achievements and receptivities, then no device or trick of method has to be resorted to in order to enlist ‘interest.’”[xvi]
Dewey also considered the past to be important as we can learn how to solve problems in the future by learning from what has already occurred. (Solving problems was fundamental to Dewey’s beliefs that are briefly pointed out in the next paragraph.) To have the students learn from the past, the teacher needs to make the past come to life by making the past problems come alive in the student’s world.
The ultimate goal is to have the child bring his experiences from the past and home, to school, expand these experiences by what occurs at school (learning) and then be able to apply them in his everyday life solving problems that he encounters.[xvii] As Dewey was also a pragmatist or a believer in pragmatism, he was concerned with preparing the child for whatever the future holds for him. (One definition of pragmatism is “a philosophical movement, developed in the United States, which holds that both the meaning and the truth of any idea is a function of its practical outcome.”)[xviii] Dewey wanted to insure the child, (and even society in general and American democracy in specific) to succeed and flourish. He believed that this would only occur if the child learned to successfully tackle the problems encountered in life.
In summary, while the concept of a child not being an adult did not originate from Dewey or was solely believed by Dewey, his writings about this concept greatly impacted American education. Dewey’s solution to the fundamental problem or challenge of adults teaching children was to tie the curriculum to the child’s experience. In this way, the gap between adult and child can be bridged and education’s fundamental problem solved.
[i] Boyd, William (1956). The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau-Selections, (p. 34). New York: Teachers College Press.
[ii] Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). “The Child and the Curriculum”. In Dewey on Education, (p. 92). New York: Teachers College Press.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). “My Pedagogic Creed”. In Dewey on Education, (p. 21). New York: Teachers College Press.
[v] Dewey, John. Democracy and Education, (p314) reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.
[vi] Berube, Maurice R. (1994). American School Reform, Progressive, Equity, and Excellence Movements, 1883-1993. (p. 16). Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
[vii]Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). “My Pedagogic Creed”. In Dewey on Education, (p. 20).
[viii] Berube, Maurice R. (1994). American School Reform, Progressive, Equity, and Excellence Movements, 1883-1993. (p. 38).
[ix] The Internet School of Philosophy. “John Dewey (1859-1952). Retrieved March 29, 2004 from http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/d/dewey/htm.
[x] Berube, Maurice R. (1994). American School Reform, Progressive, Equity, and Excellence Movements, 1883-1993. (p. 14).
[xi] Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). “The School and Society ”. In Dewey on Education, (p. 41). New York: Teachers College Press.
[xii] Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). “The Child and the Curriculum”. In Dewey on Education, (p. 104).
[xiii] Ibid., p. 110.
[xiv] Dewey, John. Democracy and Education, (p310).
[xv] Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). “My Pedagogic Creed”. In Dewey on Education, (p. 20).
[xvi] Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). “The Child and the Curriculum”. In Dewey on Education, (p. 108).
[xvii] Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). “The School and Society ”. In Dewey on Education, (p. 82).
[xviii] The Radical Academy. “American Pragmatism”. Retrieved April 4, 2004 from http://www.radicalacademy.com/amphilosophy7.htm
EDPL 348
Steve
May 4, 2004
The Importance of Experience to Situated Cognition and the Writing of John Dewey
The learning theory known as “situated cognition gives meaning to learning and promotes transfer of knowledge to day-to-day real life situations.”[i] This theory is concerned with the methods by which something is learned where context and experience play important roles.
John Dewey (1859-1952), one of America’s great philosophers, educators and child psychologists was strongly influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who believed that the child should learn through experience not by way of textbooks and lectures. “Plants are fashioned by cultivation, men by education…All that we lack at birth and need when grown up is given us by education…What comes to us from our experience of the things that effect us is the education of things.”[ii] Rousseau believed that the student must be active in the education process: “make him feel it himself or he will never learn it.”[iii]
The purpose of this essay is to point out the importance to the practitioners of situated cognition of using context and experience in education and to illustrate how Dewey similarly believed experience was vital in teaching students.
“Situated cognition is a theory of instruction that suggests learning is naturally tied to authentic activity, context and culture.”[iv] Educators were concerned that students were being exposed to concepts and rules that were not meaningful to them, i.e., these concepts and rules were inert and stagnant, only useful in the classroom. They were deemed by the student to be meaningless in his own environment. Educators further believed that the concepts contained in the subject matter or curriculum were not being learned; this, of course, i.e., having students truly learn, is the goal of an educator and this goal was not being attained. “If students learn correct rules for manipulating symbols without learning that mathematical expressions represent concepts and relationships, what they may learn may be abstract, but it is not general, (i.e., cannot be widely used).”[v]
How could the problem be alleviated? As previously described, Rousseau and Dewey both saw the importance of insuring the relevance and meaningfulness of what was being taught in the classroom. Lev Vygotsky with his concept of ‘zones of proximal development’ also added the use of appropriate strategies (1978).[vi]
Other educators believed they needed to take the environment, context, culture and experience into consideration if they were to be successful. More contemporary educators and psychologists such as Jean Lave (to whom starting the situated cognition movement is often attributed)[vii] worked to so expand education and to provide a solution to what was seen to be education’s problems. Paul Greeno (1998), E. Wenger (1991), G. Salomon (1996), John Seely Brown, Allan Collins and Paul Duguid (1989) were also instrumental in the birth of situated cognition or situated learning theory.[viii]
This group described “learning as an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world. Their definition bears analysis: generative implies that learning is an act of creation or co-creation; social suggests that at least a portion of learning time occurs in partnership with others; and lived-in world connotes real-world practices and settings that make learning more relevant, useful and transferable.”[ix]
Knowledge was not considered to be a stand-alone entity; it could not be removed from the environment or world, for if that were done, it would be artificial and not related to any real concept or behavior. Knowledge arises from our interaction with our environment and situations in which we find ourselves.[x]
“Knowledge is action. Knowledge is located in the actions of persons and groups. Knowledge evolves as we participate in and negotiate our way through new situations. The development of knowledge and competence, like the development of language, involves continuous knowledge-using activity in authentic situations.”[xi] If a student can acquire the understanding of the “how” and “why”, he will not only be able to use this information but also relate it to other information and experiences as he goes on in life and encountering new situations.[xii]
Since knowledge comes from the interrelationship between the learner and the world around him, it is up to the educator to provide activities or an environment that resembles or copies the real world context in which the knowledge is to be used. This became the goal of the proponents of situated cognition.[xiii]
Situated cognition placed an importance on the learning context and the activities themselves for in order to solve real-life problems the student needs to engage in similar activities.[xiv] To be successful would require changes to education. The teacher would need to become more of a coach or a guide than instructor or lecturer.[xv]
Situated cognitivists were focused on having the students become familiar with the conditions in which they will have to apply this knowledge, having them become more adept at creatively solving problems in a variety of scenarios, to better understand what they can do with their knowledge and to organize their knowledge so that is can be useable and meaningful in future situations and problems.[xvi]
“Knowledge is not just ‘in the head,’ if it is to be found there at all, rather knowledge consists in the ways a person interacts with other people and situations. The situated perspective…calls for more varied learning situations.”[xvii] The teacher (guide, facilitator) needs to develop environments and activities that closely resemble actual situations in the real world.[xviii]
There are numerous approaches that situated cognitivists use in building meaningful and authentic activities. “One way to utilize situated cognition is to provide models which learners can copy and observe. Another method is to encourage problem-solving activities which will hopefully generate question asking.”[xix]
Still another approach involves not only the teacher but also appropriate members of the environment including not only the local businesses but also the electronic world community.[xx] This approach called cognitive apprenticeship has a large following by those interested in methods of teaching by way of real-life activities, experiences and situations.
”By ignoring the situated nature of cognition, education defeats its own goal of providing useable, robust knowledge…Approaches such as cognitive apprenticeship that embed learning in activity and make deliberate use of the social and physical context are more in line with the understanding of learning and cognition that is emerging from research. Cognitive apprenticeship methods try to enculturate students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction in a way similar to that evident--and evidently successful—in craft apprenticeship.”[xxi]
To make the activities authentic or realistic to enhance the learning process, cognitive apprenticeship makes use of “experts” in the various fields as part of the education process. Seeing how a mathematician solves a problem, how a carpenter measures a room for remodeling, how a cook determines the type and quantity of ingredients, how a person finds his way out of a dense forest or how a politician determines an appropriate response to a critique, place the student in the middle of things; it places him in the day-to-day world of real people.
“People who use tools actively rather than just acquire them, by contrast, build an increasingly rich implicit understanding of the world in which they use the tools and of the tools themselves. The understanding, both of the world and of the tool, continually changes as a result of their interaction… Too often the practices of contemporary schooling deny students the chance to engage the relevant domain culture, because that culture is not in evidence.”[xxii] The student needs to be exposed to the actual culture or environment of the activity to make this a relevant, authentic experience from which real, lasting knowledge will be gained. Passing exams is important in academic environs, but participating in a real-life situation is most effective.[xxiii] What is learned should be determined by its applicability and context in the real world.[xxiv]
To this point in this paper, the founders of situated cognition, the problems they believed existed with education and their use of experience and activities to solve these problems have been shown. A question could then be asked: What did Dewey, who was so instrumental in American education several years before think about basing education on authentic experience?
“John Dewey was an advocate of situated approaches to learning, arguing that understanding is defined within a social unit. Learning cannot be defined by outsiders (each student will learn to read by method X), but rather, emerges via collaboration (how reading supports us.)”[xxv]
Dewey also saw that there was a problem with education. In fact, Dewey saw the similar problem with education, as did the situative cognitivists. He went as far as to refer to students as (Platonic) slaves oftentimes engaged in doing things that were meaningless to them.[xxvi] He criticized “’traditional education’ for its harsh discipline and hidebound thematic structure.”[xxvii]
“But much work in school consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they are not led to see the connection between the result -- say the answer -- and the method pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a kind of miracle.”[xxviii] He went on to refer to the methodology of teaching and learning being used by education of his day as a medieval approach.[xxix] He believed that failure in school was most often caused by not associating school with out-of-school experiences.[xxx]
Similar to the proponents of situative cognition, Dewey felt he had the solution to the problem. First of all, in addressing the concept of students as slaves, he purported, “Respect for the things of experience alone brings with it such a respect for others, the centres of experience, as is free from patronage, domination and the will to impose.”[xxxi] Experience would free the mind and the slave!
Dewey saw human experience as the link between the outside (physical events) and the inside (conscious events.)[xxxii] “Dewey came to believe that a productive, naturalistic approach to the theory of knowledge must begin with a consideration of the development of knowledge as an adaptive human response to environing conditions aimed at an active restructuring of these conditions.”[xxxiii] Experience was a process.[xxxiv] “To 'learn from experience’ is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction -- discovery of the connection of things.”[xxxv]
Therefore, in order “to think effectively one must have had, or now have, experiences which will furnish him resources for coping with the difficulty at hand.”[xxxvi] How did Dewey propose to accomplish this?
First of all, the teacher needs to be less of a supervisor and more of a facilitator.[xxxvii] Great care must be taken to insure that the experiences provided by way of the teacher and school are well conceived, appropriate and meaningful.[xxxviii] The experiences and activities provided must be as real world as possible. One recollection of a member of Dewey’s Laboratory School in the 1920s said “We, in our third grade, all fifteen of us, were occupied in thoughtful purposing, in shared experience. That year, we were creating a mining company.”[xxxix]
Even though Dewey was against many of the concepts of ‘traditional education’, he stated, “In the past, education has been much more vocational in fact than in name…the education of the masses was distinctly utilitarian. It was called apprenticeship rather than education, or else just learning from experience. The schools devoted themselves to the three R's in the degree in which ability to go through the forms of reading, writing, and figuring were common elements in all kinds of labor. Taking part in some special line of work, under the direction of others, was the out-of-school phase of this education. The two supplemented each other.”[xl]
Dewey felt that the school needed to be concerned with the new modern industrial world and its problems.[xli] The student needs to be able to apply his arithmetic and geography to business-related problems such as banking and farming. To survive in the new world, the student would have to be prepared by the school using meaningful experiences.
In summary, both the situated cognitivists and John Dewey believed that education was in need of repair for students were not learning meaningful information. Both saw the importance of experience in education. Dewey and the situated cognitivists also employed similar approaches to move experience into the curriculum. Situated cognitivists did go a little further bringing more of context and the environment into play as well. While these concepts might seem quite normal today, John Dewey did propose a great amount of change for the schools of his time. The situated cognitivists, our contemporaries, do owe a lot to the ground broken by John Dewey.
[i] Jacobs, Mindy. “Situated Cognition”. Retrieved March 31, 2004 from http://www.gsu.edu/~mstswh/courses/it7000/papers/situated.htm
[ii] Boyd, William (1956). The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau-Selections. New York: Teachers College Press. p. 11.
[iii] Ibid. p. 111.
[iv] Oliver, Kevin (1999). “Situated Cognition & Cognitive Apprenticeships”. Retrieved March 31, 2004 from http://www.edtech.vt.edu/edtech/id/models/powerpoint/cog.pdf
[v] The Online Home of the Mathematics Association of America. “A Critique of Situated Cognition”. Retrieved March 31, 2004 from http://www.maa.org/t_and_l/sampler/rs_2add.html
[vi] Oliver (1999). “Situated Cognition & Cognitive Apprenticeships”.
[vii] Oliver (1999). “Situated Cognition & Cognitive Apprenticeships”.
[viii] Brill, Jennifer M. (2001). “Situated Cognition”. Retrieved March 31, 2004 from http://itstudio.coe.uga.edu/ebook/situatedcognition.htm
[ix] Brill (2001). “Situated Cognition”
[x] Wilson, Brent G. and Myers, Karen Madsen (1999). “Situated Cognition in Theoretical and Practical Context”. Retrieved March 31, 2004 from
http://ceo.cudenver.edu/~brent_wilson/SitCog.html
[xi] Wilson (1999). “Situated Cognition in Theoretical and Practical Context”
[xii] Jacobs, “Situated Cognition”
[xiii] Rutledge, K. “Situated Learning”. Retrieved March 31, 2004 from http://www.edb.utexas.edu/mmresearch/Students97/Rutledge/html/situated_learning.html
[xiv] Jacobs, “Situated Cognition”.
[xv] Jeong-Im, Hannafin, Michael. “Situated Cognition and Learning Environments: Roles, Structures, and Implications for Design”. Retrieved March 31, 2004 from
http://tecfa.unige.ch/staf/staf-e/pellerin/staf15/situacogn.htm
[xvi] Brill (2001). “Situated Cognition”
[xvii] The Online Home of the Mathematics Association of America. “A Critique of Situated Cognition”.
[xviii] Brill (2001). “Situated Cognition”.
[xix] Jacobs. “Situated Cognition”.
[xx] Brill (2001). “Situated Cognition”.
[xxi] Brown, John Seely and Collins, Allan and Duguid, Paul (1989). “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning”. Retrieved March 31, 2004 from http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/museumeducation/situated.html
[xxii] Brown, John Seely and Collins, Allan and Duguid, Paul (1989). “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning”.
[xxiii] Brown, John Seely and Collins, Allan and Duguid, Paul (1989). “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning”.
[xxiv] Rutledge, K.”Situated Learning”.
[xxv] Oliver (1999). “Situated Cognition & Cognitive Apprenticeships”.
[xxvi] Dewey, John (1916) “Democracy and Education”. (Chapter 7) Retrieved April 2, 2004 from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
[xxvii] The Public Philosopher Contemporary: Thought in Engagement with the World. “John Dewey (1859-1952)”. Retrieved March 29, 2004 from http://geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/1643/dewey.html
[xxviii] Dewey, John. “Democracy and Education”. (Chapter 6) Retrieved April 2, 2004 from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
[xxix] Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). Dewey on Education. New York: Teachers College Press. p. 47
[xxx] Dewey, John (1933). How We Think. Boston: D.C Heath & Co. p. 99
[xxxi] Dewey, John (1929). Experience and Nature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. p. 36
[xxxii] Gutzke, Manford George (1955). John Dewey’s Thought and its Implications for Christian Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 18
[xxxiii] The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “John Dewey (1859-1952)”. Retrieved on March 29, 2004 from http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/d/dewey.htm
[xxxiv] Geiger, George R. (1958). John Dewey in Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 194.
[xxxv] Dewey, John. “Democracy and Education”. (Chapter 11) Retrieved April 2, 2004 from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
[xxxvi] Dewey, John. “Democracy and Education”. (Chapter 12 Retrieved April 2, 2004 from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
[xxxvii] Dewey, John (1997). Experience and Education. New York: Touchstone) p. 59
[xxxviii] Dewey, John. “Democracy and Education”. (Chapter 5) Retrieved April 2, 2004 from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
[xxxix] Gutzke, Manford George (1955). John Dewey’s Thought and its Implications for Christian Education. p. 86
[xl] Dewey, John. “Democracy and Education”. (Chapter 23) Retrieved April 2, 2004 from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
[xli] Blewett, John (Ed.) (1960). John Dewey: His Thought and Influence” New York. Fordham University Press. p. 101

Thesis: School has the responsibility to teach democratic education through lab schools. Assimilation.
Criticism: white, ethnocentric; elite; homogenization of society.
An old Halula paper
EDPL 348
Steve Halula
April 13, 2004
Dewey’s Fundamental Problem of Education
[xvii] Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). “The School and Society ”. In Dewey on Education, (p. 82).
[xviii] The Radical Academy. “American Pragmatism”. Retrieved April 4, 2004 from http://www.radicalacademy.com/amphilosophy7.htm
MORE STUFF FROM HALULA
EDPLEDPL 348
Steve Halula
Steve
May 4, 2004
The
The Importance of John Dewey
The learning theory known as “situated cognition gives meaning to learning and promotes transfer of knowledge to day-to-day real life situations.”[i] This theory is concerned with the methods by which something is learned where context and experience play important roles.
John Dewey (1859-1952), one of America’s great philosophers, educators and child psychologists was strongly influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) who believed that the child should learn through experience not by way of textbooks and lectures. “Plants are fashioned by cultivation, men by education…All that we lack at birth and need when grown up is given us by education…What comes to us from our experience of the things that effect us is the education of things.”[ii] Rousseau believed that the student must be active in the education process: “make him feel it himself or he will never learn it.”[iii]
The purpose of this essay is to point out the importance to the practitioners of situated cognition of using context and experience in education and to illustrate how Dewey similarly believed experience was vital in teaching students.
widely used).”[v]
How
How could the strategies (1978).[vi]
Other
Other educators believed learning theory.[viii]
This group described “learning as an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world. Their definition bears analysis: generative implies that learning is an act of creation or co-creation; social suggests that at least a portion of learning time occurs in partnership with others; and lived-in world connotes real-world practices and settings that make learning more relevant, useful and transferable.”[ix]
find ourselves.[x]
“Knowledge is action. Knowledge is located in the actions of persons and groups. Knowledge evolves as we participate in and negotiate our way through new situations. The development of knowledge and competence, like the development of language, involves continuous knowledge-using activity in authentic situations.”[xi] If a student can acquire the understanding of the “how” and “why”, he will not only be able to use this information but also relate it to other information and experiences as he goes on in life and encountering new situations.[xii]
Since knowledge comes from the interrelationship between the learner and the world around him, it is up to the educator to provide activities or an environment that resembles or copies the real world context in which the knowledge is to be used. This became the goal of the proponents of situated cognition.[xiii]
“Knowledge is not just ‘in the head,’ if it is to be found there at all, rather knowledge consists in the ways a person interacts with other people and situations. The situated perspective…calls for more varied learning situations.”[xvii] The teacher (guide, facilitator) needs to develop environments and activities that closely resemble actual situations in the real world.[xviii]
There are numerous approaches that situated cognitivists use in building meaningful and authentic activities. “One way to utilize situated cognition is to provide models which learners can copy and observe. Another method is to encourage problem-solving activities which will hopefully generate question asking.”[xix]
and situations.
”By ignoring the situated nature of cognition, education defeats its own goal of providing useable, robust knowledge…Approaches such as cognitive apprenticeship that embed learning in activity and make deliberate use of the social and physical context are more in line with the understanding of learning and cognition that is emerging from research. Cognitive apprenticeship methods try to enculturate students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction in a way similar to that evident--and evidently successful—in craft apprenticeship.”[xxi]
To make the activities authentic or realistic to enhance the learning process, cognitive apprenticeship makes use of “experts” in the various fields as part of the education process. Seeing how a mathematician solves a problem, how a carpenter measures a room for remodeling, how a cook determines the type and quantity of ingredients, how a person finds his way out of a dense forest or how a politician determines an appropriate response to a critique, place the student in the middle of things; it places him in the day-to-day world of real people.
“People who use tools actively rather than just acquire them, by contrast, build an increasingly rich implicit understanding of the world in which they use the tools and of the tools themselves. The understanding, both of the world and of the tool, continually changes as a result of their interaction… Too often the practices of contemporary schooling deny students the chance to engage the relevant domain culture, because that culture is not in evidence.”[xxii] The student needs to be exposed to the actual culture or environment of the activity to make this a relevant, authentic experience from which real, lasting knowledge will be gained. Passing exams is important in academic environs, but participating in a real-life situation is most effective.[xxiii] What is learned should be determined by its applicability and context in the real world.[xxiv]
authentic experience?
“John
“John Dewey was supports us.)”[xxv]
Dewey
Dewey also saw thematic structure.”[xxvii]
“But much work in school consists in setting up rules by which pupils are to act of such a sort that even after pupils have acted, they are not led to see the connection between the result -- say the answer -- and the method pursued. So far as they are concerned, the whole thing is a trick and a kind of miracle.”[xxviii] He went on to refer to the methodology of teaching and learning being used by education of his day as a medieval approach.[xxix] He believed that failure in school was most often caused by not associating school with out-of-school experiences.[xxx]
the slave!
Dewey
Dewey saw human of things.”[xxxv]
Therefore, in order “to think effectively one must have had, or now have, experiences which will furnish him resources for coping with the difficulty at hand.”[xxxvi] How did Dewey propose to accomplish this?
mining company.”[xxxix]
Even though Dewey was against many of the concepts of ‘traditional education’, he stated, “In the past, education has been much more vocational in fact than in name…the education of the masses was distinctly utilitarian. It was called apprenticeship rather than education, or else just learning from experience. The schools devoted themselves to the three R's in the degree in which ability to go through the forms of reading, writing, and figuring were common elements in all kinds of labor. Taking part in some special line of work, under the direction of others, was the out-of-school phase of this education. The two supplemented each other.”[xl]
Dewey felt that the school needed to be concerned with the new modern industrial world and its problems.[xli] The student needs to be able to apply his arithmetic and geography to business-related problems such as banking and farming. To survive in the new world, the student would have to be prepared by the school using meaningful experiences.
In summary, both the situated cognitivists and John Dewey believed that education was in need of repair for students were not learning meaningful information. Both saw the importance of experience in education. Dewey and the situated cognitivists also employed similar approaches to move experience into the curriculum. Situated cognitivists did go a little further bringing more of context and the environment into play as well. While these concepts might seem quite normal today, John Dewey did propose a great amount of change for the schools of his time. The situated cognitivists, our contemporaries, do owe a lot to the ground broken by John Dewey.
from http://www.gsu.edu/~mstswh/courses/it7000/papers/situated.htm
[ii] Boyd, William (1956). The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau-Selections. New York: Teachers College Press. p. 11.
p. 111.
[iv]
[iv] Oliver, Kevin from http://www.edtech.vt.edu/edtech/id/models/powerpoint/cog.pdf
[v]
[v] The Online from http://www.maa.org/t_and_l/sampler/rs_2add.html
[vi] Oliver (1999). “Situated Cognition & Cognitive Apprenticeships”.
[vii] Oliver (1999). “Situated Cognition & Cognitive Apprenticeships”.
from http://itstudio.coe.uga.edu/ebook/situatedcognition.htm
[ix] Brill (2001). “Situated Cognition”
[x] Wilson, Brent G. and Myers, Karen Madsen (1999). “Situated Cognition in Theoretical and Practical Context”. Retrieved March 31, 2004 from
http://ceo.cudenver.edu/~brent_wilson/SitCog.html
[xi] Wilson (1999). “Situated Cognition in Theoretical and Practical Context”
[xii] Jacobs, “Situated Cognition”
from http://www.edb.utexas.edu/mmresearch/Students97/Rutledge/html/situated_learning.html
[xiv] Jacobs, “Situated Cognition”.
[xv] Jeong-Im, Hannafin, Michael. “Situated Cognition and Learning Environments: Roles, Structures, and Implications for Design”. Retrieved March 31, 2004 from
http://tecfa.unige.ch/staf/staf-e/pellerin/staf15/situacogn.htm
[xvi] Brill (2001). “Situated Cognition”
[xvii] The Online Home of the Mathematics Association of America. “A Critique of Situated Cognition”.
[xix] Jacobs. “Situated Cognition”.
[xx] Brill (2001). “Situated Cognition”.
from http://www.exploratorium.edu/IFI/resources/museumeducation/situated.html
[xxii] Brown, John Seely and Collins, Allan and Duguid, Paul (1989). “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning”.
[xxiii] Brown, John Seely and Collins, Allan and Duguid, Paul (1989). “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning”.
[xxiv] Rutledge, K.”Situated Learning”.
[xxv] Oliver (1999). “Situated Cognition & Cognitive Apprenticeships”.
from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
[xxvii]
[xxvii] The Public from http://geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/1643/dewey.html
[xxviii]
[xxviii] Dewey, John. from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
[xxix] Dworkin, Martin S. (1959). Dewey on Education. New York: Teachers College Press. p. 47
[xxx] Dewey, John (1933). How We Think. Boston: D.C Heath & Co. p. 99
p. 36
[xxxii] Gutzke, Manford George (1955). John Dewey’s Thought and its Implications for Christian Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 18
from http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/d/dewey.htm
[xxxiv] Geiger, George R. (1958). John Dewey in Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 194.
[xxxv] Dewey, John. “Democracy and Education”. (Chapter 11) Retrieved April 2, 2004 from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
[xxxvii] Dewey, John (1997). Experience and Education. New York: Touchstone) p. 59
[xxxviii] Dewey, John. “Democracy and Education”. (Chapter 5) Retrieved April 2, 2004 from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
p. 86
[xl] Dewey, John. “Democracy and Education”. (Chapter 23) Retrieved April 2, 2004 from http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/publications/Projects/digitexts/dewey/d_e/chapter01.html
[xli] Blewett, John (Ed.) (1960). John Dewey: His Thought and Influence” New York. Fordham University Press. p. 101