Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning

Abstract

Many teaching methods implicitly assume that conceptual knowledge is independent of the situations in which it is learned and used.The authors examine one such method and argue that its lack of success is a direct result of this assumption.Drawing on recent research into learning in everyday activity and not just in the highly specialized conditions of schooling, they claim that knowledge is not independent but, rather, fundamentally "situated," being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed.Teaching, however, often overlooks the central, but restrictive, contribution made by the activities, context, and culture of schools to what is learned there.A theory of situated knowledge, by contrast, calls for learning and teaching methods that take these into account.As an alternative to conventional, didactic methods, therefore, the authors propose teaching through "cognitive apprenticeship" (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989).They examine two examples of mathematics teaching that exhibit important features of this approach.