Personal Blogs

• Many methods of didactic education assume a separation between knowing and doing
• The primary concern of schools often seems to be the transfer of knowledge
• The activity in in which knowledge is developed and deployed is now seen as integral part of  what is learned
• Learning and cognition, it is now possible to argue are fundamental
• KEY POINT – Suggest that by ignoring the situated nature of cognition, education defeats its own goal of providing usable, robust knowledge
• KEY POINT – All knowledge is, we believe like language (I.e. experienced readers implicidly understand that words are situated.  They therefore ask for the rest of the sentence or context before committing themselves to an interpretation of a word.  Therefore a concept, like the meaning of a word is always under construction
• Consider conceptual knowledge as similar to a set of tools
• Tools share significant features with knowledge:  They can only be fully understood through use
• People who use tools actively rather than just acquire them, build an increasingly rich implicit understanding of the world in which they use the tools and of the tools themselves
• KEY POINT – Learning and acting are interestingly indistinct, learning being a continuous, life-long process resulting from acting in situations
• The Community and its viewpoint, quite as much as the tool itself, determine how a tool is used
• It is not possible to use a tool appropriately without understanding the community or culture in which it is used – just as carpenters and cabinet makers used chisels differently, so physicists and engineers use mathematical formulae differently
• Students are often asked to use the tools of a discipline without being able to adopt its culture.  To learn to use tools as practitioners use them, a student, like an apprentice, must enter that community and its culture.
• KEY POINT-  learning is a process of enculturation
• People pick up relevant jargon,behaviour by being part of a community and gradually start to act in accordance with its norms
• Authentic activity can be deeply informative
• Much school work is inauthentic ad thus not fully productive of useful learning
• KEY POINT - Authentic activities are simply defined as the ordinary practices of the culture
• Authentic activities are not just for experts
• School activities too often tend to be hybrid (framed by one culture but attributed to another) with many of the activities not being the activity practitioners would make sense of or endorse
• KEY POINT – When authentic activity is transferred to the classroom, their context is inevitably transmuted – they become classroom tasks and part of the school culture
• KEY POINT - The idea that most school activity exists in a culture of its own is central to understanding man of the difficulties in learning in school
• Schooling seeks to encourage problem solving but disregards most of the inventive heuristics that students bring to the classroom
• Authentic Activity is meaningful and purposeful to the culture
• You need the machine to understand the manual, as much as the manual to understand the machine
• KEY POINT – The concept of indexicality is that it indicates that knowledge, and not just learning, is situated and that authentic activity are not merely useful, they are essential
• KEY POINT - Cognitive Apprenticeship methods try to enculturate students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction
• By beginning with a task embedded in a familiar activity, it shows the students the legitimacy of their implicit knowledge and its availability as scaffolding in apparently unfamiliar tasks
• KEY POINT - The development of concepts out of and through continuing authentic activity is the approach of cognitive apprenticeship – a term closely allied to the image of a tool as knowledge
• Apprenticeship enables apprentices to acquire and develop the tools and skills of their craft through authentic work within their trade – the apprentice enter the culture of practice.
• Cognitive emphasises that apprenticeship techniques reach beyond the physical skills to the kinds of cognitive skills more normally associated with conventional schooling
• KEY POINT - Cognitive Apprenticeships attempts to promote learning within a nexus of activity, tool and culture
• Learning advances through collaborative social interactions
• Within a culture, ideas are exchanged and modified and belief systems developed
• The increasingly role of the teacher as a master to apprentice, and the teachers’ use of authentic domain activity as a major part of teaching will perhaps, once and for all, dismiss George Bernard Shaw’s criticism of teachers ‘he who can, does.  He who cannot, teaches’.  His comment may be replaced with Alexander Pope’s hopeful ‘let such teach others who themselves excel’
• Epistermology – ‘the study of knowledge’

The central message of the need for social interaction, realistic and authentic learning activity all hold strong in the current world of teaching where they is a continual shift and balance between ‘acquisition’ and ‘participation’. 

The role of the teacher is still being explored in many areas of education with the movement from being a ‘teacher’ and ‘all wise knowledgable individual’ whose job is to transfer this knowledge and instead move towards a position of ‘expert participant/learner’ and support and facilitate the learners own exploration through experience and collaboration with other learners.

There is a quite a level of criticism aimed at schools and their approach to activity and I not in a position to note whether this holds up today.  I can certainly, from my own experience identify a major shift in terms of the assessment activity for apprenticeships and their technical certificates which has adapted significantly over the last 14 years that I have been involved with their delivery.  They are led much more industry and a include realistic activities and assessment to what is undertaken within the industry.

The key arguments of the author I summarise as:

• Suggest that by ignoring the situated nature of cognition, education defeats its own goal of providing usable, robust knowledge
• Learning and acting are indistinct, learning being a continuous, life-long process resulting from acting in situations
• Learning is a process of enculturation (‘the gradual acquisition of the characteristics and norms of a culture or group by a person, another culture’)
• Authentic activities are simply defined as the ordinary practices of the culture
• When authentic activity is transferred to the classroom, their context is inevitably transmuted – they become classroom tasks and part of the school culture
• The idea that most school activity exists in a culture of its own is central to understanding man of the difficulties in learning in school
• The concept of indexicality is that it indicates that knowledge, and not just learning, is situated and that authentic activity are not merely useful, they are essential
• Cognitive Apprenticeship methods try to enculturate students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction
• The development of concepts out of and through continuing authentic activity is the approach of cognitive apprenticeship – a term closely allied to the image of a tool as knowledge
• Cognitive Apprenticeships attempts to promote learning within a nexus of activity, tool and culture

In terms of the validity and relevance of the apprenticeship model for learning, it is now more than ever seen as a great way to learn and demonstrate industry readiness, with the ability to transfer the skills and knowledge in a creative way that meets the needs of industry.  The government has encouraged Sector Skill Councils to invest in the development of Higher Apprenticeships, developed in conjunction with industry to ensure the suitability and function and ‘fit-for-purpose’ for specific roles.  This is extending further in 2017 with Trailblazer apprenticeships (with a number of vocations already developing new pathways) where the industries are taking a leading role in the development of the framework, developing the learning outcomes.  Additionally apprenticeships are being seen as an alternative to the traditional progression of school, college  and university.  With the development of the QCF (Qualification Credit Framework) the level of academic study linked to apprenticeship study is more transparent with the ability to demonstrate potential ‘graduate’ standard learning achievement.

References:

John Seely Brown, Allan Collins and Paul Duguid . (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Available: http://www.jstor.org.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/stable/pdf/1176008.pdf?acceptTC=true. Last accessed 2nd March 2015.