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W4 A2 Situated cognition and the culture of learning

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  1. As this paper was written more than 20 years ago, how has its central message held up? What lasting value does this paper have today?

I believe that this paper should be used for today’s teaching practices as the messages conceived are important and up to date. Authentic learning experiences are the key to successful acquisition of knowledge and skills, rather than teaching from the desk, offering implicit problems to students that might represent the “reality” but not an authentic situation.

  1. If you had to summarise the authors’ arguments in a short paragraph what would you write?

Knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context and culture in which it is developed and used. Cognitive apprenticeship honors the situated nature of knowledge. People generally learn words in the context of ordinary communication. All knowledge is like language. Its parts are inextricably a product of the activity and situations in which they are produced. Conceptual knowledge is like a set of tools. The understanding, of both the world and the tools, continually changes as a result of their interaction. Learning and acting are interestingly indistinct, learning being a continuous lifelong process resulting from acting in situations. It is not possible to use a tool appropriately without understanding the community or culture in which it is used. Activity, concept and culture are interdependent. Learning must involve all three. The culture and the use of a tool act together to determine the way practitioners see the world; and the way the world appears to them determines the culture’s understanding of the world and of the tools. To learning to use tools as practitioners use them, a student, like an apprentice, must enter the community and its culture. Thus in a significant way, learning is a process of enculturation. In this process the activities involved should be coherent, meaningful and purposeful resulting in authentic activities, defined as the ordinary practices of the culture.

Cognitive apprenticeship (intuitive reasoning, resolving issues, negotiating) methods try to enculturated students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction. Cognitive apprenticeship supports learning in a domain by ending students to acquire, develop and use cognitive tools in authentic domain activity. Apprenticeship helps to emphasize the centrality of activity in learning and knowledge and highlights the inherently context-dependent, situated, and enculturating nature of learning. It also suggests the paradigm of situated modeling, coaching and fading, whereby teachers or coaches promote learning, first by making explicit their tacit knowledge or by modeling their strategies for students in authentic activity. Then teachers and colleagues support students’ attempts at doing the task and finally they empower the students to continue independently.

  1. In the late capitalism of the twenty-first century, is apprenticeship still a relevant model for learning? Try and think in terms of the kinds of knowledge required for the work that is common in a modern economy.

Of course it is still relevant for today. But not like before. In a modern economy of today there should be teaching in an apprenticeship model but not in the strict way. I believe that it has to be followed and valued in the context of today in order to achieve best learning results. JPFs should be incorporated in learning and not to be left aside. Just like authentic situations would help students realize what, why and how they learn a specific aspect in their own authentic context.

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