Thoughts on Situatied Cognition and philosophical underpinnings

First of all, I appreciated the comment Dr. Graham made on Monday that we be careful not to confuse underlying philosophies with instructional approaches, or even instructional theories with learning theories. After reading the Schuh and Barab article (Schuh, K. L., & Barab, S. A. (2008). Philosophical perspectives. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. van Merrienboer & M. P. Driscoll (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (3rd ed., pp. 67-82). New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [paper]), I think I was a little prone to simplify and think - "Oh, if I used a situative cognition approach, I would have to be a relativist, and I'm not a relativist." So it was nice to be able to separate that out, and to realize that there are still various philosophical camps even within these broad categories.

I really enjoyed the Brown article (Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32-42. [online]) It seems so intuitive, and so vital, even though it's a little different than the way our educational institution is used to making things work.

I'm going to appeal to Rousseau again, because I am fundamentally a French major and will always remain such. :) One of the most seminal works I ever read was for a course on philosophy of the Enlightenment era - a French Department course. Among the many Rousseau works that we studied was his revolutionary book on education, Émile. Émile is the name of a boy, and the book is a hypothetical look at his life. He is raised by conscientious parents who want something different for their son - he has a tutor, and rather than attending school and being instructed in the classical pedagogical model, he spends his days doing real-life tasks, taking walks, buying groceries, all of this being guided and facilitated by his tutor. Through this hypothetical child's life, Rousseau shows us what a real education, a situated education, can do for a child.

After I had read Émile, I was left with that fantastic fuzzy feeling, and then brought back to cold hard reality. Who could possibly afford a private life-long tutor for each of their children? How could an education like this ever be feasible? After having read these most recent articles, I have some ideas. (Brown might call Émile's experience a cognitive apprenticeship, and explore "methods [that] 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.")

I've also been reading a couple other heretical books of late. One is John Holt's How Children Learn. Long admired by homeschool advocates, Holt is of a rather situativist viewpoint. In fact, some of what he wrote in 1962 is a pretty clear rebuke of the then-common Cognitive viewpoint:

Everything I learn of organisms, including what these people [Cognitive Theory advocates] tell me, leads me to conclude that they are not like machines at all. one famous experiment with rats showed that their behavior changed markedly for the worse in almost every respect when they were crowded into a small space. Other experiments with rats showed that their performance on tasks could be strongly affected by how their human handlers felt about them; rats who had been described to their handlers as smart performed better than identical rats described to their handlers as dumb. Do machines get nervous and break down when we put a lot of them in one room? Do they work better if we talk nicely to them? Some might say that we could someday design computers that would do that. I doubt it very much. But even if we could, the fact that we might make certain machines a little more like animals does not prove tin the least that organisms are, or even are like, machines.(Ibid., 11)

Holt began his work as a teacher and sought to reform the education system, but after years of promoting his theories, became disillusioned and promoted homeschooling, or rather, a line of thought that he called unschooling, which is not, when you look at it, all that different than Rousseau.

Am I promoting that we pull all our kids out of public school? No. (Well, maybe, on some days. But I can't do that and continue in my line of work.) I do strongly believe, though, that institutionalized education, by adopting some of the philosophies of the Situated Cognition advocates, can approach what Roussau and Holt were aiming for. I think that cognitive apprenticeships are possible. There's no way we can afford a private tutor for every student, but there's no way a single tutor would have the expertise desirable for every subject anyway. So why not expose students to a variety of coaches (experts, facilitators) who can conduct mini-apprenticeships throughout their experience? Why not be more flexible on which skills need to be masters at which grade level and instead let students explore the various disciplines through their own natural curiosity into avenues of interest? A student who doesn't naturally enjoy math but does like to cook is going to recoil at a worksheet full of equations, but will find himself deriving and using mathematics of his own accord if he has to half a recipe. These same principles we find in the Utopian texts of Rousseau and Holt are perhaps not too far-fetched if we are willing to re-examine our existing paradigms.