Situated learning,Cognition and Communities in practice

Jean Lave Cognition in practiceMind. Mathematics and culture in everyday life

Jean Lave &Etienne WengerSituated learning and communities of practice

Jean Lave

• Jean Lave is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

• She has studied education and schooling in pre-industrial societies and compared with corresponding American conditions. She has become a strong advocate of ”practice of learning”

• Laves challenges the practice of school and classroom learning.

Jean Lave• In her book «Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics

and culture in everyday life» from 1988. she criticizes the decontextualised understanding of learning within behaviorist and cognitive psychology, where learning has been understood as consisting of isolated processes whether they be mechanical behavioral response or inner cognitive processes.

• Together with Etienne Wenger she has formulated a theory of situated learning. In the influential book Situated learning, legitimate, peripheral participation(1991/2003).

Lave

• From cognitive processes and conceptual structures to social engagements

• Education must be analyzed in relation with the world for which it prepares people.

Antrophological research in Liberia

• Lave investtigated the learning and use of math among Vai and Goa apprentice taylors in Liberia (1973 . 78)

• The research showed that routine calculations in the tailor shops were quite different from those evoked in experiments whether or not the tailors had attended school.

Cognition in practice

• The Liberia research challenged the importance of learning transfer as a source of knowledge and skill across situations .

• These results lead Lave to conduct comparative study of everyday mathematics in the USA. ” The adult Math Project”

• Designed to investigate arithemetic in situ, following the same individuals across varied settings in the course of their daily lives.

Social anthropology of cognition or ”outdoor psychology”(Geertz 1983)

• Exit from a theoretical perspective that depends upon the claustrophobic view of cognition from inside the laboratory and school.

• Cognition as a complex social phenomenon• Cognition in everyday practice is distributed stretching

over (not divided) mind, body, activity and culturally organized settings

• The cognition – and-culture psychcologists are critical of claims that laboratory experimentation is a sufficient basis for generalizing.

Two paradigms

Traditional psychology• Functional social

equilibrium• Laboratory experimentation• Positivist inspiration• Rational • general• Value-free• Factual knowledge

Social anthropology of cognition

• Conflict, power and disequilibrium

• Participant ion+interview• phenomenology• Historical & social• contextual• Value embedded• (socialconstructist

reflection)

Math ”activity” as distributed form of cognition

• Empirical support for this view of cognition has emerged from research exploring the practice of mathematics in a variety of common setting.

• Math ”activity”(distributed form of cognition) takes form differently in different situations.

Original research questions of the project

• How does arithmetic unfold in actions in everyday settings ?

• Does it matter whether it is a major or minor aspect of ongoing activity ?

• Are there differences in arithmetic procedures between situations in school (taking a math test) and situations far removed from school(kitchen, supermarket) ?

Methods

• A number of closely related studies:• ”best buy” arithmetic calculations in the course

of grocery shopping in the supermarket• A simulation experiment on these same

calculations• An extensive set of arithmetic tests and

observations across time, settings and activities of dieting cooks in the kitchen and of people managing the flow of money in their households.

The empirical and theoretical characterization of situationally specific cognitive activity ?

• Is the absence of school-problem functions in everyday math activity to be intepreted as ”absence of school mathematics”?

• The construction of some other mathematics ?• The inadequate or incomplete use of school

aritmetic ?• How does schooling shape aritmetic activity in

everyday situations ?• What model might best capture the unfolding

character of problem-solving in situ ?

Cultural construction and distribution

• Participants and activities far removed from school and laboratory and yet focused on arithmetic- school subject and exemplar of belief about the rational mind.

• Both sites and content of research reflected assumptions about the cultural construction and distribution of mathematical knowledge.

Research dilemmas and epistemological questions

• Our understanding of learning is entangled with institutions and dilemmas which for purposes of cognitive research are usually treated as if they had no direct bearing on each other.

• Widely shared belief that ” scientific thought is a proper yardstick with which to measure diagnose and prescribe remedies for the everyday thought observed in experiments and schooling.” This belief has long historical roots that have influenced cognitive theory, the institutional form of schooling and folk theories alike.

Arithmetic in and out of school

• The research project dismisses the following conventional assumptions:

• Most kids fail to learn in school, so the world must be made up of un-numerate people who cannot multiply or divide”

• ”School aritmetic algorithms are used routinely in the everyday lives of school alumni( there is no other kind of math to use)

A different problematic of cognition ?

• One way to rethink models of mind is to reexamine cognitive processes , infused with a specific theoretical meaning by contemporary cognitive theory – as has mathematics.

• The usual theoretical metaphor is a computational one in which the mind is supposed to reflect, represent and operate on

• Rather than interact with the world.

Critique of functionalism and the duality of traditional views of cognition.

• Functionalism assumes• that society is characterized by a set of

macrostructures to be passively internalized by individuals born into it.

• that Consensus is the foundations of shared order.

• that Cultural transmission is central to achieving consensus and is the crucial relation between society and individual.

Functionalism and education

• Functionalism arose in the early nineteenth century as an argument of the new industrial bourgeoisie against aristocratic privilege.

• Equal opportunity to advance in life: Those who were superior physically, mentally and morally would naturally rise to the top. Those who lacked these qualities would stay where they belonged.

• Functional theory permeates rationales,explanations and organization of schooling and is reflected in the concept of meritocracy

An implicit functionalist theory of learning(critique by lave)

• Children can be taught general cognitive skills(e.g. reading, writing and aritmetic) if these ”skills” are disembedded from the routine contexts of their use.

• Extraction of knowledge from the particulars of experience, of activity from its context, is the conditions for making knowledge available for general application in all situations.

• Classroom tests put the principle to work

Duality and cognition

• A duality of the person(rational vs emotional) is inherent in the view of functionalism and it is implicit in the logic of traditional cognitive studies.

• Duality of the person translates into division between intellectual labour and the rest of the population

• Duality between rational scientific thought and every day thought

• Traditional cognitive studies are not equipped to elaborate a theory of active reflexive social actors, located in time and space.

Transfer as the essence of functionalist theory of learning

• Cognitive psychology accounts for stability and continuity of cognitive activity across settings through the psychological mechanism of learning transfer.

• Knowledge acquired in ”context-free” circumstances is supposed to be available for general application in all contexts.

• The central role of transfer reflects the functionalist assumption of literal cultural transmission and conceptualization of relations between school and everyday practice.

Learning transfer ?

• The concept of learning transfer reflects a widely shared assumption about the cognitive basis of continuity of activity across settings.

• Conventional theory assumes that aritmethic is learned in school in the normative fashion it is taught

• CT assumes that aritmethic is then carried away from school to be applied at will in any situation that calls for application

Culture

• The concept of cultural uniformity reflects functionalist assumptions about society as a consensual order and cultural transmission as a process of homogeneous cultural reproduction across generations. It has served as a mandate to treat culture in cognitive studies as it were a constant, as if nothing essential about thinking would be disturbed if its effects were controlled experimentally

Critique of Culture as a container

• Cultural uniformity legislates away major questions about social diversity, inequality, conflict, complementarity, cooperation and differences of power and knowledge and the means by which they are socially produed, reproduced and transformed in laboratory, school and everyday settings.

Situated learning

• Human minds develop in social situations.• They use the tools and representational

media that culture provides to support, extend and reorganize mental functioning.

• Cognitive theories and school practice have not been sufficiently responsive to questions aboout these relationships.

Legitimate Peripheral Participation( Lave & Wenger 1991)

• Legitimate: The presence of members must be acknowledged (apprenticeship)

• Peripheral: apprentices (newcomers) move from the periphery to center.

• Participation: Learning is a process that takes place in a participation framework.

• Learning is mediated by the differences of perspectives among the coparticipants.

• Learning is distributed among the coparticipants

LPP theory . Empirical basis

• Apprenticeship• Vai and Gola Tailors in Liberia• Butchers ( meat cutters) in teh U.S.• Yucatec midwives• AA- non-drinking alchoholics (U.S) etc

Challenging the teacher ad the ressources of the community(Gates doctrine)

• ” mastery resides not in the master but in the organization of the community of practice of which the master is part”.

• The roles of masters vary across time and place• A decentred view of the master as pedagogue

moves the focus of analysis away from teaching and into the intricate structuring of a community´s learning resources” ( LPP, p. 94)

Principles of learning in LLP

• Strong goals for learning because learners develop a view of what the whole entreprise is about.

• Apprentices learn mostly in relation with other apprentices

• Engaging in practice rather than being its object may be a condition for the effectiveness of learning. Apprentices gradually assemble a general idea of what constitues practice.

Communities of Practice

• Situated learning has practice at its heart.• It removes learning from individualism. • Instead learning is anchored in access to

participation in communities of practice.• Learning is increased access of learners to

partipating roles in expert performances ( cf research groups)

Discourse and practice

• Verbal instruction has been assumed to have special and especially effective properties.

• While• Learning by observation and imitation is supposed to

produce the opposite, a literal and narrow effect.• LLP argues that language may have more to do with

legitimacy of participation and access than knowledge transmission.

• Learning to become a legitimate participant involves learning how to talk (and be silent)

Structureof LLP, (Lave & Wenger)

• Frameworks of practice are structured and systematic .

• It is precisely that which provides the conditions for legitimate peripheral participation.

• But structures only vaguely determine thought and the structures may be reconfigured in the local context of action.

Examples of critical questions to be raised in relation to situated learning and communities og pratice

• An understanding of learning as legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice tends to overlook conservatism, protectionism and the tendency to recycle knowledge. ????

• Under what circumstances might situated learning lead to renewal of practice , i.e. to creativity and innovation ?

• From anthropological observation to theory of learning and schooling ??

• Various contexts have various implications . Need for critical desciptions.

• The notion of ”communities of practice” has idealistic overtones and might be (and have been) used and abused by different intersts.”