Literature
Review and Introduction
The
journal is penned by an art teacher, working with elementary school children
aged 7 to 10 where she encouraged children to work on history, art history and
community life for purposeful art making, more specifically on a project based
activity on Olympic games.
Brown,
Collins and Duguid suggest that most teaching practices face limitations when
they assume concepts to be naturally abstracted from the situations in which it
is learned. They are also looked upon as supplements to the concepts. Lave
(1997) challenge the idea of separating the subject from its process and
application. According to Duguid (1989), Learning = activity * context *
culture. If not, education defeats its purpose of application of knowledge.
Situated
leaning means to place knowledge and application to a context, a place and
time, influenced by the environment. The concept of situated learning is
embedded in constructivism (Stein, 1998). It conceives of learning as a
sociocultural phenomenon rather than a decontextualized body of abstract
knowledge. Situated learning differs from the other kinds of experiential
learning in it being grounded in everyday practices, acquired situationally and
deeply embedded in the socio cultural context.
Lave
and Wenger (1991) note that, “the generality of any form of knowledge lies in
the power to renegotiate the meaning of the past and future in constructing the
meaning of present circumstances” (p.34).
The
Experiment
The
author went ahead to design a project to give children an opportunity to learn
through activities rooted in their social and physical environment and calling
it a socio-constructivist situated approach to learning. They define planning
as an essential starting point but do not specify the goals for them. Instead
they discuss about the various goal possibilities as a result of the various
planning and decisions. Thus the hypothesis was flexible and adaptive to the
needs and interests in the present context of time and place, for the children.
The children were picked from a peer culture, scouts, where their friendship
developed outside an educational concept.
Once
a week art classes took shape on the concept of Olympic games. The concept was
chosen based on the children’s activities, interactions and conversations.
Observations of children, the identification of peer culture lead to insights
of their interests, everyday questions, concerns, likes and dislikes. The
children researched on the array of themes, posters, history, articles, and
mascot on the Olympics. With a set of questions the children narrowed down on
the mascot that further led to more questions on the subject. Post the
research, they were asked to design a mascot for the Olympics to be held in
their own country.
Ecological
theorists like McCabe and Balzano (1986) and socio-historical theorists like
Lave (1988) all focus their attention to knowledge being implemented in
activities embedded in socially constructed domains, ecological approaches or
physical environments. The author suggests that the role of the teacher here is
to facilitate social interaction, purposeful discussions, constructive
conflicts and environmental stimuli for triggering children.
As
Denzin (1977) points out the socio-cultural world has patterns of interaction
and communication that link individuals to the experience. Thus a very
important aspect of the social environment is communication. In this experiment
communication formed a network of sending and receiving ideas through negotiations,
visual expressions and debates.
Conclusion
A
number of American communities have made serious efforts to recreate successful
educational approaches from other communities (Cadwell, 1997). The author
concludes with the benefits of the situated learning in a classroom that
initiated student interaction, communication, triggering negotiating
capabilities, and contextualizing the problem prior to finding solutions along
with the importance of teacher intervention.
No comments:
Post a Comment