Situated Cognition
Biography
Jean Lave is a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her doctorate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University in 1968. She is a social anthropologist with a strong interest in social theory. She has worked extensively on the re-conceiving of learning, learners, and educational institutions in terms of social practice. She has published four books in this field.
More recently her work has taken a historical turn with her field research in Portugal on how multiple identities (national, class, gender) are constituted in struggles between communities. Jean Lave was the Honorary Simon Visiting Professor in Anthropology at Manchester University in 1995. In 1994 The American Educational Research Association presented her with the Sylvia Scribner Research Award. Much of Lave's work in situated cognition and communities of practice was done with Etienne Wenger.
Theory of Situated Cognition
The theory of situated cognition brings together the elements of cognition, perception, and action within a social context. Lave was influenced by many previous thinkers including John Dewey's famous ideas, which stated that learned developed from experience and social interaction.Vygotsky, Piaget, and Bandura were also influences on Lave's work.
The emphasis is away from the individual and toward the social setting and the collections of people within such settings. Knowledge accrues through everyday life, and even the mundane actions of day-to-day living contribute to the person's and the group's perspectives and world-views. Some knowledge acquired out of context is more difficult to generalize to unfamiliar situations.
Communities of practice are natural learning groups found in many contexts. Each individual is generally involved in a number of them through their occupation, school, home, community, and leisure activities. A person may be a core member in some groups (acknowledged by other members as a long-standing member or an "expert". In other groups the same individual may be at the margin by virtue of newness to the group or by having less expertise than other members.
Each community of practice has a theme or enterprise that is understood by all its members, and which may evolve and change over time as needs change. The participants typically feel some sense of belonging and membership to the group as a social entity. These groups typically produce internal sets of rules, routines, vocabulary, and styles of behavior that may be unique to the group.
Designing learning experiences from the situated cognition perspective has four major premises:
1. Learning is grounded in the actions of everyday situations
2. Knowledge is acquired situationally and transfers only to similar situations
3. Social processes influence the way people think, perceive, solve problems, perform procedures, build declarative knowledge, and interact with others.
4. Learning is thoroughly enmeshed in participation in complex social environments that contain people, situations, and activities.
Application of Situated Cognition
The recent trend toward use of portfolios in adult learning contexts brings credence to the notion of situated cognition. Montessori education has utilized these ideas since the early part of the 20th century.
Wilson and Myers (1999) in a chapter on Situated Cognition, suggest that SitCog has a broad foundation that includes psychology-based learning theories plus anthropology, critical theory, political science, and other disciplines. They warn that the educator, in designing learning activities, should resist applying any theory too dogmatically, but draw from a range of theories and disciplines.
Situated cognition spans social, behavioral, and neurological perspectives of knowledge and learning, and uses a web of social interactions and learning activities. Individual cognitive mechanisms of learners are respected in SitCog, and it is believed that cognition is enacted, unfolded, or constructed.
An outstanding feature of situated cognition is the perspective of placing the individual's cognition within a larger social and physical milieu in which the learner will interact with others' cognitive processes as well as with the physical context.
Brown, et.al (n.d.) developed arguments about the situated nature of language and skill acquisition, and proposed that word meanings are constructed by the learner based on contextual usage of words (spoken or read) in natural usage. Meaning evolves each time the learner is exposed to the word. They further propose that concepts are continuously under construction, just as words are, with activity and perceptual involvement serving as the catalysts for construction. Tools should be acquired actively through usage and observation of others using them.
Books Authored or Co-Authored by Jean Lave:
Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life (1988)
Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991)
Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context (1996)
Learning Theory Bibliography
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., and Diguid, P. (n.d.)
Driscoll, 2000
Stein, 1998
Wilson & Myers, 1999.