No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Learning to navigate
Abstract
Understanding Practice brings together the many different perspectives that have been applied to examining social context. From Ole Dreier's work on the therapeutic relationship, to Hugh Mehan's work on learning by disabled students, to Charles and Janet Keller's work on blacksmithing, the chapters form a diverse and fascinating look at situated learning. A distinctive feature of the book is the wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the problem of understanding cognition in everyday settings.
... Learningi sa na spect of social practices,n ot abstract,internal cognitiveprocesses. Several authors arguethatcognition is distributed between human and material-symbolic actors in practices (Hutchins 1996). Cognition is not an internal property;i ti sarelational process happeningi n-between actors.I na na cademic context one can arguet hatar esearcher is thinking with her articles, computers,a nd research community.C ultural psychology( Cole1 996) understands human behavior and cognition as aspectso fc ultural practices,which means that one cannot understand the individual apart from different cultural, social, historical, and situatedp ractices. ...
... Our understanding of pedagogy is grounded in social constructivist theories that equate learning with participation in culturally valued activities, which have derived from studies of contexts as diverse as naval midshipmen learning to navigate (Hutchins 1993) to girl scouts' learning and development of identity as part of a cookie sales drive (Rogoff et al. 1995). Learning, in these theories, is both socially situated, for example, within the classroom, workplace, or playing field, and co-constructed by participants within the activity. ...
Theatre artists were interviewed to understand how they conceptualise audiences in relation to their own creative and collaborative processes. The authors identified three modes through which theatre artists engage with audiences: (1) watching with the audience, (2) confronting the audience, and (3) creating a community of practice/knowledge. This article considers each of these ideas pedagogically as spaces for the co-construction of knowledge. In doing so, the authors confront Jacques Rancière's ideas about spectatorship and pedagogy. The article offers possibilities for theatre educators, as well as theatre artists, to integrate these pedagogical modes of engagement with audiences within their own practices.
The primary methodological approach in cognitive psychology is experimental. However, the case study seems to hold particular importance in the foundational concepts of higher cognitive functions. For example, theories of the cognitive changes that lead to spontaneous insights have their roots in moments such as Poincaré’s realisation about chaos theory while stepping onto a bus or Kohler’s description of the chimpanzee Sultan’s sudden discovery of how to reach a banana. Indeed, it makes sense for research that is interested in nonstandard cognitive processes to be founded on case studies. In this paper, we draw on detailed examination of single cases to illustrate exaptative actions. Exaptative actions are actions which have an initial goal not related to changing the problem space in an epistemically or pragmatically amenable way but accidentally reveal a pathway to the problem solution. We show that these actions are a common bridge between pragmatic and epistemic actions but also question the idea that there are easily identifiable distinct action forms over the course of a problem-solving episode. We finish with observations on the importance of qualitative, single case research to cognitive psychology.
Jean Lave is a social anthropologist whose studies in the 1970s and 1980s of apprentice tailors in West Africa and everyday routines such as grocery shopping contributed to the development of situated learning theory, which posits that learning is embedded within socially, culturally, and contextually specific activity. With Etienne Wenger, she conceptualizes situated learning as legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice. Learning is fundamentally change, they argue, that emerges through nuanced interactions between newcomers and old timers as the former moves toward full participation in a community’s defining practices. Practices, people, and communities mutually constitute one another and generate conflicts and contradictions that must be negotiated. Learning is thus political for Lave, as are learning theories in the ways they frame social relations and structure the world. Lave challenges dominant psychological views of learning as mental processes of acquisition and transfer, noting how schooling practices reproduce these views as common sense. Lines of research drawing upon Lave’s work include studies of cognitive apprenticeship, communities of practice, and critical examinations of transfer and schooling. More recently, scholars have embraced her ethical-political project by using a situated view to foreground culture in educational practice and center justice and equity in the study of learning within historically marginalized communities.
This study uses discourse analysis to investigate the connectedness between embodiment and the politics of orthography. Drawing on a video-recorded conversation from a large sociolinguistic dataset on Amazigh/Berber, the study examines the role of embodied acts not only as semiotic resources that elaborate talk but also as consequential discursive entities that organize political arguments about script. The participants use multimodal utterances that extend beyond meaning to iconize social orientation as well as power in conversation. Analysis of the video reveals the way participants map their social perceptions of the language and its script onto their talk and embodied actions. Analysis also shows how script arguments mirror larger political debates in Morocco, in which script preferences are based on ideological and political orientations.
Aims and objectives
This study examines language accommodation in cross-dialectal encounters. It demonstrates how speakers of different Arabic varieties use (non)accommodation strategies that include both verbal and embodied actions.
Approach
The study uses qualitative data from Arabic cross-dialectal communication. In the course of their interactions, participants draw on linguistic and nonlinguistic resources to achieve either convergent or divergent accommodation. Using the theoretical frameworks of discourse analysis (DA) and communication accommodation theory (CAT), the study investigates natural conversations for insight into qualities of Arabic cross-dialectal communication.
Data and analysis
The data were collected in the United States. In this study, the participants originate from four major geographical areas in the Arab world, including the Maghreb, Egypt and Sudan, the Levant, and the Gulf.
Findings/conclusions
The analysis demonstrates that successful accommodation requires a verbal and nonverbal collaborative construction of meaning to achieve co-participation. Participants linguistically converge while they display a shared Arab identity. The data also show that when a sense of shared Arabness is deemphasized and the positive social image to a group’s variety is violated, divergence as a nonaccommodative strategy is used.
Originality
This is the first study that demonstrates how different modes of accommodation are expressed, not only through speech but also through embodied actions. The study shows that accommodation as a process is not complete at the verbal level; it must be orchestrated at multiple semiotic levels, including nonverbal ones.
Significance/implications
Scholars have paid less attention to nonverbal accommodation. This study seeks to bridge this gap by analyzing both verbal and nonverbal accommodation, whether convergent or divergent, in Arabic cross-dialectal communication. It shows how speakers of different dialects use accommodation to signal intergroup relations and negotiate different social identities.
Elaborating the relations amongst workers’ learning, innovations and well-being is essential for achieving two important and dual goals in contemporary work life. The first is individuals’ ongoing learning that underpins their employability and can respond to new challenges and emerging occupational and workplace requirements. The second comprises workers’ remaking and transforming workplace practices, processes and outcomes (i.e., workplace innovations) in response to these challenges, and through them sustaining workplaces’ productivity and viability. These dual processes of individuals’ learning and remaking of practice co-occur and warrant understanding and supporting and promoting to exercise them optimally in achieving these dual goals. We aim to illuminate and elaborate these dual learning and innovations from the results of two studies of small to medium size Singaporean enterprises using interviews and observations. Framed by considerations from cultural psychology, work practice and well-being theorising, the dualities of workplace affordances (i.e., opportunities provided by workplaces) and individual engagement (i.e., how workers elect to engage and learn from these opportunities) are used to propose how workers’ worklife learning and workplace innovations can arise reciprocally. In conclusion, sets of curriculum and pedagogic practices that can be exercised in work settings are advanced.
This chapter focuses on the planning and teaching cycle of one teacher during a collaborative translation activity to explore the ways that materials shape the teaching and learning process, and we use Grammar-Translation as a point of contrast to highlight the specific affordances of translating pedagogies. Analyzing videotaped lessons, interviews, and reflective blogs, this study employs sociocultural and applied linguistic theories of materiality to examine the ways that objects in the environment shape, and are shaped by, human activity. Findings illustrate the ways that the physical relationship between actors and objects limit or give access to the semiotic fields that enable meaning to be constructed. The arrangement of student bodies, the strategic use of written and digital materials, and improvised writing conventions shaped planning and teaching phases of instruction. Finally, we offer implications for teachers and scholars interested in language learning.
This chapter examines navigation and navigational routines as social and interactional activities in patrolling exercises in United Nations military observer (UNMO) training, showing how navigating is more than getting from point A to point B. The data come from two multinational MO courses where English is used as working language and lingua franca. By using navigation as an entry point to examine talk and interaction in patrol vehicles, this chapter illustrates how collaborative practices are created through performance of individual actions and their reiteration. Successful navigation provides anticipatory information for the team related to their route and position that can be used as a tool for making and reporting observations, and verbalises the location, thereby creating shared situational awareness. Navigation is also important for safety. The study offers insights on social and interactional activity in teamwork and the impact that team members’ actions have on collaborative work. The results can be utilised to further develop MO training, but they also benefit other simulated and practice-based training.
Within the UKCS offshore oil and gas industry there exist key personnel who perform critical roles in an emergency as part of the installation's emergency response team (ERT), two of these personnel are the Offshore Installation Manager (OIM) and the offshore Control Room Operator (CRO). The OIM is responsible for the safety and well-being of all persons onboard and within 500 m of the installation. Should an emergency situation arise, the OIM performs one of the most critical roles in emergency response - management of the response to the emergency to mitigate and make safe the installation to secure a place of safety for persons onboard or organise their safe evacuation. Such emergency response shall also include limiting the loss of hydrocarbons to the environment. The CRO monitors and interprets the output from an installation's Distributed Control System (DCS) and Fire and Gas Panel (FGP), responding to alarms and deviations from steady state. In many instances, an offshore CRO's actions in response to these deviations can determine whether or not the situation deteriorates into a disaster. Should an emergency occur, the CRO will act in accordance with an installation's emergency response procedures and OIM instructions.
The persistence of incidents, a number leading to disasters, in the industry highlights the importance of both OIM and CRO competence in controlling emergencies. Both positions require an effective system to assess the competence of job holders. Research at the University of Aberdeen identified potential barriers that can prevent the effective competence assessment of an OIM in emergency response. An extension to this research analyses the two offshore industry standards for competence in emergency response: OPITO 7025 – OIM Controlling Emergencies and OPITO 9004 – Control Room Operator Emergency Response, and associated documentation, applying a critical hermeneutic approach, focusing on the assessment of underpinning knowledge and understanding within the roles. The key findings are that there currently exists no effective means to assess the underpinning technical knowledge and understanding of either OIMs or CROs in emergency response within the offshore industry. Knowledge and, in particular, understanding are poorly defined within the relevant OPITO standards. There exists no validation of evidence collated to support an individual's underpinning knowledge and understanding and no truly independent audit of collated evidence or the process of assessment.
The research is important to Duty Holders (see also OSD Installation Operators under UK Offshore Safety Directive Regulations) and employers within the offshore oil and gas industry, organisations associated with the offshore industry, safety engineers and UK Government departments with regard to the effectiveness of competence assessment of appointed OIMs and CROs. It is also significant to risk engineers when considering the probable competence of key emergency response personnel in a given environment at a given point in time. The research is not just applicable to the UKCS offshore industry but also to the global offshore oil and gas industry.
When we use a smartphone as we move about, we see our surroundings in a different way, adopting new practices to combine physical exploration of place with digital navigation on the Web. This article seeks to identify how consulting digital information as we go along modifies our behaviour. Specifically, we will focus on the use of a mobile application dedicated to the presentation of a tourist site. Our exploratory study is based on a comparison of two groups of visitors: the first group was provided with a printed tourist guide, and the second had the same guide plus a smartphone with a tourist guide application. For the purposes of comparison, the visitors were followed step by step (their movements were tracked by GPS) and click by click (the application recorded the user’s browsing history). At the end of the tour, participants were also invited to comment on their experience, in semi-structured interviews. The results of the study suggest that the use of a smartphone while sightseeing modifies significantly our walking pace, the number of halts and slowdowns we make, and also the type of circuit we follow. Using the smartphone leads visitors to follow more carefully the itinerary proposed and, as a result, to explore the world with greater application
The debated term “Mediterranean” has been variously understood as a modern construct, a “politics of knowledge,” and/or a zone of community or conflict. This article argues that such polyvalence can be traced back to the second century BCE. During this period, and in Polybius' Histories, a teleological understanding of world power was evolving, one that labeled Rome as an inevitably superior focal point of a Mediterranean-centered “oikoumenē.” Geographic determinism combined with a language of cultural capital to weave a new map of the “inhabited world,” according to which “global” time and space unified along the spine of an “Our Sea.”
The purpose of this article is to present an approach to policy analysis that centres on the notion of practice. Traditionally policy analysis rests on two types of categories: the substantive categories of the policy issue at hand and the general conceptualisations that emerge from the discipline itself, such as policy formulation, policy implementation, policy instrument, agenda‐setting, and so on. Challenging these categories and unpacking policy as a bundle of practices, makes it possible for the analyst to unearth the taken‐for‐granted and tacit dimensions that stabilise a particular policy in place and time. Using the case of prostitution policy, I will show how a practice approach allows for a critical analysis of certain empirical features of this type of policy, such as some remarkable constancies over many countries and long historical periods in regulatory approach and the propensity for even progressive policies in this domain to revert to more prohibitionist forms of regulation.
This paper critically reflects on the influence of historicity in self-regulatory activity towards mediating subjective task complexity in job design. This is based on the growing interest of using the ‘practice’ approach in overcoming the gap between the theoretical understanding of what people do and the realistic understanding of what people actually do at the workplace. The paper argued that since an objective analysis of the number of alternatives presented in any given situation will not always coincide with subjective perceptions, and the individual’s lack of knowledge about the external world may result in his/her inability to accurately predict the outcomes of his/her decisions, then it is important to understand how an individual acquire knowledge about his/her external world of work, and also if its consequential effect on the routine is acquired through the recollections of the subconscious mind’s daily encounters at the work situations.
The three chapters in this section approach modeling from very different yet consistently intriguing points of view. Nemirovsky focuses on how people generalize; he argues that generalizations are intimately grounded in situations and only exceptionally take the form of “For all x, the following holds...” He illustrates his view through a detailed analysis of how a student creates representations to model the passage of a train through a tunnel. Verschaffel, Greer, and De Corte review their program of research about how students and teachers interpret mathematical word problems. They argue that classroom cultures tend to encourage students to ignore real-world constraints and considerations crucial to problem solving in out of school settings. Further, they claim that for mathematics to be useful in modeling problems of a practical nature it is important that mathematics education give due regard to realistic considerations in modeling. Kaput and Shaffer discuss human reasoning, including modeling, from an evolutionary perspective. They adopt Donald’s theory that human representational competence has gone through stages marked by radically new means of using symbols. And they propose that human cognition is presently moving toward a fifth stage, where computer technology augments people’s ability to represent scientific and mathematical problems.
The interdisciplinary field of the learning sciences encompasses educational psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and anthropology, among other disciplines. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences is the definitive introduction to this innovative approach to teaching, learning, and educational technology. This dramatically revised second edition incorporates the latest research in the field, includes twenty new chapters on emerging areas of interest, and features contributors who reflect the increasingly international nature of the learning sciences. The authors address the best ways to design educational software, prepare effective teachers, organize classrooms, and use the internet to enhance student learning. They illustrate the importance of creating productive learning environments both inside and outside school, including after-school clubs, libraries, museums, and online learning environments. Accessible and engaging, the Handbook has proven to be an essential resource for graduate students, researchers, teachers, administrators, consultants, educational technology designers, and policy makers on a global scale.
Design and problem solving are central to technology and have distinguished learning in technology from other curriculum areas. This research investigated how expert technologists learn design and problem solving through experience. Data was collected from four expert technologists and this information was analysed using learning theories that focus on learning through experience—that is experiential learning theory, situated cognition, distributed cognition and activity theory. This framework of analysis provided evidence that learning through experience is central to these experts’ development and justify a broader construct of experience than normally associated with hard materials. This information supports curriculum development in hard materials technology that employs a wide range of experiences and provides justification for curriculum developers and teachers to justify, inform and develop effective design and problem solving learning programmes focussed on a broadened construct of experience.
With increasing disciplinary interest in amateur practice, and growing geographical use of artistic practice as a research method, ideas of proficiency are increasingly coming under scrutiny. In this paper, I explore and unsettle different classifications of proficiency in relation to empirical data from practice-based research with art practitioners. I focus on the role and nature of experimentation within artistic practices across different levels of proficiency, and suggest that this leads to increasingly individualised practices over time, which can be characterised by features from outside the conventions of a field (proto-practices) irrespective of formal attributions of proficiency. I suggest an alternative understanding of proficiency that characterises the practice rather than the practitioner in terms of experimental style rather than skill, which has theoretical and methodological implications for geographical research into both amateur and artistic practices.
Purpose
– Apprenticeships are now usually seen as a model of education focused on occupational preparation, albeit manifested in different ways across nation states. However, throughout human history, the majority of occupational preparation has been premised upon apprenticeship as a mode of learning. That is, a preparation arising mainly through apprentices’ active and interdependent engagement in their work, rather than being taught or directly guided by more experienced practitioners. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
– A review of literature.
Findings
– A way of considering apprenticeship as a mode of learning as well as a model of education.
Research limitations/implications
– Three elements of considering and supporting apprenticeship as a mode of learning.
Practical implications
– Practice curriculum, practice pedagogies and personal epistemology.
Social implications
– A way of considering apprenticeship as a mode of learning as well as a model of education.
Originality/value
– A way of considering apprenticeship as a mode of learning as well as a model of education.
There is a growing need for a comprehensive and informed account of how learning across working life can be conceptualised, its range of purposes outlined, and processes supporting that learning understood. Consensus exists across governments and supra-national agencies, spokespersons for industry, occupations, employees, workplaces, education systems and communities and by workers themselves that the ongoing development of occupational capacities is now required by all kinds of workers in all occupations across their working lives. This consensus arises from the recognition that not only is the knowledge required for occupational practice subject to constant change, but also the nature and form of that change are more than merely keeping up-to-date with the latest developments. Instead, many occupations are being transformed, which affects what constitutes occupational competence and extends to what is expected of those occupations by the community. Moreover, the nature and kinds of paid employment, how it is undertaken and by whom are also constantly changing. Therefore, there is a need to view workers’ ongoing development across working lives as a major education project. Given the importance of this project in securing economic and social goals, it warrants a fresh and informed approach to how these goals might be realised. The focus here is distinct from other educational projects in so far as its conceptions are far broader. The concern is to build upon both work and educational experiences, and to be open to a range of provisions of experiences and support going beyond the scope of what can be realised through the provision of experiences in educational institutions. So, this project needs to be realised not only through educational systems and institutions, but also in the circumstances where occupations are enacted (i.e., workplaces, work practices and communities). Given this necessity for ongoing learning across working life constitutes an entire educational project, there needs to be clarity about what conceptions underpin it, the kind of purposes to which it is directed and the processes used to realise these purposes. In this way, this concluding chapter draws upon contributions within this book and those from elsewhere to set out something of what comprises the educational project associated with ongoing learning across working life.
Purpose
This paper aims to analyze the organization of storytelling and its role in creating and sharing practical knowledge for cancer diagnosis in a medical community in Italy.
Design/methodology/approach
The qualitative analysis draws upon different interactional data sets: naturally occurring diagnostic conversations among physicians in the ward, research interviews, video-based sessions in which physicians watch and discuss their diagnostic work.
Findings
The results highlight: the specific organization of storytelling practices in medical diagnostic work; three main functions that such storytelling practices play in supporting collaborative diagnostic work in the community of our study; and how storytelling practices are resources on which participants rely across settings, including ad hoc reflexive meetings.
Originality/value
This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the role that storytelling plays in the diagnostic work in an understudied and yet life-saving site such as oncology.
Informed by key ideas from the learning sciences (i.e. metaphors, resources and levels of learning), this chapter addresses some challenges in pre-service teacher education in Ireland and identifies a number of potentially generative concepts from workplace learning research that might advance policy and practice. The main point of this chapter is that, more often than not, work rather than learning appears to be the leading activity in schools during initial teacher education, and that reframing the school as a ‘learningplace’ is central to both teacher education reform and widening the scope of workplace learning research. The challenges are: (1) invisibility-visibility of learners and learning; (2) solo and assisted performance; (3) reframing the knowledge-practice relationship; (4) school-university partnership: which model(s)?; and (5) advancing learning at the system level. In light of workplace learning research, ‘generative concepts’ from the research literature are identified that might inform future research, policy and practice.
This chapter addresses the question: Is there a virtuous circle between situated learning within communities of practice and the corporate pursuit of innovation in large companies? The authors trace a succession of ways in which it has been formulated, reframed, and addressed across a range and sequence of qualitative studies. Overall, they argue for more ethnographic studies of organizational learning and innovation and recommend further use of actor-network theory, which has potential to add considerably to communities of practice theory. The authors illustrate this argument in the chapter through a discussion of Carlile's (2002) important paper and cite a number of other studies that use actor-network theory in combination with communities of practice theory.
The Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research is the critical reference source for the growing field of engineering education research, featuring the work of world luminaries writing to define and inform this emerging field. The Handbook draws extensively on contemporary research in the learning sciences, examining how technology affects learners and learning environments, and the role of social context in learning. Since a landmark issue of the Journal of Engineering Education (2005), in which senior scholars argued for a stronger theoretical and empirically driven agenda, engineering education has quickly emerged as a research-driven field increasing in both theoretical and empirical work drawing on many social science disciplines, disciplinary engineering knowledge, and computing. The Handbook is based on the research agenda from a series of interdisciplinary colloquia funded by the US National Science Foundation and published in the Journal of Engineering Education in October 2006.
The Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research is the critical reference source for the growing field of engineering education research, featuring the work of world luminaries writing to define and inform this emerging field. The Handbook draws extensively on contemporary research in the learning sciences, examining how technology affects learners and learning environments, and the role of social context in learning. Since a landmark issue of the Journal of Engineering Education (2005), in which senior scholars argued for a stronger theoretical and empirically driven agenda, engineering education has quickly emerged as a research-driven field increasing in both theoretical and empirical work drawing on many social science disciplines, disciplinary engineering knowledge, and computing. The Handbook is based on the research agenda from a series of interdisciplinary colloquia funded by the US National Science Foundation and published in the Journal of Engineering Education in October 2006.
The anthropological approach to studying culture has implied observations of and participation in other people’s practices however strange and exotic they may seem. These practice-based experiences are the backbone of the anthropological profession. Anthropology has for a long time been more or less consciously entangled with defining these experiences as learning experiences and subsequently defining culture as the result of learning processes. It is, however, primarily in relation to the general focus on practice that the anthropological paradigm of practice-based learning takes shape.
How do people negotiate commitments to engaging in joint activity while at the same time anticipating and managing the inherent risks of collaboration? We explore this question through the ethnographic example of a hackathon, a collaborative software-design competition. We focus specifically on the earliest and, in many ways, most uncertain phase of collaboration, in which commitment and activity simultaneously emerge: team formation. We analyze mercurial allegiances in terms of a technoliberal participation ideology closely associated with the mores of the digital economy, which paradoxically emphasizes intensive project-based collaboration but limited interpersonal responsibility. We examine the verbal and nonverbal resources (such as stance-taking, politeness, reported speech, humor, and gesture) that prospective teammates use to modulate expressions of commitment, and the ways in which they pursue self-interested projects while maintaining social relatedness in order to accomplish joint activity in a context of social volatility.
Background:
Recent research has suggested that using electronic health records (EHRs) can negatively impact clinical reasoning (CR) and interprofessional collaborative practices (ICPs). Understanding the benefits and obstacles that EHR use introduces into clinical activities is essential for improving medical documentation, while also supporting CR and ICP.
Methods:
This qualitative study was a longitudinal pre/post investigation of the impact of EHR implementation on CR and ICP at a large pediatric hospital. We collected data via observations, interviews, document analysis, and think-aloud/-after sessions. Using constructivist Grounded Theory's iterative cycles of data collection and analysis, we identified and explored an emerging theme that clinicians described as central to their CR and ICP activities: building the patient's story. We studied how building the patient's story was impacted by the introduction and implementation of an EHR.
Results:
Clinicians described the patient's story as a cognitive awareness and overview understanding of the patient's (1) current status, (2) relevant history, (3) data patterns that emerged during care, and (4) the future-oriented care plan. Constructed by consolidating and interpreting a wide array of patient data, building the patient's story was described as a vitally important skill that was required to provide patient-centered care, within an interprofessional team, that safeguards patient safety and clinicians' professional credibility. Our data revealed that EHR use obstructed clinicians' ability to build the patient's story by fragmenting data interconnections. Further, the EHR limited the number and size of free-text spaces available for narrative notes. This constraint inhibited clinicians' ability to read the why and how interpretations of clinical activities from other team members. This resulted in the loss of shared interprofessional understanding of the patient's story, and the increased time required to build the patient's story.
Conclusions:
We discuss these findings in relation to research on the role of narratives for enabling CR and ICP. We conclude that EHRs have yet to truly fulfill their promise to support clinicians in their patient care activities, including the essential work of building the patient's story.
Current educational reform efforts in the United States are setting forth ambitious goals for schools, teachers, and students (e.g., National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989; National Education Goals Panel, 1991; National Research Council, 1993). Schools and teachers are to help students develop rich understandings of important content, think critically, construct and solve problems, synthesize information, invent, create, express themselves proficiently, and leave school prepared to be responsible citizens and lifelong learners. Reformers hold forth visions of teaching and learning in which teachers and student engage in rich discourse about important ideas and participate in problem solving activities grounded in meaningful contexts (e.g., American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1989; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989, 1991). These visions of teaching and learning depart significantly from much of the educational practice that currently typifies American classrooms — practice that is based on views of teaching as presenting and explaining content and learning as the rehearsal and retention of presented information and skills.
Smart learning environments offer rich opportunities for language learners. In particular, context-aware systems which allow learners’ progress to be sensed within and across an activity, enable instructed language learning to move beyond the traditional confines of the classroom walls. In this paper we present the European Kitchen, a real-world task-based environment for cooking and language learning. In doing so, we demonstrate how specific design decisions, in the development of this longer-term iterative design project, conjoin Human Computer Interaction practice and learning theory for situated language learning. We also show how this approach is combined with Conversation Analysis, which is used as a tool to measure the impact of these decisions on the interactions taking place in and with the kitchen. Our work reveals that in order to design for and evaluate effective and meaningful language learning, there should be more balance between technologically-driven theory and theory driven research which has a strong pedagogical foundation. Our work has implications for a transferable, interdisciplinary model of task-based, situated learning which can be applied and adapted to different skill and knowledge sets.
In recent years a professional sector has emerged within the UK delivering angling-based intervention programmes targeted at young people 'disengaged' with education. These coaches bring with them an angling cultural background, which influences their interactions with young people as 'novices', emerging in 'angler talk' that accompanies waterside coaching. We argue that young people's exposure to 'angler talk' amounts to a cultural apprenticeship, socialising young people into an experience-based learning community. Through angler anecdotes and waterside banter young people are encouraged to be active participants in an egalitarian system of knowledge exchange that is particularly appealing for working with disaffected young people. By identifying how angling as a community of practice manifests in the teaching and learning relationship, we demonstrate the benefit of ethnographic approaches for appreciating the subtle cultural influences at work in skill-based intervention programmes. First 50 available free at http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/fMRYhanZcePySI5GT44F/full
Awareness is one of the central concepts in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, though it has often been used in several different senses. Recently, researchers have begun to provide a clearer conceptualization of awareness that provides concrete guidance for the structuring of empirical studies of awareness and the development of tools to support awareness. Such conceptions, however, do not take into account newer understandings of shared intentionality among cooperating actors that recently have been defined by philosophers and empirically investigated by psychologists and psycho-linguists. These newer conceptions highlight the common ground and socially recursive inference that underwrites cooperative behavior. And it is this inference that is often seamlessly carried out in collocated work, so easy to take for granted and hence overlook, that will require computer support if such work is to be partially automated or carried out at a distance. Ignoring the inferences required in achieving common ground may thus focus a researcher or designer on surface forms of “heeding” that miss the underlying processes of intention shared in and through activity that are critical for cooperation to succeed. Shared intentionality thus provides a basis for reconceptualizing awareness in CSCW research, building on and augmenting existing notions. In this paper, we provide a philosophically grounded conception of awareness based on shared intentionality, demonstrate how it accounts for behavior in an empirical study of two individuals in collocated, tightly-coupled work, and provide implications of this conception for the design of computational systems to support tightly-coupled collaborative work.
C ontributors
Indigo Esmonde, University of Toronto; Krishna Madhavan, Purdue University; Wolff‐Michael Roth, University of Victoria; Dan L. Schwartz and Jessica Tsang, Stanford University; Estrid Sørensen, Humboldt University and Aarhus University; Iris Tabak, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
B ackground
The field of engineering education research has seen substantial growth in the last five years but it often lacks theoretical and empirical work on engineering learning that could be supplied by the learning sciences. In addition, the learning sciences have focused very little on engineering learning to date.
P urpose
This article summarizes prior work in the learning sciences and discusses one perspective—situative learning— in depth. Situativity refers to the central role of context, including the physical and social aspects of the environment, on learning. Furthermore, it emphasizes the socially and culturally negotiated nature of thought and action of persons in interaction. The aim of the article is to provide a foundation for future work on engineering learning and to suggest ways in which the learning sciences and engineering education research communities might work to their mutual benefit.
S cope /M ethod
The article begins with a brief discussion of recent developments in engineering education research. After an initial overview of the field of learning sciences, situative learning is discussed and three analytical aspects of the perspective are outlined: social and material context, activities and interactions, and participation and identity. Relevant expert commentaries are interspersed throughout the article. The article concludes with an exploration of the potential for contributions from the learning sciences to understanding engineering learning.
C onclusion
There are many areas of mutual benefit for engineering education and the learning sciences and many potential areas of collaborative research that can contribute not only to engineering learning but to the learning sciences.
Building on contemporary research on teacher professional development, this study examined the practices of a technology-focused learning community at a high school in the United States. Over the course of a school year, classroom teachers and a university-based researcher participated in the learning community to investigate how technology can promote student achievement and engagement within the secondary English curriculum. This analysis used the design frame-work to identify key practices within the learning community, which included writing a mission statement, innovating with digital tools, engaging in critical discussion, and examining student work. Findings suggest that the design framework can offer a common discourse and visual representation to guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of professional development.
Drawing upon the concept of practice, the article explores diagnostic decision making in oncology through the analysis of informal conversations between doctors in an Italian hospital. The analysis shows that doctors rely on three collaborative practices: (a) joint interpretation, (b) intersubjective generation and validation of hypotheses, and (c) postponing the diagnostic decision. Through such practices, doctors jointly handle tough issues such as managing complexity, dealing with cognitive difficulties and limits of knowledge, and avoiding diagnostic errors. The article addresses some lacunae in the literature by providing empirical access to how decision making is done in an understudied and specialized branch of medicine.
copies via eprint link: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/qGexFFqzmBSXqcnCqBew/full
The phrase 'learning in the face of mystery' is borrowed - in homage -from Barry Turner, who coined it in contrast to 'learning in the face of problems', which assumes learning to be voluntaristic, always functional to the organization, synonymous with change. The shift from the one to the other resides in an aesthetic choice between rationality and relationality. In fact, in spite of the huge amount of literature on organizational learning, there is still very little understanding about organizing as a practice based on a distributed knowledge system. At the same time, the normative/prescriptive discourse on Organizational Learning and the Learning Organization is mobilized as a further means of organizational control. The aim of this paper is to explore, from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, the implicit assumptions underlying the Organizational Learning literature, and to look for alternative ways of conceptualizing learning-working-innovating as non-distinct activities. The term 'learning-in-organizing' is proposed as a replacement for 'organizational learning', so that its distributed and provisional nature can be considered when interpreted as a practical accomplishment.
This paper presents a study of the socio-technical ordering of time around wood-fuelled heating systems of detached houses. It analyses the sequences and rhythms that organize the work of domestic heating, its synchronization with other daily activities, and tempo as the subjective experience of time in these activities. The study is based on a large, pre-existing Finnish free-form diary collection. We suggest that domestic energy technologies become useable and useful through the gradual embedding that involves the temporal organization of everyday life. As a result, technologies that organize time are not only convenient in an invisible way but also act as taken-for-granted coordinates and rhythms of human pursuits in everyday life. In many countries, wood-fuelled heating systems remain a common renewable energy technology in detached houses and stand as one option to lower related carbon emissions. However, the broader use of wood is compromised by time and convenience.
Theories of mind are implicitly embedded in educational research. The predominant theory of mind during the latter half of the twentieth century has focused primarily on the individual mind in isolation, context-free problem-solving and mental representations and reasoning, what we refer to as cognitivism. Over the last two decades, CS Education researchers have begun to incorporate recent research that extends, elaborates and sometimes challenges cognitivism. These theories, which we refer to collectively as sociocultural cognition theory, view minds as cultural products, biologically evolved to be extended by tools, social interaction and embodied interaction in the world. Learning, under this perspective, is viewed as tool-mediated participation in the ongoing practices of cultural communities. In this paper, we pursue three goals. First, we provide a summary of the key principles in sociocultural cognition theory, placing this theory within a historical context with respect to the cognitive theories that it extends and challenges. Second, we integrate across different but related research efforts that all fall under the sociocultural cognition umbrella, using a uniform terminology for describing ideas represented within different discourse communities. And third, we reference a number of canonical sources in sociocultural cognition theory so as to serve as an index into this diverse literature for those wanting to explore further.
In order to keep current and dynamic, organizations depend on the careful induction of new members. In social work, as in many professions, that task is generally given to experienced practitioners who supervise and manage the gradual transformation of novices into effective professionals. The process is critical for both organizations and newcomers: the former require new practitioners who are capable of respecting and emulating current practice, but also able and willing to challenge and revise the way things are done; the latter require a quick, deep immersion in organizational life if they are to participate in and influence practice. Unsuccessful induction can lead to stagnation for individuals and the organizations they seek to join. This article draws on a longitudinal study of the school‐to‐work transition in social work, with particular attention to the conditions that are most conducive to the effective induction of newcomers. Social work students were interviewed during their final field education placements (ie internships) and again in their first professional jobs. Findings considered here include the student's responsibility in the induction process, the importance of first impressions and activities, the ways successful mentoring is distributed across organizations, and the benefits gained by the organization through the induction process.
Traditional approaches to organizational change have been dominated by assumptions privileging stability, routine, and order. As a result, organizational change has been reified and treated as exceptional rather than natural. In this paper, we set out to offer an account of organizational change on its own terms--to treat change as the normal condition of organizational life. The central question we address is as follows: What must organization(s) be like if change is constitutive of reality? Wishing to highlight the pervasiveness of change in organizations, we talk about organizational becoming. Change, we argue, is the reweaving of actors' webs of beliefs and habits of action to accommodate new experiences obtained through interactions. Insofar as this is an ongoing process, that is to the extent actors try to make sense of and act coherently in the world, change is inherent in human action, and organizations are sites of continuously evolving human action. In this view, organization is a secondary accomplishment, in a double sense. Firstly, organization is the attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it towards certain ends by generalizing and institutionalizing particular cognitive representations. Secondly, organization is a pattern that is constituted, shaped, and emerging from change. Organization aims at stemming change but, in the process of doing so, it is generated by it. These claims are illustrated by drawing on the work of several organizational ethnographers. The implications of this view for theory and practice are outlined.
Intelligence, expertise, ability and talent, as these terms have traditionally been used in education and psychology, are socially agreed upon labels that minimize the dynamic, evolving, and contextual nature of individual-environment relations. These hypothesized constructs can instead be described as functional relations distributed across whole persons and particular contexts through which individuals appear knowledgeably skillful. The purpose of this article is to support a concept of ability and talent development that is theoretically grounded in 5 distinct, yet interrelated, notions: ecological psychology, situated cognition, distributed cognition, activity theory, and legitimate peripheral participation. Although talent may be reserved by some to describe individuals possessing exceptional ability and ability may be described as an internal trait, in our description neither ability nor talent are possessed. Instead, they are treated as equivalent terms that can be used to describe functional transactions that are situated across person-in-situation. Further, and more important, by arguing that ability is part of the individual-environment transaction, we take the potential to appear talented out of the hands (or heads) of the few and instead treat it as an opportunity that is available to all although it may be actualized more frequently by some.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.