Chapter 18 - Situativity and Learning

Summary

This chapter deals with the situative approach to learning. School learning is situated in a setting of a complex social organization that contains learners, teachers, curriculum materials, software tools, and the layout of the physical environment. Other learning is situated in a setting of an individual reading a book or just thinking. The development of information-processing theory in cognitive science enabled formal analyses of subject-matter content of learning. Apprenticeship learning was embedded in a rich practical social context, unlike schooling, where the contexts for learning skills and knowledge are abstracted from their use in the nonschool world. Learning is the gradual appropriation, through guided participation, of the ability to participate in culturally defined, socially situated activities and practices. In some activity systems, work is arranged so that the distribution of cognitive functions complies approximately with simple decomposition and functional localization.