Schooled people do better, although they rarely use the supposedly general algorithms taught in school. Instead, they invent new methods specific to the situation at hand.
Even though application is often missing, having formal training in some form of the skill can help general ideas be transferred to new situations.
Yet to be tru-ly skillful outside school, people must develop situation-specific forms of competence.
Having an idea of application helps with transfer. School generally misses the application component (see the previous note).
utside school, actions are intimately connected with objects and events; people often use the objects and events directly in their reasoning, without necessarily using symbols to represent them. School learning, by contrast, is mostly symbol-based; indeed, con-nections to the events and objects symbolized are often lost.
The story is that, "we need theory before we can apply," but much learning can happen through experience, trial & error, and feedback on production.
school is an institution that values thought that proceeds independently, without aid of physical and cognitive tools.
This is a huge gap between school and authentic activity, where if we were actually modelling the behavior of that skill, the tools would be included.
No individual in the system can pilot the ship alone. The knowledge necessary for successful piloting is distributed throughout the whole system.
In this case, is there individual training? Or does the team train together to form the unit of knowledge necessary?
FreshRoots has also developed partnerships with local foundations to pay highschool and college students from the neighborhood to apprentice with them in thetechnical aspects of maintaining the hydrofarm
This is just schooling with a tangible/narrow goal. One of the downsides of the learning in action is the situation-specific content and learning (Resnick), and this is now being attached to schooling. And they are also being trained to run equipment that, according to the description, is extremely expensive and delicate and is probably beyond the economic capital of most of the members of the community, even if grouped. Not that much social justice to me
Asking students to offer suggestions for ways to measure that circumference, she discouraged them from appealing to familiar tools like tape measuresbut rather suggested that “let’s just use our body tools.”
Connection to Resnick - symbol manipulation vs. contextualized reasoning!
activitieshave high use value rather than exchange value, in the sense that young peoplelearn skills that they put to use to solve meaningful problems, rather than problems
This reminds me of Resnick's article - that school knowledge is so disconnected and isolated from the rest of what we do, real life, issues that effect us. high use value challenges this isolation
Educationally sig-nificant interactions do not involve abstract bearers of cognitivestructures, but real people who develop a variety of interpersonal re-lationships with one another in the course of their shared activity in agiven institutional context."
This is a nice summary of resnick and lave/wenger put together - we learn by participating in real activities together. Moll et. al. adds that the social and cultural context of the learning environment is critically important to consider.
Our example highlights how, within such a distributedsystem, children can draw on the resources of teachers, materials,and, most important, one another to shape and direct their academicactivities.
Reminds me of Resnick's discussion of tool manipulation outside of school versus the emphasis of pure mentation in school. Also reminds me of the everyday activity observations, so often I saw people using eachother as tools or resources to learn how to effectively do their task. In this case, these students are using the tools available to direct their learning.
She intention-ally allows Aaron to answer the other children's questions, buildson their knowledge with more information, and asks open-endedquestions to bring focus to the group and encourage individuals toparticipate
This example seems to be working along the lines of popular knowledge. That each participant brings in a valid set of experiences and knowledges, particular and unique from anybody else. Relates also to Resnick's points about shared cognition out of school versus the emphasis on individual cognition in schools.
but to jump from one sector of the labormarket to another
I think this shows flexibility and ability to keep learning, mostly situation-specific job training (Resnick) but some transferable pieces of information too.
designed to display and encourage a way of seeing, of making sense, ofexperience by other
Co-participation within museum setting - relates to Resnick's shared cognition and FoK's emphasis on relationships and context.
n the early stages oflearning, cultura artifacts, whether objects, words, or figures, serve as obvious mediators of people's activity. We count our fingers, glance at diagrams, and recite rules to ourselves. After practice (and forjh,_e_y<mng, a degree of maturation), however, are . worosoecome i.llnersp(;;;king, and figuresoecomeToiii)s obvious, external form, relying instead on inner means that we can re-produce at will.
Symbolic manipulation vs. contextualized reasoning!
It seems like they are arguing that given enough exposure to context, you will ultimately move into pure mentation - if you measure the cottage cheese enough times, you won't need the measuring cup anymore
In contrast, to insist on starting with social practice, on taking participation to be the crucial process, and on including the social world at the core of the analysis only seems to eclipse the person. In reality, however, participation in social practice -subjective as well as objective -suggests a very explicit focus on the person, but as person-in-the-world, as member of a sociocultural community.
I like this consideration of individuals situated within the social world - it relates to Resnick's consideration of "individual cognition in schools versus shared cognition outside" (pg. 13) and and my own issues with individualism in the context of social justice.
In a theory of practice, cognition and communication in, and with, the social world are situated in the historical development of on-going activity. It is, thus, a critical theory; the social scientist's practice must be analyzed in the same historical, situated terms as any other practice under investigation. One way to think of learning is as the historical production, transformation, and change of persons.
A lot of what I'm getting out of this is that context is crucial. They seem to be arguing that it is easier to understand how learning works by looking at it within the context(s) that it is happening in.
This also connects back to #resnick's ideas about symbol manipulation versus contextualized reasoning.
A. A. is the reconstructign of identity, through the process of constructing personal life stories, and with them, the meaning of the teller's past and future action in the world.
This quotation also made me think of Resnick's adaptive learning... "school should focus its efforts on preparing people to be good adaptive learners, so that they can perform effectively when situations are unpredictable and task demands change." (pg. 18)
This development in-volved a transition from domestic production in which chil-dren learned subsistence skills from their same-sex parent, to learning part-time specialisms in the same way, to learning a specialized occupation from a specialist master.
How does the apprentice find his way to his specialist master? Resnick challenges the usefulness of the kind of "generalized learning" that people claim goes on in school. But would it make sense as part of a model of career/life choice?
An important point about such sequestering when it is insti-tutionalized is that it encourages a folk epistemology of dicho-tomies, for instance, between "abstract" and "concrete" knowledge. These categories do not reside in the world as dis-tinct forms of knowledge, nor do they reflect some putative hierarchy of forms of knowledge among practitioners. Rather, they derive from the nature of the new practice generated by sequestration
I think this is a very interesting point. In some sense, I feel that we are brought up taking these distinctions as obvious, and it is interesting to see it challenged. It also ties perfectly into the Resnick's discussion of "symbol manipulation" in schools versus "contextualized reasoning" outside