In chapter 6 Boaler states that one of her aims in this study was to investigate ‘situated learning’ and she cites Lave in her research throughout chapters 6 and 7. Jean Lave is a social anthropologist with a strong interest in social theory. She teaches geography and education at the University of California, Berkeley. A lot of Lave’s work in situated cognition and communities of practice has been done with Etienne Wenger. Lave received her Ph. D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 1968.
In 1991 Lave worked with Wenger to propose the situated learning model of learning. This theory suggests that learning involves social interaction, and that knowledge should be presented in an authentic context. In one of Lave’s projects she compared the way ‘just plain folk’ learned to the way students learned in the classroom and she found that apprentices experienced great learning success through authentic activity without actually being taught to. This is similar to what the teachers at Phoenix Park School were trying to do. They gave students projects that were open ended and similar to real life and allowed the students to work on these projects without actually teaching them the skills and concepts.
When designing learning experiences from the situated learning perspective, one believes that knowledge is acquired through situations and this knowledge is transferred only to similar situations. That the knowledge gained out of context is more difficult to generalize to an unfamiliar situation. Students at Amber Hill seemed to have run into this difficulty. When they were asked to answer a question or solve a problem that was unfamiliar to them, they had difficulty applying the math they had learned in isolation.
Looking at learning from a situative perspective means looking at the group of learners as more important than individual ideas. The individuals in a group consider, question, and add to each other’s thinking so that important mathematical ideas and connections can be produced as a group (Brodie, 2005). According to Brodie (2005) situative perspectives argue that what a learner says and does in the classroom will make sense from the learner’s perspective of knowing and being, from the learner’s identity in relation to mathematics and to the learner’s past experiences of learning math, both in and out of school. She states that if learners have a particular expectation of ways of working in math classrooms and of what counts as appropriate contribution in the classroom, that they will continue with this outside of the classroom.
Situated learning theory seems to apply more to Phoenix Park School where the students are given freedom to work with others at their own pace, using their own constructed ideas and skills to solve relevant, and authentic problems. When they learn this way they are more able to transfer this learning to other situations. Amber Hill School on the other hand seems to be following a more traditional learning method where students are given closed end questions to work on individually using learned formulas and procedures which they find difficult to transfer outside of classroom use.
“Situative perspectives argue that a focus on conceptual structures is not sufficient to account for learning. Rather, interaction with others and resources are both the process and the product of learning and so learning cannot be analysed without analysing interactional systems.” (Brodie, 2005)
References
Boaler, J.(2002). Experiencing School Mathematics: Traditional and Reform Approaches to Teaching and their Impact on Student Learning. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates:Mahwah, New Jersey.
Brodie, K. (2005). Using cognitive and situative perspectives to understand teacher interactions with learner errors. Retrieved from the internet October, 2011.
http://elpea.tripod.com/jlavebio01.html
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