Chris Fowler Staff Seminar 20 April 2011

1. "I have never let my Schooling interfere with my Education." (Mark Twain): Understanding the Caribbean context. Chris Fowler Staff Seminar 20 April 2011

2. Contents • The Issues • Formal & Informal Education • Situated cognition/learning • Critiques • Reconciliation • The Caribbean context?

3. The Issues • Knowledge can be divided into Declarative (“knowing what”) or Procedural (“knowing how”) (Brown et al, 1989) • So (western) Schooling is concerned with the teaching and learning of ‘decontextualised formal concepts’ (declarative knowledge) and ‘activity and context’ necessary for procedural knowledge are secondaryto learning. • Education can be divided into formal (decontextualised, abstract and ‘taught’) or informal (contextualised, vicarious and ‘learnt’ ) (Scribner & Cole, 1973). • Only (Western) Schooling (formal education) improves cognitive abilities and therefore should be universally adopted (Strauss, 1984)

4. The Drive for Formal Education • Deficiency model – the cognitive abilities of peoples from unschooled cultures either ‘lag’ behind or are deficient compared to schooled cultures (Wagner, 1973) • Attempts are made to control for age, intelligence, motivation etc, and to use ‘culture-fair’ tests – a psychological approach based on experimentation • But the experimental situations are artificial and meaningless to most of the unschooled cultures (“how good are they at performing our tricks”?) • In contrast an anthropological approach is one that is more sensitive to “context, be it situational, social or cultural” (Edgerton, 1974) and is based on ‘clinical’ observation (a la Piaget) • Differences in performance can be understood better in terms of (mis)comprehension of instructions or lack of familiarity with test objects (Cole & Scribner, 1974). • If there is no deficiency then should western modes of education be universally adopted? Formal but non-Western Education?

5. Situation, Situation, Situation Brown, Collins & Duguid (1989) argue that: • Situations co-produce knowledge through activity • Knowledge, like language, is indexed to the world – it only makes sense within a context. • Situations are dynamic so concepts, like meanings, are under construction – negotiated or modified by use. • Knowledge is similar to a set of tools – you can acquire tools but not know how to use them. • How a tool is used is strongly determined by the user community (culture) – activity, concept and culture are therefore interdependent. • The use of the tool and culture combine to determine how the practitioner sees the world (communities of practice – Lave & Wenger,1991). • Knowledge is easily transferable or generalisable so choice of task is critical (‘Best-buy calculations’ (Lave, 1988) and ‘Brazillian Street kids ‘ (Carraher et al, 1985) • School activities are rarely authentic (ordinary practices found in ones culture)

6. Three key conclusions…. • Learning cannot be transferred between situations (its indexed - Brazillian street kids) • Training by abstraction won’t work (must be authentic tasks) • Learning takes place in a social setting (e.g. communities of practice)

7. But…… Laurillard (1993) argues that: • Learning in schools is different from learning in Universities • Situated learning is experiential , first order and mainly unmediated experiences –> percepts (things in our everyday life that we can directly experience) • Academic learning is mainly second order and mediated (symbolic representations) –> precepts (other people’s descriptions of the world that cannot be directly experienced) • Situated cognition is good at explaining the learning of percepts but not precepts – the later needs arhetorical activity (a conversation or argument) that attempts to change the way the learners experience their world

8. And……. Anderson, Reder & Herbert (1996) argue that cognition is not situated: • Transfer of learning across different tasks: Plenty of evidence that transfer of learning does take place across tasks and this is dependent on: • the level of shared cognitive elements (more shared more transfer) • degree of practice (more practice more transfer); • and whether learners’ attention is focused on transferability. • Training by abstraction: A problem of a disjunction between what is learnt in the classroom and what is needed on the job ->the need for combination of abstract instruction with relevant concrete examples • Complex Social environments: Part training, where different components (social and task) are learnt at different times, is very effective (e.g Patrick, 1992); also studies using co-operative learning (e.g communities of practice) are riddled with serious methodological problems (e.g non random assignment of subjects to treatments).

9. Reconciliation? • Outcome Based Learning can help align what happens in the classroom with what is required and valued by society (i.e. addresses Anderson et al’sdisjunct) by: • Aligning meaningfulobjectives, abstract instructions, authentic tasks, and appropriate assessments to achieve valued learning outcomes • Increasing sensitivity to the cultural context (both the school and wider culture) to ensure the alignment of cultural values and learning outcomes

10. Reconciliation? The Wider Cultural Context The Pedagogical Process Abstract Instruction Appropriate Assessment Meaningful Objectives Authentic Tasks Valued Learning Outcomes

11. Summary • Situated learning has focused our attention on • where learning takes place (the learning context) • the social/cultural nature of learning • the importance of authentic tasks • the need for learning outcomes that meet real world and culturally valued needs

12. Discussion: Relevance, if any, to the Caribbean Schooling System? • What is the Caribbean culture? • What are the outcomes valued by that culture? • Are these the same outcomes valued in the school culture? • What is currently practiced in the class room? • What needs to be changed? • How do we, as Educators, change practice?