Situated Learning and Cognition: Theoretical Learning and Cognition

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze how schoolchildren's thinking and concept formation generated in classroom teaching can relate to daily life situations. Situated thinking and learning and theoretical thinking and learning are discussed as learning forms that can accomplish this integration. According to Vygotsky, subject-matter concepts are transformed into personal concepts through children's ability to use them in daily life. The relation between skill and content has to be presupposed in this transformation of subject-matter concepts into everyday concepts, because everyday or daily-life concepts are learned through and interwoven with practical activities in cooperation with other people. The analyses are based on distinctions between (a) societal and personal knowledge, (b) subject-matter and everyday concepts, (c) subject-matter methods and content, and (d) thinking as related to subject-matter methods and concepts as related to subject-matter content. For the personal aspect of knowledge, everyday concepts are located within the life setting of a person; therefore, the relation between subject-matter concepts and personal concepts is often much weaker for immigrants and refugees coming to a new country than for children with generations of ancestors in a society. A project with Puerto Rican children is sketched to discuss how classroom teaching can relate subject-matter knowledge of social science with children' s everyday concepts and thereby enhance the children's theoretical concepts and thinking.