Situated cognition and learning environments: implications for teachers on- and offline in the new digital media age

Abstract

John Seely Brown suggested that learning environments should be spaces in which all work is public, is subject to iterative critique by instructors and peers, and in which social interaction is primary. In such spaces, students and teachers engage in a situated cognition approach to teaching and learning where “cognitive accomplishments rely in part on structures and processes outside the individual”. Here we describe a qualitative analysis of a socially situated learning setting that aimed to develop children who can design, analyze, critique, and transform media, subjecting existing social media, their designs, and their peers’ designs to public and iterative critique. In this setting, adult mentors supported children’s self-expression, self-reflection, and skillbuilding through authentic, socially situated reading, writing, and discussion, and media production. Creating and leveraging such spaces is essential for preparing all children for successful experiences in the new knowledge economy in formal and informal educational settings.

Keywords:

• authentic practice
• learning
• media
• situated cognition
• pedagogy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the MacArthur Foundation for their support to Kimberley Gomez for ethnographic study of the DYN program and for their support for youth and innovative approaches to learning. Thank you to our colleagues on the Digital Youth Project and especially to Brigid Barron, Nichole Pinkard, and Caitlin Kennedy Martin.

Author note: All students’ names are pseudonyms. All adult names remain as given. This follows the practice determined by the DYN Project team and as is reflected in Barron et al. (2014).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kimberley Gomez is an Associate Professor of Urban Schooling and Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research explores teaching and learning through the use of digital technologies and Web 2.0 environments across learning ecologies (schooling, afterschool, community, and online). A special focus of her research is on the affordances of tools to support literacy development, literacy production, and critical literacy.

Ung-Sang Lee is a doctoral student in Urban Schooling in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He explores youth participatory action in technology infused schooling contexts. He is a former teacher in Detroit, MI.

Notes

1. Informal contexts and informal pedagogy here refer to out-of-school teaching and learning experiences where there may be specified curricula and organizational structures; however, the content is not typical of formal schooling (e.g. mathematics, social studies, science classes) (Walters, S.).