from pages (49-52)
This section looks at learning through participation and engagement in the world as a means to help make learning more concrete by integrating the context of the learner with the learning objective by situating the leaning into social practice into the learning process. This in fact shifts the lens where the abstract is presented in concrete terms. Consider the following quotes from our text on situated learning.
“In contrast with learning as internalization, learning as increasing participation in communities of practice concerns the whole person acting in the world. Conceiving of learning in terms of participation focuses attention on ways in which it is an evolving, continuously renewed set of relations; this is, of course, consistent with a relational view of persons, their actions, and the world.”
“A theory of social practice emphasizes the relational interdependency of agent and world, activity, meaning, cognition, learning and knowing. It emphasizes the inherently socially negotiated character of meaning and the interested, concerned character of thought and action in persons-in-activity, This view also claims that learning, thinking and knowing are relations among people in activity in, with, and arising from the socially constituted structured world.”
”In a theory of practice cognition and communication in, and with, the social world are situated in the historical development of ongoing activity. One way to think of learning is the historical production, transformation, and change of persons. In a thoroughly historical theory of social practice, the historicizing of the production of persons should lead to a focus of learning.”
“Let us return to the question of internalization from such a relational perspective. First the historicizing of processes of learning gives the lie to ahistorical views of “internalization” as a universal process. Further, given a relational understanding of person, world, activity, participation, at the core of our theory of learning, can be neither fully internalized as knowledge structures nor fully externalized as instrumental artifacts or overarching activity structures.
Participation is always based on situated negotiation and renegotiation of meaning in the world. This implies that understanding and experience are in constant interaction – indeed, are mutually constitutive. The notion or participation thus dissolved dichotomies between cerebral and embodied activities, between contemplation and involvement, between abstraction and experience; persons, actions, and the world are implicated in all through, speech, knowing and learning.”
As we endeavor to teach concrete relational students, these ideas should be tested. Can we help teach abstract concepts by situating the concept in social practice? What would this look like? Can our situated learning be a means for individual internalization? As we teach and integrate these concepts I would be interested in seeing how situated learning help us descend the ladder of abstraction and ascend in our knowledge of the abstract world that can help us integrate Biblical truth into a world that is situated toward a different context.
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