Activity 5: Reflections on situated learning

In the field of psychology and education the definition of learning, a process that brings together cognitive, emotional, and environmental influences and experiences for acquiring, enhancing, or making changes in one's knowledge, skills, values, and world views (Illeris, 2000; Ormrod, 1994). Regarding the learning process is essential to describe how the learning takes place, what happens during this stage. So in the role of being a process, therefore the explanations to this question represents the learning theories. A learning theory is an attempt to explain how people learn. There are main learning theories, behaviorism, cognitivism, social learning, social constructivism, multiple intelligences and brain-based learning.

According to Tracey’s taxonomy situated learning teaching belongs to social constructivism, developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1996), which implies that it is an instructional approached that makes students to learn throughout an actively participating during the learning experience. Which means that learners basically create meaning from daily life activities, where learning occurs relative to the teaching environment (Stein, 1998). On the other hand situated learning differs from behaviorism and cognitivism, which relates to observable performance and internal mental structures, look at knowledge external to world.

Currently as part of my social service experience in teaching practice it is important to based everyday activities in the classroom on a theory or approach in order to provide a very comfortable learning atmosphere among learners. Actually the current EFL curriculum for public middle schools (Programas de studio 2006 Lengua extranjera) has its theoretical foundation on constructivism, that is, that every individual is constantly and actively involved in making sense of the world by constructing or reconstructing meaning from the interpretation of personal experiences, which are called as social practices of the language. But what this curriculum is not taking into consideration is the content that fits best the students’ needs.

Therefore situated learning could play the main role in my teaching context, where learners belong to an indigenous ethnicity, which since many years is fighting to keep their culture, ancient traditions and of course their identity, characteristics that distinguishes them from other cultures, even those who are established in the same geographical region.

For that reason the key concepts to situated learning that might apply to this specific context are that knowledge is not an object and memory is not a location, moreover it is located in the actions of persons and groups, according to Brown, Collins and Duguid's (1989).

On the premise that situated learning foster students learn content through such a variety of activities rather than acquiring content in a structured way facilitated by teachers. Learners directly manipulate the content by doing and reflecting on what they do. Therefore the communities practice, called like this due to groups of learners who within any community, they interpret, reflect and form meaning as Stein (1998) stated, the community provides the opportunity for the interaction; participation provides the learner with the meaning of the experience. Another characteristic of situated learning is that uses cooperative and participative teaching methods in which the structure of the learning is implicit in what the learners experience rather than in the subject matter.

In summary situated learning through communities practice could foster my students to reach the objectives by experiencing real life situations, problem based tasks by integrating content, context, community and participation in the classroom, only so far learning will be meaningful and very valuable for his life in the future.