Situated cognition: Knowledge and power in context. Paper presented at the annual meeting

Abstract: Although adult education as a field has shown interest in the work of Lave and others concerning situated cognition, the authors argue that adult education as a field has misappropriated some of the central concepts of situated cognition. The ideas of the social context as central to learning have increasingly been mentioned in discussions of learning in adulthood (i.e., Wilson, 1993; Fenwick, 2000; Hansman, 2001). Situated learning emphasizes setting and activity as dialectically integrating people, tools, and context within a learning situation. Wilson (1993) explains that “Learning is an everyday event that is social in nature because it occurs with other people; it is ‘tool dependent ’ because the setting provides mechanisms...that aid, and more important, structure the cognitive process; and finally it is the interaction with the setting itself in relation to its social and tool dependent nature that determines the learning ” (p. 73). Psychological and behavioral understandings of learning explain learning as an internal, individual, mental process in which the mind acquires and stores knowledge for future use in any context. Proponents of situated cognition (i.e., Lave, 1988, 1996; Rogoff, 1995; Wersch, 1991