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teaching, “The goal shifts from the teaching of
concepts to engaging the learner in authentic tasks
that are likely to require the use of those concepts
or skills.” (p. 30). This approach has been trying
to find ways to teach traditional school content
using situated pedagogies like the use of learning
environments where students solve real world
problems. The authors use the concept of prac-
tice fields (as proposed by Sange, 1994, cited by
Barab & Duffy, 2000) and define it as learning
environments where students “Can practice the
kind of activities they will encounter outside of
schools.” (p. 30). They propose a series of eight
principles for the design of practice fields: 1)
doing domain-related practices, learners should
be actively engaged in authentic domain-related
practices, such as finding a cure for a real life dis-
ease; 2) ownership of the inquiry, learners should
be motivated by feeling the problem as their own
and by allowing them to create their own solutions;
3) coaching and modeling of thinking skills, the
role of the teacher must be to coach and model
the problem solving process; 4) opportunity for
reflection, learners should have ample opportuni-
ties to think on why and what they are doing in the
field of practice; 5) dilemmas are ill-structured,
learners should engage in ill-defined problems so
that they can build their own problem frames and,
in this way, own the problem and the solutions;
6) support the learner rather than simplify the di-
lemma, learners should face complex, challenging
real work problems, and be given the necessary
support to solve them; 7) work is collaborative and
social, learners should discuss and negotiate ideas
with others to modify their own understanding;
and 8) the learning context is motivating, because
learners solve the diverse problems of many com-
munities, their context should be described in a
way that engages students.
at Vanderbilt (1990) and Bielaczyc and Collins
(1999) talk of learning communities in classrooms,
which is also a more grounded idea linked to the
type of learning practices that happen in a school.
A learning community is defined by Bielaczyc
and Collins (1999) as a “culture of learning in
which everyone is involved in a collective effort
of understanding.” (p. 271). The authors state that
a learning community must have four characteris-
tics: “(a) diversity of expertise among its members,
who are valued for their contributions and given
support to develop, (b) a shared objective of com-
munity advancing the collective knowledge and
skills, (c) an emphasis on learning how to learn,
and (d) mechanisms for sharing what is learned.”
(p. 272). They also propose that the activities that
the members of a community of learning perform
together should be a way for: “(a) both individual
development and collaborative construction of
knowledge, (b) sharing knowledge and skills
among members of the community, and (c) mak-
ing learning processes visible and articulated.” (p.
274). Although Bielaczyc and Collins (1999) are
more interested in school learning, in these ideas
presented by them it is possible to see the influence
of the anthropological approach of communities
of practice discussed previously. They are adding
two relevant ideas that facilitate the application of
situated learning ideas in a learning situation; i.e.,
the importance of having communities formed by
learners with different levels of expertise (remem-
ber Vygotsky's concept of ZPD) and the emphasis
on the development of the metacognitive ability
of learning how to learn.
Cognitive Apprenticeship
A common criticism of the situated learning
paradigm has been that there is not an accepted
teaching model based on this paradigm (Hendricks,
2001); however, it is important to highlight that
many of the efforts made to develop and test a
situated learning pedagogy which can be applied
to regular learning experiences have started from
Learning Communities
Concurrent to this concept of practice fields , other
authors like the Cognition and Technology Group
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