Learning in Virtual Worlds: A Situated Perspective - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 128

making an analogy between the master-apprentice
relationship with the teacher-student relationship
(Jarvela, 1994). Actually, the concept of appren-
ticeship appears in both the anthropological and
cognitive approaches of situated cognition. On
the one hand, Lave and Wenger (1991) speak
of learners as apprentices when discussing their
dynamic process of communities of practices and
express that “Learning through apprenticeship
was a matter of legitimate peripheral participa-
tion.” (p. 30). On the other, Brown, Collins, and
Duguid (1989) emphasize the concept of cognitive
apprenticeship and instructional methods inspired
in the type of learning happening in craft work-
shops. In these workshops, as traditional sword
making or mason workers in Mexico, apprentices
model ways of thinking and solving problems
by observing advanced experts perform and by
engaging in coached authentic practices so that
they can also become experts one day. Thus, using
this process of apprenticeship in a craft organiza-
tion as a metaphor, the main purpose behind the
apprenticeship instructional strategies is to allow
students to embed themselves in real world sce-
narios in which they perform authentic activities
and social interactions that emulate those done
by real life practitioners. In this way students
can have some of the benefits of how knowledge
is built in the workplace, i.e., solving authentic
problems and receiving constant guidance and
reinforcement (Kerka, 1997, as cited by Brill,
Kim, & Galloway, 2001).
Coming from the cognitive approach, Collins,
Brown and Newman (1989), in their extensively
cited article, describe a more organized framework
around the cognitive apprenticeship concepts.
This cognitive apprenticeship framework has
been developed and tested and is considered
to be a prescriptive methodology for teaching
(Casey, 1996). Their methodology uses Lave
and Wenger´s concepts of apprenticeship and
legitimate peripheral participation; although,
they are not proposing to build communities of
practice, as such, at schools, they are more inter-

ested in using apprenticeship methods to develop
specific cognitive skills in students. Collins et al.
(1989) affirms that schools ignore, when design-
ing their programs and teaching methodologies,
how experts think when they carry out complex
tasks outside the schools; a situation that causes
students to end up learning mostly inert knowl-
edge with poor transfer possibilities outside the
classroom. For example, during history courses
students memorize long lists of dates, events,
names and places, but very seldom engage in the
type of activities that historians do, like inquiring
and debating the claims of traditional historical
interpretations (Wiley and Ash, 2005). To solve
this problem, the authors propose the cognitive
apprenticeship methodology to foster students'
learning of expert practices. Particularly, they
were interested in supporting the teaching and
learning at schools of higher order cognitive
and metacognitive abilities because these are the
mental resources more commonly employed by
experts to solve problems in domains as reading,
writing and mathematics. The central instructional
strategy employed by the cognitive apprentice-
ship methodology is based on allowing students
to engage in realistic problem solving and task
performing, i.e., in situating learning.
The cognitive apprenticeship model proposed
by Collins, Brown and Newman (1989) represents
a very well organized effort to ground situated
learning ideas, thus, it is useful for the objectives
of the present chapter to analyze it closely. The
model is organized around four main groups of
strategies and 18 sub-strategies to build a learning
environment (See Table 1).
Over several years, a number of studies have
been using and evaluating the cognitive appren-
ticeship model; for example, Jarvela (1994) ap-
plied the model to develop a technologically rich
learning environment to promote problem solving
skills in 7th grade students. Her research interest
was to analyze the student-teacher and student-
student interactions. She found that the models'
basic strategies, modeling, scaffolding and fading