Situated Learning

Well, I am finally getting caught up in my Gee readings and my blogs. Even though the chapters are amazingly long they are full of information and I am surprised at how my interest seems to peak at certain times and I actually find myself doing more than just reading because I have to for class. Instead of having to reread a page because my eyes read the words but my brain absorbed nothing I am actually rereading paragraphs because my eyes are reading the words but my brain is still thinking about what I just read.

In Chapter 4 about Situated Meaning and Learning I found that I had to stop reading for awhile because I kept thinking about what Gee says on pages 86 and 87. My attention was first peaked at the top of page 86 with; "While video games actively encourage such situated and embodied thinking and doing, school often does not. In school, words and meanings usually float free of material conditions and embodied actions. They take on only general, so-called decontextualized meanings." I think I had to stop and think about this because I know for sure that there have been times when I am sitting in the classroom or reading the assigned texts and I have absolutely no idea what is going on. It finally dawned on me here what Gee has to say about video games. He is not encouraging them in the classrooms but he is showing how important it is that students are given the time and materials to probe, hypothesize, reprobe and rethink. This is especially true in science and math classes. I learn nothing in a class that does not have some sort of hands on activity and where I am discouraged from approaching the same problem from a variety of different angles.

The quote from Chapter 4 that really summarizes situated learning to me is on page 87; "If all you know-in any domain-are general meanings, then you really don't know anything that makes sense to you." If you simply read the book but you don't take the time to analyze it or search for more than the bare meanings then you are not going to learn anything from the author. If you read the science vocabulary, but you don't work more than once in a hands on lab where you can ask questions, make mistakes and then retry things then the vocabulary that you mastered will mean nothing later.