Alfredo Jornet

Situated cognition: Situated cognition

UNLABELLED Following the cognitive revolution, when knowing and learning have come to be theorized in terms of representations stored and processed in the mind, empirical and theoretical developments in very different scholarly disciplines have led to the emergence of the situated cognition hypothesis, which consists of a set of interlocking theses: cognition is embodied, fundamentally social, distributed, enacted, and often works without representations. We trace the historical origins of this hypothesis and discuss the evidential support this hypothesis receives from empirical and modeling studies. We distinguish the question of where cognition is located from the question of what cognition is, because the confounding of the two questions leads to misunderstandings in the sometimes-ardent debates concerning the situated cognition hypothesis. We conclude with recommendations for interdisciplinary approaches to the nature of cognition. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:463-478. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1242 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. CONFLICT OF INTEREST The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Perezhivanie in the Light of the Later Vygotsky’s Spinozist Turn

ABSTRACT Perezhivanie is a category that takes on special significance in the light of the Spinozist turn that Vygotsky was beginning to take toward the end of his life, but the development of which was interrupted by his untimely death. In this study, we use several empirical classroom episodes to exhibit how, with perezhivanie, psychological research necessarily moves from an empiricist stage to an inquiry into “peak psychology,” one that is oriented toward the future. We end by suggesting that perezhivanie in the light of the later Vygotsky’s direction requires, as he articulated in his notebooks, rewriting much of the theory he had established before.

The Matter of Space: Bodily Performances and the Emergence of Boundary Objects During Multidisciplinary Design Meetings

Prior research has identified the importance of embodied action in establishing representational infrastructure during disruptions in interdisciplinary work. This study expands on such research by examining meetings of interdisciplinary museum design teams—including educators, designers, researchers, and museum professionals. In these meetings, the museum space (exhibition room) emerges as a boundary object as it is presented through diverse material artifacts including floor-plans and mock-ups. The authors’ analyses identify and describe bodily and discursive practices of place-making and place-imagining that the participants perform as they attempt to maintain continuity across these shifting material forms and occasions.

The Thinking Body

In the chapters of the first two parts of this book, we focus on specific issues that historically have been topics of educational psychology. We begin this third part of the book with a summary of the position on the thinking body that has emerged throughout those chapters. This summary is in the form of a holistic study of learning that accounts for the thinking body as a whole. Using exemplifying fragments from a tenth-grade physics course, we articulate a monist, one-substance approach. The analyses exhibit how the monist approach advanced throughout the book solves three perennial problems that plague present-day research: (a) the separation of body and mind that is accompanied by the reduction of affective and bodily practical dimensions of life to the intellectual (mentalism); (b) the conflation of thinking and speaking; and (c) the separation of individual and collective subjectivity

A Transactional Approach to Transfer Episodes

In this article we present an analytical framework for approaching transfer episodes—episodes in which participants declare or can be declared to bring prior experience to bear on the current task organization. We build on Dewey’s writings about the continuity of experience, Vygotsky’s ideas of unit analysis, as well as more recent developments in continental philosophy to develop a transactional approach that involves reconceptualizing the notion of experience. In this view, experience is not something that individuals have but an analytical category that denotes the unity of whole persons, their material and social environment, and their changing transactional relations (mutual effects on each other) across time. In the 1st part of the article, we present the theory and contrast it with past and present literature on transfer. In the 2nd part, we develop the methodological implications and analyze an episode of transfer from a technology-enhanced science education curriculum in which students were presented with analogous models of scientific phenomena across different tasks. We describe instances of recognition, of analogical reasoning, and of how students applied theoretical knowledge in terms of transactional units of change. We conclude by discussing implications with regard to further theoretical development and educational practice.

Situational Awareness as an Instructable and Instructed Matter in Multi-Media Supported Debriefing: a Case Study from Aviation

Debriefing is an important practice for learning from experience especially in high-risk industries, including the medical field and aviation. Although it might be assumed that tools aiding in representing the events to be debriefed will improve the learning outcomes, meta-analytic studies appear to show that there is no advantage to debriefing sessions that use videos. Simultaneously, such meta-analytic studies are calling for process-related investigations of debriefing generally and those focusing on representational tools more specifically. In this study, we provide an exemplary interaction analysis of debriefing meetings in aviation that immediately follow 4-hour examination sessions. We examine how situational awareness—a crucial feature of aircraft piloting performance—becomes an instructable and instructed matter in and through the meetings. We exhibit the anchoring role of the tool, the opportunities for distinguishing knowledge from performance components, and the opportunities for anchoring third-person perspectives of performance to embodied knowing.

Theorizing with/out “Mediators”

Mediation is one of the most often cited concepts in current cultural-historical theory literature, in which cultural actions and artifacts are often characterized as mediators standing between situational stimuli and behavioral responses. Most often presented as a means to overcome Cartesian dualism between subject and object, and between individual and society, some scholars have nonetheless raised criticism suggesting that such mediators are problematic for a dialectical psychology that takes a unit analysis (monist) approach. In fact, Spinoza develops a monist theory of mind and body that goes without and even excludes every form of mediation. In this study, we follow up on the latter criticisms and explore what we consider to be problematic uses of the notion of mediation as an analytical construct in the literature. We elaborate an empirically grounded discussion on the ways the concept of mediation may lead to dualistic readings; and we offer an alternative account where the notion of mediator is not needed. We conclude discussing prospects for and implications of a cultural-historical theory where the notion of mediation no longer is invoked to account for human action and development.

More Than the Code: Learning Rules of Rejection in Writing Programs

A teacher and students coding together make explicit the unwritten rules of programming.

From Object-Oriented to Fluid Ontology: a Case Study of the Materiality of Design Work in Agile Software Development

In much of extant research on design cooperation, design materials are approached from noun-oriented ontologies and social topologies where the notion of ‘object’ is central. There is a long history of critique concerning such ontologies, most recently coming from the anthropology of making, because they are failing to capture the dynamic and fluid aspects that characterize the living, constantly changing world that we inhabit. Though often recognized, the implications these critiques have for design cooperation research and practice have been drawn only to a limited extent. In this study, we discuss and empirically examine such implications by adopting a fluid ontology in the analysis of design cooperation. We use data from design conversations in a firm that practices extreme programming, a form of agile software development, to exhibit what theorizing design activity in terms of fluid things, fluid spaces, and continuity has to offer to practitioners and analysts.

Identity, Knowledge, Power, and Educational Reform

This, the second issue of 2018, presents five original articles, followed by three book reviews. Although all of these are independent works, two main threads appear pervasive across several of them: the important issue of identity and emotional experiences, and the question of how relations of knowledge distribution and power may be critically revised through scholarly as well as everyday praxis. Our first article, “Learning and Becoming Writers: Meaning, Identity, and Epistemology in a Newsroom Community of Practice” by Mariana Pacheco, celebrates the educational processes for pre–high school adolescent student journalists in a community newspaper project—the monthly Southside Free Press—which has a circulation of tens of thousands and a history of publishing for several decades. A yearlong ethnography in the newsroom community of practice analysed literacy learning and identity development using Rogoff’s three planes of analysis: apprenticeship, guided participation, and participatory appropriation. The report focuses on the engagement of relatively novice and old-timer “staff writers” in the preparation of articles into the shape required by their “teen editors” for publication; these engagements critically offer opportunities to learn. For instance, one key idea is that texts need to be reviewed, redrafted, and edited for as long as it takes to pass muster, a process requiring considerable persistence and even resilience from youngsters not used to this rigor. Less is said about the development of the teen editors and staff members, but they clearly bring a professionalism to the enterprise, as well as sensitivity to the educational needs of new participants for legitimacy; love of learning and democracy is central to discourse in this community that goes beyond what might be expected in a professional newspaper shop floor. But then the charitable status and value to the community, after all, depends to an extent on the enterprise of developing these youth, as well as producing a journalistic product. Finally, one is left to reflect on why such educational activities are not so easily propagated in schooling institutions. One can point to several elements of the Free Press community that run counter to schooling: Staff are volunteers, and applicants are recommended or at least selected (no one with less than a certain grade point average is recruited). They are paid and, as professionals, they can be expected to deliver. Perhaps also important, the circulation goes beyond the community of practice and into the wider community, giving their product a wide audience outside of academe. There may be other key elements that make the Free Press free to do “real” education: An analysis of the educational capital available to the organization was beyond the scope of this ethnography. In the book review section, Natalia Panina-Beard reviews Dana Walker’s book A Pedagogy of Powerful Communication: Youth Radio and Radio Arts in the Multilingual Classroom, Minding the Media, which explains how a media project was implemented in a school serving a large Hispanic community. The Youth Radio and Radio Arts approach is argued to be productive for working with multilingual students “who do not ‘fit in’ with a mainstream school structure and organization of learning” (p. 177) as it encourages their Spanish language culture and draws on “highly professional supports such as bilingual artists and writers, a radio mentor and the researcher available to the youth (that) were key resources in their engagement” (p. 179). If one were to draw together conclusions from this book and the Free Press project, it would seem that both offer students culturally meaningful contexts and learning opportunities with rich resources, a sense of communicative audience, and a refreshing space to work and learn free from much of the claptrap of schooling. The theme of developing identity is further germane to the second article in this issue, “Resituating Funds of Identity Within Contemporary Interpretations of Perezhivanie” by Adam MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY 2018, VOL. 25, NO. 2, 101–104 https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2018.1453274