Situative perspective on cognition

In this article we set out to consider what the situative perspective on cognition-that knowing and learning are situated in physical and social contexts, social in nature, and distributed across persons and tool-might offer those of us seeking to understand and improve teacher learning. As we pointed out earlier, these ideas are not entirely new. The fundamental issues about what it means to know and learn addressed by the situative perspective have engaged scholars for a long time. Almost a century ago, Thorndike and Dewey debated the nature of transfer and the connections between what people learn in school and their lives outside of school. These issues, in various forms, have continued to occupy the attention of psychologists and educational psychologists ever since (Greeno et al., 1996).

Labaree (1998) argued in a article that this sort of continual revisiting of fundamental issues is endemic to the field of education. Unlike the hard sciences, whose hallmark is replicable, agreed-upon knowledge, education and other soft knowledge fields deal with the inherent unpredictability of human action and values. As a result, the quest for knowledge about education and learning leaves scholars feeling as though they are perpetually struggling to move ahead but getting nowhere. If Sisyphus were a scholar, his field would be education. At the end of long and distinguished careers, senior educational researchers are likely to find that they are still working on the same questions that confronted them at the beginning. And the new generation of researchers they have trained will be taking up these questions as well, reconstructing the very foundations of the field over which their mentors labored during their entire careers. 

Questions about the nature of knowing and the processes of learning have not been matters only for academic debate. Teacher educators have long struggled to define what teachers should know (e.g., Carter, 1990; Holmes Group, 1986; National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, 1991) and to create environments that support meaningful teacher learning (e.g., Howey & Zimpher, 1996; Sykes & Bird, 1992).

These struggles have played out in ongoing attempts to teach pre-service teachers important principles of learning, teaching, and curriculum in ways that connect to and inform their work in classrooms. They have resulted in solutions as varied as teaching carefully specified behavioral competencies believed to be central to effective teaching (e.g., Rosenshine & Stevens, 1986) to building teacher education programs around immersion in public school classrooms (e.g., Holmes Group, 1990; Stallings & Kowalski, 1990).

Given the enduring nature of these questions and the debates surrounding them, what is to be gained by considering teacher knowledge and teacher learning from a situative perspective? Can this perspective help us think about teaching and teacher learning more productively? We believe it can-that the language and conceptual tools of social, situated, and distributed cognition provide powerful lenses for examining teaching, teacher learning, and the practices of teacher education (both pre-service and in-service) in new ways. For example, these ideas about cognition have helped us, in our own work, to see more clearly the strengths and limitations of various practices and settings for teacher learning. But this clarity comes only when we look closely at these concepts and their nuances. By starting with the assumption that all knowledge is situated in contexts, we were able to provide support for the general argument that teachers' learning should be grounded in some aspect of their teaching practice. Only by pushing beyond this general idea, however, to examine more closely the question of where to situate teachers' learning, were we able to identify specific advantages and limitations of the various contexts within which teachers' learning might be meaningfully situated: their own classrooms, group settings where participants' teaching is the focus of discussion, and settings emphasizing teachers' learning of subject matter. Similarly, ideas about the social and distributed nature of cognition help us think in new ways about the role of technological tools in creating new types of discourse communities for teachers, including unresolved issues regarding the guidance and support needed to ensure that conversations within these communities are educationally meaningful and worthwhile.

We close with two issues that warrant further consideration. First, it is important to recognize that the situative perspective entails a fundamental redefinition of learning and knowing. It is easy to misinterpret scholars in the situative camp as arguing that transfer is impossible-that meaningful learning takes place only in the very contexts in which the new ideas will be used (e.g., Anderson et al., 1996; Reder & Klatzky, 1994). The situative perspective is not an argument against transfer, however, but an attempt to recast the relationship between what people know and the settings in which they know-between the knower and the known (Greeno, 1997). The educational community (and our society at large) has typically considered knowledge to be something that persons have and can take from one setting to another.

When a person demonstrates some knowledge or skill in one setting but not another (e.g., successfully introducing a concept such as negative numbers to one's peers in a micro-teaching situation, but having difficulty teaching the same concept to children in a classroom mathematics lesson) a common view is that the person has the appropriate knowledge but is not able to access that knowledge in the new setting. This view is consistent with the educational approach prevalent in teacher education as well as K-12 classrooms  of teaching general knowledge, often in abstract forms, and then teaching students to apply that knowledge in multiple settings. Ball (1997), in contrast, has written about the impossibility of teachers determining what their students really know (and the imperative to try in spite of this impossibility). An insight demonstrated by a student during a small-group discussion "disappears" when the student tries to explain it to the whole class. A student "demonstrates mastery" of odd and even numbers on a standardized test yet is unable to give a convincing explanation of the difference between even and odd. Based on this "now you see it, now you don't" pattern, Ball argued that the contexts in which students learn and in which we assess what they know are inextricable aspects of their knowledge. In other words, learning and knowing are situated.

A parallel argument can be made for teacher learning. As teacher educators we have tended to think about how to facilitate teachers' learning of general principles, and then how to help them apply this knowledge in the classroom. From the situative perspective, what appear to be general principles are actually intertwined collections of more specific patterns that hold across a variety of situations. In this vein, some scholars have argued that some, if not most, of teachers' knowledge is situated within the contexts of classrooms and teaching (Carter, 1990; Carter & Doyle, 1989; Leinhardt, 1988). Carter and Doyle, for example, suggested

that much of expert teachers' knowledge is event-structured or episodic. This professional knowledge is developed in context, stored together with characteristic features of the classrooms and activities, organized around the tasks that teachers accomplish in classroom settings, and accessed for use in similar situations.

It is this sort of thinking in new ways about what and how teachers know that the situative perspective affords. Rather than negating the idea of transfer, the situative perspective helps us redefine it. These ideas about the relationships among knowing, learning, and settings lead to the second issue-the role that researchers play in the process of learning to teach. As researchers we inherently become a part of, and help to shape, the settings in which we study teachers' learning. In examining her own work with children, Ball (1997) found it was impossible to determine how, and the extent to which, the understandings and insights expressed by children during interactions with her were supported by her implicit (unconscious) guiding and structuring. She argued that teachers' sincere desire to help students and to believe that students have learned may lead them to "ask leading questions, fill in where students leave space, and hear more than what is being said because they so hope for student learning" (p. 800). Ball suggested that this unavoidable influence means we must recast the question of what children "really know," asking instead what they can do and how they think in particular contexts. Further, in addressing these questions, teachers must consider how their interactions affect their assessments of what students know.

Similarly, as researchers trying to understand what teachers know and how they learn, we must be particularly attentive to the support and guidance that we provide. In the heyday of behaviorist perspectives, process-product researchers worked hard to avoid this issue by making their observations of teachers' behaviors as objective as possible; the goal of the observer was to be a "fly on the wall," recording what transpired but not influencing it. With the shift to cognitive perspectives, many of the efforts to study teachers'

thinking and decision making maintained this goal of detached objectivity. Researchers working within the interpretive tradition and, more recently, those who hold a situative perspective, remind us that we are inevitably part of the contexts in which we seek to understand teachers' knowing and learning. Rather than pretending to be objective observers, we must be careful to consider our role in influencing and shaping the phenomena we study. This issue is obvious when individuals take on multiple roles of researchers, teachers, and teachers of teachers; it is equally important, though often more subtle, for projects in which researchers assume a non-participatory role.

As Labaree suggested, we will not resolve these issues concerning the relationships between knowing and context and between researcher and research context once and for all. Like Sisyphus, we will push these boulders up the hill again and again. But for now, the situative perspective can provide important conceptual tools for exploring these complex relationships, and for taking them into consideration as we design, enact, and study programs to facilitate teacher learning.