Group items tagged

learning as an integration with a community in action

situated learning (Brown, Collins & Duguid,1989; Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991

discursive paradigm (Edwards & Potter, 1992; Foucault, 1972; Harre & Gillet, 1995

distributed cognition (Salomon, 1993

situatedness

contextuality

cultural embeddedness

social mediation

practice

discourse

communication

t the learner should be viewed as a person interested in participation in certain kinds of activities rather than in accumulating private possessions.

What is metaphorical about the issue of participation?

learning-as-participation

Participation" is almost synonymous with "taking part" and "being a part,"

While the AM stresses the individual mind and what goes "into it," the PM shifts the focus to the evolving bonds between the individual and others.

PM makes salient the dialectic nature of the learning interaction: The whole and the parts affect and inform each other

whereas the AM stresses the way in which possession determines the identity of the possessor, the PM implies that the identity of an individual, like an identity of a living organ, is a function of his or her being (or becoming) a part of a greater entity.

one may oppose the above classification of theories of learning by saying that most conceptual frameworks cannot be regarded as either purely "acquisitional" or purely "participational." The act of acquisition is often tantamount to the act of becoming a participant, and if so, one can find it difficult to consider AM and PM separately, let alone as mutually exclusive

I will argue for the inherent impossibility of freeing the discourse on learning from either of the two metaphors.

Theories can be classified as acquisition-oriented or participation-oriented only if they disclose a clear preference for one metaphorical ingredient over the other

the dichotomy between acquisition and participation should not be mistaken for the well-known distinction between individualist and social perspectives on learning

According to the distinction proposed in this article, theories that speak about reception of knowledge and those that view learning as internalization of socially established concepts belong to the same category (AM), whereas on the individual / social axis, they must be placed at opposite poles.

it is the aim of this article to show the dangers of such total, single-minded devotion to one metaphor. 

Why Do We Need More Than One Metaphor? 

metaphorical pluralism

. Educational practices have an overpowering propensity for extreme, one-for-all practical recipes.

Because no two students have the same needs and no two teachers arrive at their best performance in the same way, theoretical exclusivity and didactic single-mindedness can be trusted to make even the best of educational ideas fail. 

the most powerful research is the one that stands on more than one metaphorical leg

plurality of metaphors does not imply that "anything goes;"

critical theories can be defined as conceptual frameworks that deal with human beings in a social context and “aim at emancipation and enlightenment, at making agents aware of hidden coercion, thereby freeing them from that coercion and putting them in a position to determine where their true interests lie” (Geuss, 1981,

There are as many terms that denote the action of making such entities one's own: reception, acquisition, construction, internalization, appropriation, transmission, attainment, development, accumulation, grasp. The teacher may help the student to attain his or her goal by delivering, conveying, facilitating, mediating, et cetera. Once acquired, the knowledge, like any other commodity, may now be applied, transferred (to a different context), and shared with others. 

in spite of the many differences on the issue of "how," there has been no controversy about the essence: The idea of learning as gaining possession over some commodity has persisted in a wide spectrum of frameworks, from moderate to radical constructivism and then to interactionism and sociocultural theories

the two distinctions were made according to different criteria: While the acquisition / participation division is ontological in nature and draws on two radically different answers to the fundamental question, "What is this thing called learning?," the individual / social dichotomy does not imply a controversy as to the definition of learning, but rather rests on differing visions of the mechanism of learning.

Table 1. 

When two metaphors compete for attention and incessantly screen each other for possible weaknesses, there is a much better chance for producing a critical theory 3 of learning (Geuss, 1981; Habermas, 1972).

We have to accept the fact that the metaphors we use while theorizing may be good enough to fit small areas, but none of them suffice to cover the entire field.

we must learn to satisfy ourselves with only local sensemaking