Week 6 Situated Meaning as a Basis for

Week 6 Situated Meaning as a Basis for Organizing Learning

Meaning as Situated & Embodied v Symbolically Represented Situated in activities which give rise to meaning Embodied in terms of connection of meaning to visceral reaction, perception, emotion, and action Symbolically represented in terms of mentally representing a world (the object) out there independent of the person (the subject) Discarte’s mind-body dualism Implications for learning How we learn What we learn

Learning as Action Learning involves “experiencing the world in new ways” (Gee, 2007, p. 31) Learning involves the “feel”, rather than something being “told” Learning as developing new emotions (feeling what happened) Meaning-making and motivation to learn (e. g. , “a need to know”)

Learning as Building Symbolic Representations Cognition Serial vs. parallel processing Emotional control Disruption Activation Motivational control Prioritizing Effort allocation Terminating

Group Task Look at the “greenhouse” teaching example, what indicates “situatedness”? What makes the “situated and embodied argument” of learning more appealing than “symbolic represented meaning” argument? In the spirit of Simon (1967), to reconcile the situated and symbolic accounts of cognition, reframe your situated and embodied account of the vignette using Simon’s approach (with mechanistic language, such as activation, termination, and interruption)