I recently had an opportunity to experience SitCog learning, quite by accident.
My school has assigned me to tutor English to a Kindergarten student in who is
a non-English speaker. Omar[1]
is of Persian descent, and is non-verbal since he has been in the USA only since
September. I have been meeting with Omar three times a week for about a month
within in his classroom.
In one of my first experiences with Omar, we went to a quiet corner to learn. He saw a pile of pillows and pointed to it. I
said “Do you want to sit on a pillow?” He nodded. In the next minute or two, I
narrated the situation using “pillow” in various contexts: “I want a pillow
too. Can you bring me a pillow? Let’s put the pillow here. Let’s sit on the
pillows. This is my pillow. That is your pillow.” We continued to use the
pillows for the sessions.
Several sessions later, we were working on a
Goldilock's story designed to teach “big”, “medium” and “small”. There were many
opportunities in the picture in the student workbook to apply adjectives of
size. He struggled in pointing to the “big bear”, had a little more success
with “big hat”, and “big robe”. But when we got to “big pillow”, he succeeded
immediately and smiled. My information processing 'persona' told me that he had “encoded”
the adjectives into LTM and was now processing the information correctly. However,
after the session ended, I began to reflect on this moment of success. I
recalled reading this:
“…remembering arises through
interactions with the environment, and the concept of memory becomes
nonexistent or irrelevant to an explanation of knowledge and learning, replaced
by an emphasis on the tuning of attention and perception; this is perceptual
learning.” (Young, M.F., cited by Artino, A., 2013)
The task of identifying the “big” pillow was easy because he recognized it, not from memory, but from having had an experience with a real pillow. We had had a shared interaction with it in an authentic situation. He perceived the
pillow in the picture to be the same as the pillow we were sitting on.
In another session, I saw how lack of context resulted in no
learning. The task was to paste hats on different characters - a clown, a
cowboy, a chef and a firefighter- in a mini-book. Despite my efforts to connect
meaning to these words, it was hopeless. Omar had no context with which to
complete the task. Worse, it cannot be assumed that Omar has seen any of these
professions in his own culture.
Omar’s learning illustrates the powerful impact of situated
learning. As teachers, we do not always see the opportunities to use SitCog,
even when they are right in front of us. We seem to default to the information
processing approach: teach students to store information and retrieve it from
LTM as needed. The SigCog approach reverses this order: begin with context;
then use that to deepen understanding, so that learners can “tune” their
perception, making abstract thinking more accessible.
I’m hoping to use more SigCog with Omar. And the next time, I’ll
know it when I see it.
References:
Artino, T.R., It’s Not
All in Your Head: Viewing Graduate Medical Education Through the Lens of
Situated Cognition, Journal of Graduate Medical Education, June 2013
[1] Names
have been changed to fictitious ones.
