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The Geological Society of America Special Paper 486 2012
Situated and embodied learning in the field Edwin Hutchins Nan Renner Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92037, USA In the past two decades, cognitive science has been moving away from a concept of cognition as a logical mental process to a notion of cognition as an embodied biological process. This shift has implications for the study of scientific practice—the cognition of science is no longer thought to happen only inside the heads of scientists. Rather, scientific cognition happens in the interactions among scientists, in the interactions of scientists with the natural world, and with the tools and inscriptions they create for themselves. The embodied nature of scientific cognition is present in all aspects of science, but it is most visible in the field, where the body comes into contact with nature and raw natural phenomena. The chapter by Mogk and Goodwin (this volume) echoes this recent shift in cognitive theory by providing well-chosen examples to illustrate the situated, embodied nature of the geology field school experience, and by describing how science proceeds by the creation of braided streams of inscriptions. In this commentary, we will try to put contemporary cognitive science to work in further developing the implications for educational practice and research.
Mogk and Goodwin draw our attention to the creation of a first inscription when a geologist makes a recording of raw data, a reading from a Brunton compass, for example. This is the moment when nature becomes culture, and the cascades of inscriptions that constitute scientific discourse begin (Latour, 1986). The young scientist’s body brings the compass into coordination with the strata of rock. It then brings the state of the compass (reading) into coordination with the emerging inscription that records the strike and dip. This is situated thinking. In this moment, students experience their own bodies providing the critical coordination of the measurement tool with the natural world, engaging their perceptual-motor-cognitive systems to achieve and exploit this coordination. Creating a map, or other representation of the spatial relations among geologic features, involves a very complex shift in perspective. The student is situated inside the landscape, but outside the map. The landscape has its own dimensions, but the map is always rendered on a human scale (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002), which facilitates the application of perceptual processes to make conceptual inferences. For example, the spatial relations of two locations that are not visible from each other in the real world may be easily apprehended when depicted on a map. Furthermore, a map may superimpose the depictions of locations on a cardinal direction frame. Determining the cardinal direction relation of the two locations would be difficult in the world, but it is trivial on the map. The reconciliation of the perspective inside the terrain and the perspective outside the map is part of all mapmaking and map-using activities. Most of the tools found in the field school setting are what Norman (1994) has called “cognitive artifacts” (see also Hutchins, 1999). A person using such a tool creates a new cognitive system that has different properties from the cognitive properties of the unaided human (Hutchins, 1995). Cognitive tools can enhance perception, as when a lens is used to magnify a visual field. Tools can structure perception through measurement and classification. Tools can transform features that cannot be sensed by humans (e.g., magnetic fields) into features that can be sensed by humans
SOME EXAMPLES OF SITUATED EMBODIED LEARNING IN THE FIELD Modern cognitive science understands that cognition is situated in context such that cognitive processes and the environment for thinking mutually shape each other through time. People not only respond to the world around them, they act on that world, changing the environment and changing their relations to the environment as part of the thinking process. The field school experience is powerfully situated. As Mogk and Goodwin note, in the field, the observer can be inside the object of study, rather than outside it. Only in the field does the student have direct experience of the range of spatial scales from millimeters to kilometers and an opportunity to see and feel (through integrated multimodal perception) the consequences of geologic processes at different spatial scales.
Hutchins, E., and Renner, N., 2012, Situated and embodied learning in the field, in Kastens, K.A., and Manduca, C.A., eds., Earth and Mind II: A Synthesis of Research on Thinking and Learning in the Geosciences: Geological Society of America Special Paper 486, p. XXX–XXX, doi:10.1130/2012.2486(30). For permission to copy, contact
[email protected]. © 2012 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.
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(needle position on a compass), and tools can transform memory by creating a lasting record, making information available for later use with other cognitive processes and other cognitive agents. These transformations mean that a geologist equipped with the appropriate tools and the knowledge to use them is a very powerful cognitive system. To create the first inscription, the student must filter the world of experience to identify what is relevant and what can be disregarded. The multimodality of field experience includes vision, but also tactile and haptic sensation, audition, olfaction, thermosensation, and proprioception. The embodied representations formed in this sort of experience are expected to be more complex, more stable, and more versatile than those acquired in single-mode learning. While creating a first inscription, the multimodality of experience is both a resource and a challenge. It is a resource because correlations in sensation across modalities attract attention and can provide signals for association or error correction (Jacobs and Shams, 2010). It is a challenge because the richness of the experience can be overwhelming. Mogk and Goodwin point out that in the classroom and the laboratory, decisions about what is relevant and what is not have typically been made in advance by whoever set up the learning environment. Mogk and Goodwin note the potential relevance of embodiment and the actions involved in the production of inscriptions, but they do not examine in detail the ways in which these activities could be related to conceptual insight. Recent research has shown that action and gesture are not just the surface manifestations of underlying thought; they also shape thought (GoldinMeadow and Beilock, 2010). We hypothesize that practitioners can reason more deeply about the meanings of inscriptions if they have previously produced and interpreted similar inscriptions through transformation of their own perceptual-motor-cognitive experiences of phenomena in the real world. Initiation into the geoscience community of practice is partly guided by explicit forms of instruction that can take place in the master-student relationship. Implicit learning that takes place via legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991) may be even more important than explicit instruction. Participation in the discourse and rituals of doing science in the field with experts can lead students to learn ways of being a scientist without being aware of having learned. Under this view, the goal of scientific training might not be just to get students to entertain the right mental constructs, but to lead them to engage in the embodied activities of perception and action that constitute professional practice (National Research Council, 2007; Goodwin, 2000). Implications for Research The situated, embodied perspective on field study suggests a set of questions: 1. How and what do students learn differently when situated in the natural world? How do students accomplish the reconciliation of territory and map?
2. In what ways are the experiences of human-scale representations different from landscape-scale experiences? What perceptual inferences are made possible in the human-scale representations? 3. What is the role of embodied memory in expert and novice performance? 4. What are the various ways that students in the field figure out what is relevant and what they should attend to? What constraints (physical, sociocultural, perceptual-motor, conceptual) are available and how can they be used? 5. What is happening cognitively in those critical moments when first inscriptions are created? Are inscriptions understood differently after the person has experience creating similar inscriptions? If so, in what ways? 6. What cognitive transformations (e.g., perceptual, perspectival, computational) are created by the geoscientist’s toolkit? 7. What elements of geoscience practice should be represented explicitly to the students and what should be learned implicitly? A research program focusing on these questions could offer a richer understanding of what happens in the field and provide guidance for the design of even more valuable fieldstudy programs. REFERENCES CITED Fauconnier, G., and Turner, M., 2002, The Way We Think: New York, Basic Books, 464 p. Goldin-Meadow, S., and Beilock, S., 2010, Action’s influence on thought: The case of gesture: Perspectives on Psychological Science, v. 5, no. 6, p. 664–674, doi:10.1177/1745691610388764. Goodwin, C., 2000, Practices of seeing: Visual analysis: An ethnomethodological approach, in van Leeuwen, T., and Jewitt, D., eds., Handbook of Visual Analysis: London, Sage Publications, p. 157–182. Hutchins, E., 1995, Cognition in the Wild: Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 408 p. Hutchins, E., 1999, Cognitive artifacts, in Wilson, R.A., and Keil, F.C., eds., The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences: Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, p. 126–128. Jacobs, R.A., and Shams, L., 2010, Visual learning in multisensory environments: Topics in Cognitive Science, v. 2, p. 217–225, doi:10.1111/j.1756 -8765.2009.01056.x. Latour, B., 1986, Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands: Knowledge and Society, v. 6, p. 1–40. Lave, J., and Wenger, E., 1991, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation: New York, Cambridge University Press, 138 p. Mogk, D.W., and Goodwin, C., 2012, this volume, Learning in the field: Synthesis of research on thinking and learning in the geosciences, in Kastens, K.A., and Manduca, C.A., eds., Earth and Mind II: A Synthesis of Research on Thinking and Learning in the Geosciences: Geological Society of America Special Paper 486, doi:10.1130/2012.2486(24). National Research Council, 2007, Taking science to school: Learning and teaching science in grades K–8, in Duschl, R.A., Schweingruber, H.A., and Shouse, A.W., eds., Teaching Science as Practice: Washington, D.C., The National Academies Press, p. 251–295. Norman, D., 1994, Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine: New York, Basic Books, 304 p.
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