The “Situated Cognition” was indeed a dense article.
Priscilla was not joking when she warned us!
I think I can see how I can apply the ABCS of activity to my
lessons on the ancient civilizations with some design work. The AeCTS article
gave us a good outline of how to use knowledge as a learning tool. The texting
with Don followed this pretty closely, with Priscilla explaining her “I will
email Don tonight” is the exit experience or strategy, so we have a clear
ending of this experience. I appreciated the debrief from that activity, where
we looked at different Structures, Processes, and Discourses of several
different topics we teach in elementary school in Virginia. I think working
together to figure some of these out would be awesome. Anyone else? It’d be a
good place to start thinking of designs for our future lessons.
I think that I need to continue processing enculturation as
a way to teach in my classroom. I understand that being exposed to the entire
context of a concept helps learners see the “why I’m learning this,” but how
does it work in practical use in an elementary classroom? When I’m teaching
ancient Greece contributions, how do I include the idea of enculturation? I
could take the position of an anthropologist and/or archaeologist while
studying the contributions of the ancient civilizations. During these units, I often
show a video on Safari Montage of a man playing this role… I can clearly see how some of the major contributions
from Greece and Rome tie into our language and US Government, so finding clear
contributions and “big ideas” and generalizable knowledge for those two is
relatively easy. However, I’ll have to work a little harder when we add in
teaching Ancient China and Egypt next year. Off to tackle Vygotsky!
I'm totally on the same page as you in that enculturation is taking a bit more for me to wrap my head around how to incorporate in my classroom. You're right that if we looked for big ideas in ancient civilizations we might find ways to relate them to current government, but even that is difficult since our own government is difficult to completely teach as well!
ReplyDeleteYes - context jumps to mind - not just from the article but in general. Some of our SOL’s seem to lack that context when our students age is taken into consideration and without context I can’t rationalize to myself how students are going to remember this information. Furthermore, connecting ideas to student lives seems the key learning. In past years during the Mali unit students would get to taste a regular Saltine and an unsalted Saltine to provide them with some understanding of what salt can do to food. However, with increasing strict food allergy guidelines we are no longer aloud to do this making it that much more difficult to explain why salt was important in Mali.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Rachel, about how our student’s age does not seem to be taken into consideration with these SOL tests. It seems to really link to what Vygtsky said about mental age vs physical age.
DeleteI would like to learn more about Safari Montage, I've never heard of it and looking at the website, real quick, it seemed to be full of information for kids.
ReplyDeleteWhat about as your learning about the different civilizations having students in groups of 4-5 having to create their own government for the first colony on Mars?