Roxanne Pompilio
  • Home
  • About Roxanne Pompilio
    • Contact
  • EDL 650
  • EDL655
  • EDL 795A
  • EDL 640
  • EDL 690
  • EDL 680
    • EDL680 Assignments
  • EDL 610
    • Habits
    • Culture
    • Platform
  • EDL 630 Blog
  • EDL 630—Learning and Discovery—Making Wine Jam (20% Project)
    • Preliminary Research for Inquiry Questions, Revisions, & Recipes
    • History of Jams, Jellies, Marmalade and Cannning
    • Purchasing the Right Tools
    • Jam Making 101—My First Attempt at Making Grape Wine Jam
    • Jam Making 101—Second Attempt at Making Grape Wine Jam and First Canning
    • 20% Project—Final Reflection and Memories
    • Diigo Research—20 Percent Project
  • EDL 630 Final Project—Plagues that Changed History
  • EDL 621 Gamification
Social Media

Reflecting on situated learning—a close reading project

12/6/2014

1 Comment

 

Much more difficult than I expected

Picture
As an Advanced Placement teacher and someone who has had to grapple with difficult texts and break them down for students, I thought this was going to be a fun, enjoyable experience. Quite the contrary. My brain hurts. Perhaps I have been away from the world of intellectuals for too long, or maybe I am just feeling the effects of age. In terms of informing my professional practice, the close reading experience of a difficult text gave me an appreciation for what my students must be feeling, especially my second language learners. It also causes concern with some of the Common Core requirements that students need more of these experiences and strategies to assist them. This particularly holds true with the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium (SBAC) exam and the redesign of many of the AP course exams. It is one thing to have a week to digest difficult material and reflect on it and another experience to have to experience it in a timed situation. Many of my second language AP World students struggled last year when having to read and interpret excerpts from primary source texts as part of their multiple-choice exam. The challenge for me when teaching complex texts is how much scaffolding to provide while trying to teach students to use strategies like close reading effectively. 

Situated Learning (Legitimate Peripheral Participation) by Lave and Wenger (1991)

Quote: "Learning is a process that takes place in a participation framework, not in an individual mind." (p.15) I selected this quote because it broadens the traditional definition of learning to extend learning to involving a collective act. Here rather than learning being an individual activity where the learner is somewhat isolated, learning involves a community of participants. It is in this global framework and through these interactions that meaning gets constructed.

Question: According to Lave and Wenger (1991), how students learn in school should be rethought from the perspective of the Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP) viewpoint. Although I agree that there is a need to rethink schooling, the infrastructure needed to achieve this is not yet in place. My question for Lave and Wenger is what rethinking schooling from an LPP perspective might look like in the current school environment? 

Connections: "we emphasize the significance of shifting the analytic focus from the individual learner to learning as participation in the social world, and from the concept of cognitive process to the more-encompassing view of social practice. "(43) This connects with Richardson's argue in his essay "Why School.." given the abundance of information and the way in which the 21st century student processes and learns information. 

"Learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and ... mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of community." (p.29). This reminds me of newcomers to the Twitter community. To gain mastery in this area of social media, requires participating in all of the sociocultural practices of the Twitter community. As someone somewhat new to Twitter prior to this course, I only moved toward mastery of social media by immersing myself in it. This required validation from within the community in order to move toward full participation.

Epiphany: The text from Situated Learning by Lave and Wenger (1991) was much more of a challenge to wrap my brain around it than I anticipated. Overall, I learned a lot about the Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LLP) perspective and Lave and Wenger's situated learning model. Many of the ideas are visionary and seem relevant given today's learners and the abundance of technology. However, I still have concerns about implementing some of these ideas into practice. Much of the infrastructure, at least in the school environment is missing.

Google Doc Close Read
Comments on Sara's Google Doc
1 Comment
Amal Hersi
12/20/2014 03:36:15 pm

I agree with you that this reading was a complex one. I too had read a couple of times to grasp what the author was trying to convey to the readers. But overall, I think you got the concept..Great job :)

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014

    Author

    Roxanne Pompilio is a History-Social Science Teacher at the School of Creative and Performing Arts. She currently teaches 7th and 10th grade World History.

    Categories

    All
    20 Percent Project
    Changing Paradigms (Read More)
    Education Reform
    From Knowledgeable To Knowledge-Able
    Hackschooling
    Internet Motivation
    Outboard Brain
    Storify The Global Achievement Gap

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly