Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

542 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
most employment positions do. But candidacy for high-status professions results from success at
examinations involving declarative knowledge.
Another reason for the comparative recency of interest in how we acquire knowledge in action
may be a function of where research on learning has traditionally taken place. Research
on learning, like most psychological research, has traditionally been conducted in psychology
departments on university campuses, where it is relatively easy to find an abundance of potential
research subjects and many examples of learning. Research on learning has also been
conducted in schools, which aspire for their students to succeed in university, and thus teach
the declarative knowledge that universities value. Not surprisingly, research on learning tended
to reflect the available participants and material. So the high status of academic knowledge appears
to have distracted us from asking questions about how the knowledge of action might be
acquired.
Many writers have challenged the high status of academic knowledge. John Dewey argued
strongly for the inclusion of vocational subjects in the education of all high school students.
More recently, Donald Schön championed the cause of action knowledge. In The Reflective
Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983), Schön demonstrated the complexity
of knowledge-in-action and showed how successful practice depends on two different kinds of
reflection. Reflection-on-action is the more usual form of reflection in which we think about our
actions and their consequences after the event. This is to be contrasted with reflection-in-action
in which there is a “conversation” between the knower and the action, a kind of conversation in
which unusual events in practice are processed without deliberation but with a reflection within
the action itself. Schön expands on this in his second book, Educating the Reflective Practitioner
(1987), in which examples of complex performance are used to show how reflection-in-action
contributes to competence, as in piano playing and architectural drawing.
At about the same time that Schön was demonstrating the demands and complexity of knowingin-action,
other researchers were becoming intrigued with a rather different form of action
knowledge that has become known as situated cognition. The research emphasis in situated
cognition is jointly on the role cognition plays in authentic and complex learning and on the role
that the context or situation plays. Learning is assumed to go on in the interplay between the
learner and the context, with the context being an integral part of what is learned. Vygotsky in
his Mind in Society (1978) described how human activities take place in cultural settings and
cannot be understood apart from those settings. In this perspective learning is fundamentally
experiential and fundamentally social. Thus research on situated cognition takes us into realistic
settings that are quite different from studies of learning in schools and universities. Many of the
settings studied are workplaces.
In situated cognition, the interest is the complex relationships between the knower or learner
and the relevant elements of the environment, sometimes called affordances. For example, in
Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (1998), Etienne Wenger (1998) reported
on his ethnographic fieldwork in the medical-claims–processing center of a large U.S.
insurance company. He uses his accounts of the way people interact with one another and with
the shared knowledge of the workplace to develop a social theory of learning. This way of understanding
learning rests on the dual concepts of practice (especially a community of practice)
and of identity. In Wenger’s study, a group of claims processors were observed struggling with
a complex worksheet that the company called the COB worksheet and that the processors called
“the C, F, and J thing.” The processors knew the steps to complete the worksheet and described it
as “self-explanatory,” while they professed no understanding of the reasons that the calculation
was the way it was. The processors gave up on making sense of what they did, acknowledging
that perhaps the company didn’t want them to understand, and they put their effort into creating a
work atmosphere in which that bit of ignorance would not be a liability. In practice, understanding