Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Situated Cognition and Beyond 715
to John Dewey, new facts and ideas become the ground for further experiences in which new
problems are presented. The process is a continuous spiral. In this regard, all of the central
concepts of learning, thinking, and identity are to be conceived in active and relational terms
rather than in terms of static objectivist matching and representations. Meaning constructions
are purpose-driven according to relational contexts and thus constantly fluid, albeit relatively
fixed patterns of phenomena observed across similar situations. Mind and body are perceived as
an aspect of person-environment interaction, where activity involves a transaction or interaction
between person and environment that changes both.
On the aspect of situatedness relating cognition to spatial-temporal settings, human beings are
thrust into the world with tools and material objects as “ready-at-hand” until breakdown occurs.
A hammer is used for the purpose of hammering until it fails to achieve its purpose. At such a
stage, reflection as a process to reconsider the purposes for which an object is to us is usually
necessary. Current work in situated cognition can emphasize the role of reflection, abstraction of
meanings, and how as humans we are able to engage in metacognitive thought where language
and thinking are central. Identity can be modified through reflection in the context of prior situated
understanding. However, the field of situated cognition needs a balance between meanings as
always situated and when interpretations have value for transfer across contexts resultant from
reflection. Meanings are implicit and embedded into the forms of life, as Wittgenstein explains,
and usually made explicit only through reflection and secondary orders of perception. Meaning
is personal at the phenomenonal level when one is engaged and absorbed in the situation. It can
become more explicit when one starts to move away from the situatedness, and can be shared as
one articulates at the description level.
Situated cognition implies learning “to be” as contextualized. For example, one learns to be
a scientist in the context of the scientific practice and in the process appropriates the “ways of
seeing” meanings within that practice. In this sense, identity is context dependent such as the
community of practice being an important instance of a rich situated context. From Heidegger’s
view point, identity as Being is thrown into the real world and not necessarily constrained to a
limited community. In other words, Being should be cast from the perspective of Being in general
rather than Being within a situated context. In other words, Being can transcend a situated context
into a generalized Worldhood. Although Being is purpose-driven, Being or identity can be cast
from the perspective of identity as a “process-journey” unfolding in situ (as Being is continually
being transformed through each experience) according to broad rather than narrow prescriptive
conceptions of purpose. Here purpose is generalized to actions in the world rather than specific
situations. In other words, when identity is formed within individuals, such a state is contextless
rather than bound to specific contexts. From a situated cognition perspective, knowledge and
information is contextually bound, whereas we argue from Heidegger’s viewpoint that identity
is presented as context-free, or more accurately, identity is bound to Worldhood as the largest
possible context. In other words, within Worldhood, identity is transferable across contexts. If
we think of situatedness as a continuum, then Worldhood lies at one end of the extremes—the
unsituated end. This provides us with a framework for rephrasing the problem of transfer of
learning across different contexts as one that is less relevant. Instead, learning involves the ability
to generate appropriate states of the living organisms on demand. These states form part of our
identity, and it is identity that we carry with us from one context to another.
CONCLUSION
A consistent framework in needed in situated cognition and beyond to account for embodied
cognition within the individual Dasein or Being since the organism emerges in situ through
personal experience in the context of worldhood. On the other hand, situated cognition needs to