Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Stakeholder-Driven Educational Systems Design 735
Educational Systems Design—ESD is defined as the process of educational communities, at
whatever level of the system, collectively designing their own educational systems.
Enaction—Fundamentally, enaction is the position that the primary way that we relate to the
world is by interacting with it rather than by processing representations of it. Enaction is a
framework, in much the same way that representational realism is a framework. It provides a
warrant for a number of approaches that are considered constructivist in nature. Situated cognition
and Communities of Practice can be seen as warranted by this framework. Enaction is remarkable
in that it is the first framework to use a metaphor of mind that is backed by biological rather than
technological evidence. The framework is valuable because it provides a measure for determining
the internal consistency of practice that is called “constructivist.” It also provides guidance for
design, and guidance for the creation of research agendas, something that is often considered a
weakness of the constructivist project. Enaction is sometimes referred to as a post-constructivist
position.
Evolutionary Consciousness—Banathy contends that because human culture has evolved into
self-reflective consciouness, we have the ability to engage in self- guided cultural evolution.
Situated Cognition—Clancey claims that situated cognition is comprised of three aspects: the
social function which regulates behavior; behavioral content which relates cognition to spatial
temporal settings; and the structural mechanism which coordinates perception, conception, and
action. What cognition is situated in is human experience (which includes time, place, and other
aspects of a dynamically changing environment as well as dynamically changing internal mechanisms).
From this perspective much of the literature on situated cognition is incomplete in that
the internal dynamic is often missing. Further, situatedness is often confused with environmental
context. On the other hand this literature base does make the social-centeredness of learning
visible.
Systems Design—Banathy defines this as a future-creating human activity where members of a
system engage in creating and implementing their vision of what their system should be or in
consciously redesigning it to meet changes within the community and/or its environment.
FURTHER READING
Banathy, B. H. (1996). Designing Social Systems in a Changing World. New York: Plenum.
Clancey, W. (1997). Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. NewYork:Cambridge
University Press.
Reigeluth, C., Jenlink, P., Carr, A., and Nelson, L. (1998). Guidelines for Facilitating Systemic Change in
School District. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 15(3), 217–234.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge
University Press.