Monday, February 28, 2005

Situated Language and Learning

Having finished his video games book, I've started Situated Language and Learning: A critique of traditional schooling by James Paul Gee (2004). It's a very accessible ~125 page read. While I'm most interested in ch4 "Simulations and Bodies" for my embodiment reading this semester, I may end up going through all of it, although I feel that I am beginning to get a good overall feel for his ideas. So here's a 12 piece paraphrase of a summary of Gee's one main argument:
  1. Learning to read in academic content areas is difficult
  2. because the types of language (jargon) used in these content areas is significantly different from people's "everyday" vernacular,
  3. but the jargon is integrally connected (and thus important to learn) to complex and technical ways of thinking in the content areas.
  4. Privileged kids get a jumpstart on learning and using this language before they start school, and in their lives outside of school.
  5. Schools underestimate the importance of learning "academic" varieties of language, start teaching it too late, and thus do a poor job of it.
  6. Both rich and poor kids demonstrate complex "specialist" languages that they have learned (and therefore the ability to learn specialized language) in their lives outside of school (e.g. the language in Pokemon).
  7. Role-playing and simulations work well when based on a person's experiences, and
  8. specialist language (both academic and non-academic) is more easily learned when it is tied to a person's experience, therfore,
  9. video games , as compelling simulations of experience and new worlds, can be harnessed to teach specialized language.
  10. Popular culture links people together by interest and endeavor (affinity groups), rather than by shared culture, gender, or race.
  11. Success today requires "shape-shifting portfolio people" -- people who gain many diverse experiences that help them adapt and transform themselves.
  12. The learning of specific "academic" languages that schools do, is less important than learning how to learn specialist languages.
I tied a few of these together because I saw them as connected, or leading to the next.

posted by Unknown @ 11:24 AM   1 comments

1 Comments:

At 8:28 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

To answer the question "what does Jim Gee think about embodiment?" I turned to ch4 "Simulations and the Body" in his Situated Learning book. What I gleaned from it, is that he feels that simulated experiences are darn close to "real" experiences (which are basically just mentally constructed anyway, so why wouldn't they be as "real"?). He says, "School learning is often about diembodied minds learning outside of any context of decisions and actions. When people learn something as a cultural process their bodies are involved becasue cultural learning always involves having specific experiences that facilitate learning, not just memorizing words" (p. 39). He doesn't mention bodies again until he talks about "comprehension" and situated cognition studies (e.g. Baralou 1999a, b; Brown et al. 1989; Clark 1997, 2003; Engestrom et al. 1999; Gee 1992; Glenberg 1997; Glenberg and Robertson 1999; Hutchins 1995; Latour 1999; Lave 1996; Lave and Wenger 1991; Wertsch 1998; Wenger 1998). "they share the viewpoint that language is tied to people's experiences of situated action in the material and social world Furthermore, these experiences are stored in the mind/brain, not in terms of language but in something like dynamic images tied to perception both of the world and of out own bodies, internal states and feelings: 'Increasing evidence suggests that perceptual simulation is indeed central to comprehension' (Barsalou 1999a: p. 74)" (p.49).

Perceptual simulation. We make models of experience based on our experience. If the experience is "rich" (multi-sensory simulation, actual first-hand experience), the models will be rich. If our experience of something is not rich (lecture, boring book, typical drills), the models we build will not be as robust. This is why small personally seminars are more effective than large lectures; why engaging in an activity is more effective than hearing about it; why it's harder to fire a person face to face than over the phone, or in a letter; why Milgram's "teachers" less likely to shock their "students" when in the same room. There's a quality to the models of experience we make that intensifies as we inch closer to the actual experiences we model. But, as the colleague I discussed in a previous blog argued, all of these things are embodied. Perhaps, as with so many other things, it's not a binary of on or off, embodied or not embodied, but rather a matter of volume, or "richness" of embodiment.

 

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