Cognition in Contexts: Ecologies of Learning and Thinking in Everyday Life

1 Unit · Graduate

This seminar will explore how learning and thinking are organized in everyday settings. Most academic research on cognition and learning has been conducted primarily in laboratory and school settings; this focus has made for a too narrow conception of what cognition and learning are, titling images of cognition toward the abstract, the individualistic, and the mentalistic. In the wide range of everyday cultural contexts, cognition is unquestionably practical, embodied, distributed, and tuned to ecological niches of cultural consequence. And the organization of learning, over interactional and longer time frames, looks very little like the conventional images of learning in schools—a single ‘teacher’ instructing and testing a group of individual ‘students’. The wide variety of everyday learning arrangements will be a central focus of this class. The course readings are interdisciplinary, drawn from anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and the learning sciences. Most are ethnographic case studies, and all seek to balance the empirical and conceptual. This will be a theme of our discussions: how a study is strategically sited and constructed to be rich empirically but also to develop concepts for seeing these and other learning and thinking contexts from new perspectives. The widely used yet underexamined concept of ‘context’ itself will be a recurrent topic of discussion as well.