Naoki,
The confusion stems partially from my carelessness, and my limited ability
to fully articulate thoughts, as well as trying to reconcile 'cognitive
apprenticeship' in activity theory, and only half-baking those thoughts.
Responding to you clearly requires more care.
Once when I advocated 'Situtated Learning' as background reading for
people who would mediate network discussions, a colleague contested the
book, beginning with 'Oh, you mean the book about taylors'. Not expecting
a left-hook reaction based on the research field, I was stunned into
defenselessness.
You wrote "In their paper, what kind of historical form of aprenticeship
Brown and others tried to imitate is not clear at all. " and I agree. It
may be possible, looking at the development of the cognitivist field to
reconstruct what these Brown et al. were thinking about. The research
field is different for cognitivists, who seem to have focussed primarily on
academic thinking, perhaps called 'higher-order' thinking and it has
influenced their theoretical view.
>
>Collin' s formulating "cognitive" apprenticeship is
>based on cognitivisits' view. The only terminolgy looks new and trendy.
>
>For example, I cannot understand why he tries to distingush thinking
>from acting or interacting.
It is difficult to find a clear consensus of 'higher-order'. I think we
can infer what it means from several places where it is applied. Other
example might be what is advocated in "How to solve it: A new aspect of
mathematical method" by Polya. The work by Bob Karplus and others includes
proportionality reasoning and controlling variables. Piagetian formal
operations and beyond seems to be where higher-order thinking lay, and is
consistent with the types of academic inquiry, analysis and problem solving
situations many cognitivists have studied.
People who can engage in inquiry, analysis or problem solving tasks can
often do so with little externalization of their own thought processes.
Solving a math problem may be mediated by something like paper and pencil,
but a novice watching someone solving a problem who does not articulate
what (s)he is thinking has little infomation about what those thought
processes are. Naoki, as you note, this certainly includes thinking in
school-like activity, but it can occur in many other situations such as
programming a computer, or in designing a custom-built set of stairs for a
house.
But indeed a lot of the focus seems to have been on school-like activity,
some of it, dove-tailing with constructivism, is partially in rebellion of
'direct instruction', and advocating approaches in which students become
more active in learning contexts. It has also been partially in rebellion
of the academic 'rote-learning' in which students would memorize scripts
for academic tasks, without giving meaning to them.
Aside, one might argue that students adopt rote-memorization in response to
tasks that are so decontextualized that the students cannot give meaning to
them anyway. And so a major difficulty lies with the nature of the tasks
the students are asked to complete.
What I think Collins has been advocating with cognitive apprenticeship are
ways for more-expert participants in activity to support more-novice
participants when trying to engage students actively in learning new
thought processes . Collins' advocates processes in which the focus is on
helping the more-novice learn'how to think through a task.' The way I have
been thinking about it lately is that Collins' version of cognitive
apprenticeship is a collection of moves that the more-expert may apply to
shape a particular zoped with a more-novice. Naoki, your point that
cognitive apprenticeship is from the viewpoint of the teaching curriculum
is well put. What Collins is advocating might be better called 'cognitive
mentorship' - it does not provide suggested moves for the apprentice in a
zoped.
It would be enlightening to explore Rogoff's 'Apprenticeship in thinking'
which takes the analytic viewpoint. Rogoff's description of the
metacognitive role that skilled partners play can be contrasted to Collins'
cognitive apprenticeship model two ways. (1) Guided participation seems
also to be like a teaching curriculum in that adults may structure tasks to
ensure the childs active participation, taking on
overall management of the situation. (2) The main elements of Collins'
cognitive apprenticeship being coaching, modeling, scaffolding,
articulation and reflection. At first blush what I have not seen in
Rogoff's book is where the articulation and reflection occur, but I think
that is due to the nature of the tasks she has investigated. Where
articulation and reflection involve 'thinking about thinking', these
processes might be called 'higher-order' or perhaps Rogoff might refer to
them as metacognitive.
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Technology in Education
Lesley College, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]