The Social-Direct Negotiation Process

I believe learning is an enculturation process that occurs in the context as a result of actively participating in social practices. This active participation is a jointly coordinating and negotiating process by which the individual utilizes the socially-valued function or social discourse (i.e., knowledge or language) as the way practitioners use it in a particular context, resulting in changing one’s membership from the novice to more central participation in a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In this way, knowledge is created, reflected, and evolved as an active form of competence, tool, or the language bound to the social context of a community of practice (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Lave & Wenger 1991; Resnick, 1987; Whitehead, …show more content…
Said another way, teaching is a socially-guided dialogical event/process that allows the learner to co-experience various activities, as well as to achieve commonly-shared goals together (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Shaw, Kadar, Sim, & Repperger, 1992; Young, Kulikowich, & Barab, 1997). Importantly enough, teaching should be considered as a social dynamic that takes place on-the-fly from the demand side rather than the supply side, helping the learner adopt the goal and achieve it with guidance through dynamic interactions. As such, our job as an instructor would be to 1) create a rich authentic context that encourages learners to engage in social and physical interaction with the environment, and to actively participate in the authentic activity; and, 2) sensitively capture and/or detect the teachable moments that emerge from the instructional situations, and act on it on the fly (i.e., on-the-fly pedagogical reasoning)—e.g., providing guidance or new tasks in an attempt to help learners adopt new goals related to the materials and the learning environment, and to guide them to achieve …show more content…
Learning is a process by which novices grow toward experts through experience in any learning event (Brown et al., 1989; Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991). This instructional model is often called “apprenticeship.” Apprenticeship in school—i.e., cognitive apprenticeship (Collins et al., 1989), unlike traditional apprenticeship, concerns “learning-through-guided-experience on cognitive and metacognitive skills and processes” (Collins et al., 1989, p. 456); that is, how to co-act with experts and learning the goals associated with tools and skills in authentic activities are at the heart of cognitive apprenticeship (Brown et al., 1989). My instructional practice, therefore, takes into account how to leverage modeling, coaching, articulating and reflecting in the course of instructional