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MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 5(2), 1 14-126 Copyright O 1998, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition

Situated Learning and Cognition: Theoretical Learning and Cognition

Mariane Hedegaard Institute of Psychology

University of Aarhus

The aim of this article is to analyze how schoolchildren's thinking and concept formation generated in classroom teaching can relate to daily life situations. Situated thinking and learning and theoretical thinking and learning are discussed as learning forms that can accomplish this integration. According to Vygotsky, subject-matter concepts are transformed into personal concepts through children's ability to use them in daily life. The relation between skill and content has to be presupposed in this transformation of subject-matter concepts into everyday concepts, because everyday or daily-life concepts are learned through and interwoven with practical activities in cooperation with other people. The analyses are based on distinctions between (a) societal and personal knowledge, (b) subject-matter and everyday concepts, (c) subject-matter methods and content, and (d) thinking as related to subject-matter methods and concepts as related to subject-matter content.

For the personal aspect of knowledge, everyday concepts are located within the life setting of a person; therefore, the relation between subject-matter concepts and personal concepts is often much weaker for immigrants and refugees coming to a new country than for children with generations of ancestors in a society. A project with Puerto Rican children is sketched to discuss how classroom teaching can relate subject-matter knowledge of social science with children's everyday concepts and thereby enhance the children's theoretical concepts and thinking.

The "discovery" within the cognitive tradition of the social anchorage of cognition led to theories of cognition located in cultural contexts (Cole, 1990; Mercer, 1992; Scribner & Cole, 1981), distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1991, 1993), and situated learning and cognition (Lave 1988, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991). The inspiration came both from Vygotsky's theory and from the anthropological research tradition. Although Vygotsky is referred to in these theories, there are also differences between Vygotsky's theory and those from the anthropological research tradition as to how everyday cognition and learning are related to school cognition and learning.

The aim of this article is to analyze how schoolchildren's learning and cognition generated in classroom teaching can relate to everyday life situations. First I discuss the accomplishment of the approach of situated learning and cognition in relation to school teaching. I argue that the situated learning and cognition approach has highlighted a very important aspect of learning and cognition in school but that this approach provides too narrow a frame for integrating students' personal knowledge with societal knowledge of a subject-matter area. Then I discuss Vygotsky's theory of

Requests for reprints should be sent to Mariane Hedegaard, Institute of Psychology, University of Aarhus, 4 Asylvej, 8340 Risskov, Denmark.

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SlTUATED LEARNING AND COGNITION 1 15

the relation between school knowledge and students' everyday knowledge, and I relate this to the developmental perspective of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). I analyze Brown and Campione's (1994) use of this concept in classroom teaching in relation to the children as a community of learners (COL). A problem they do not solve in this program is specification of a developmental theory that can relate to the social practice of society. The focus of the COL program is primarily on the social process of instruction instead of on both content and class activity as a unit. The social process of instruction should not be neglected but seen in relation to the aim and content of teaching, which should be based on both social practice and a theory of child development.

I argue that to contribute to the student's general cognitive and motivational development, the content of teaching should be anchored in three areas: the everyday knowledge of the student, the subject-matter area important for a society, and a theory of personality development that includes the social practice traditions of society. One way of realizing a teaching project that takes all three parts into consideration is illustrated in the last part of the article by a report of an after-school project initiated by Seth Chaiklin, Pedro Pedraza, and me.

SITUATED LEARNING AND COGNITION

Lave (1988,1991,1992,1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991) is one of the central researchers in this new approach to cognition and learning. Lave's analyses of apprenticeship learning in tailor shops in Liberia pointed to the need to understand learning as a kind of social practice in the learners' everyday lives. Lave's research has also inspired new ways of conceptualizing school teaching.

Cognitive apprenticeship, as formulated by Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989a, 1989b) and Collins, Brown, and Newman (1989), is built on "activity theorists such as Vygotsky, Leontiev and others" and has been devoted to apprenticeship learning in school. This programmatic formulation of a new teaching practice has stimulated discussbn, and therefore, I review it in relation to central ideas in Vygotsky's work.

The preconceptions for their program are that conceptual knowledge can be compared to a set of tools and that activity-practicing, intellectual tool use promotes cognition. Academic disciplines, professions, and manual trades are seen as communities or cultures. To learn to use tools as practitioners use them, a student, like an apprentice, must enter that community and its culture.

According to Brown et al. (1989a), activity in school should be authentic, which implies that school activities should include the ordinary practice of different science cultures. School teaching is modeled by apprenticeship learning: The teacher is seen as the master or practitioner, and the students are apprentices. The teacher's task, as master, is to confront the apprentices with effective strategies that can be used to solve everyday problems (e.g., everyday mathematical problems). The goal of teaching in school is the student's acquisition of skills practiced within science communities. To accomplish this goal, different teaching techniques are used, such as modeling, coaching, scaffolding, fading, and articulation.

In the cognitive apprenticeship approach, Collins et al. (1989) stressed the learning of cultural strategies of the different scientific disciplines but advised not to teach the science concepts directly to the students. The teacher should instead support the students' use of their everyday knowledge procedures and, through different teaching techniques of scaffolding and so forth, develop the student's cognition.

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1 1 6 HEDEGAARD

Palincsar (1989) discussed this approach as an important contribution to implementing new teaching strategies in school. She supported Brown et al.'s view of learning as enculturation by formulating three central principles for learning that can be accomplished by such a change in the approach to the understanding of learning in school:

First the approach argued by the authors [Brown, Collins, & Duguid] grounds education in a practical world of experience. The authors focus on educating students to think like practitioners, who act on ill-defined problems in a flexible manner. . . . Second, situated cognition should aid students to form a sound epistemological framework. The information explosion necessitates change in our approach to teaching facts. Rather than simply knowing something, it is important that a student know where to find information and how to relate it to a broader body of knowledge. . . . Third, situated cognition is important because it can give students a sense of agency in their learning. . . . that learning occurs for the purpose of understanding and controlling not only school tasks but also the events in the children's lives. (p. 6)

But Palincsar (1989) also criticized Brown et al.'s idea of authentic activities as primarily connected to practices within a culture. She pointed to the problem that the situated approach focuses too much on everyday practice and never explicates the content in the practitioner's culture that should be taught to students. She argued against Brown et al.'s claim that the students should learn within the culture of practitioners to be able to use the procedures as tools, the way practitioners use them. She also argued that it is too overwhelming a job to teach students the cultures of the various subject-matter disciplines.

Rather than try to identify the ordinary practices of the disciplines, the school should focus on its own autonomous culture and that of society. The acculturation of students into an academic environment, without destroying their zest for learning, without impairing their respect for an understanding of their own cultural traditions in an increasingly multiethnic society, and without imposing values beyond those for which a societal consensus exists, is a tall enough order for our schools. (pp. 6-7)

I

As a historian, Wineburg (1989) went further in this direction, criticizing Brown et al. for simplifying the problem of cultural practices of mathematicians and historians. He pointed to the need for defining the central concepts and procedures of these sciences and transforming them into subject matters in school.

In the cognitive apprenticeship approach, the question remains, How does the relation between cultural practice of the learning situations match the learner's everyday life and personal knowl- edge? Lave's tailor example from Liberia shows a close connection. The apprentice's life is integrated with the cultural practice of tailoring. But how do we draw a parallel to this in school teaching? How, for example, should children's lives be integrated with the lives of mathemati- cians? When the cultural practice is a community of mathematicians or historians, the schoolchil- dren's practice is different; therefore, it is difficult to relate their everyday knowledge to this practice. The question is how to find significant problems that can relate the two "worlds." In his modification of Brown et al.'s (1989a; Collins et al., 1989) instructional design, Young (1993) pointed to the problem of finding situations on which to base situated learning in school. How to solve the task of selecting situations that combine children's everyday knowledge with subject- matter knowledge is a very serious problem that Young did not solve, neither theoretically nor through his exemplification of a computer simulation of a real-life problem. The problem of how to connect everyday practice in science communities to the specific children's everyday commu-

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SITUATED LEARNING AND COGNITION 1 17

nity practice and personal knowledge is not solved simply through computer simulation. Although the simulated problem is concrete, it does not necessarily become situated within the child's community practice and related to the child's personal knowledge.

I conclude this section by highlighting three aspects that the cognitive apprenticeship approach has promoted for school teaching: (a) that learning should be grounded in a practical world of everyday life, (b) that it is important to learn the strategies of a culture, and (c) that students are agents of their own learning. My critiques are directed against the narrowness of cognition and learning promoted by this approach. The type of cognition and learning favored by the cognitive apprenticeship approach is primarily connected to unreflected social practice in everyday life activities with no qualitative differentiation between knowledge and practice of different commu- nities-tailors, mathematicians, classrooms, and so forth. Adults' activities in different cornmu- nities of practice are regarded as unquestioned standards for the goals of development. This approach has no reflected goal for development, and it does not have a theory of the relation between learning and development. However, other ways of conceptualizing the relation between subject-matter concepts and student's everyday knowledge and between learning and development could be promoted in school, for which the cultural-historical tradition of Vygotsky and his followers (Davydov, 1977,1982,1989; Hedegaard, 1990,1995; Lompscher, 1984,1985) provide a theoretical foundation.

VYGOTSKY'S THEORY ABOUT THE RELATION BETWEEN SUBJECT-MATTER CONCEPTS AND EVERYDAY KNOWLEDGE

Inspired by Vygotsky's theoretical approach, I argue that a theory about schoolchildren's learning has to be anchored in three places: (a) everyday life situations that are characteristic of children's community, (b) subject-matter areas (problem areas that are relevant for societal life and that have dominated the different sciences through time and have developed into central concepts and procedures of science), and (c) the learning subjects and their development. This means that there are three questions to take into consideration for schoolchildren's learning: (a) Is what children learn meaningful in their community context, (b) is what children learn central and important for the subject-matter area, and (c) does what children learn contribute to their development from the point of view of "good" development?

Vygotsky (1 987) wrote that the problem in psychological theories that separate form and content in cognition arises because the content of cognition has always been regarded as culturally developed and socially and historically determined, whereas the form has mostly been regarded as biological, determined by organic maturation running parallel to the brain's organic develop- ment. However, Vygotsky (1987) argued that the interdependence between form and content characterizes both the historical evolution of humanity's cognition and the development of the single person (p. 370). This implies that one can differentiate between both different content and different forms of cognition and thinking that are all culturally determined. The interdependence between content and form is the basis for understanding the ontogenetic development of concepts and thinking.

Vygotsky (1987) characterized concepts as organized in systems that arise through children's participation in cultural activities (p. 386). He differentiated between learning and cognition in everyday community life and school life and also between learning and cognition in school life

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1 1 8 HEDEGAARD

and work life. A cardinal change in children's cognition takes place as an effect of the children becoming members of a school community and subject to subject-matter teaching. Vygotsky's (1982) theory of how concepts are formed during school age explicated the relation between subject-matter concepts and students' everyday cognition. On one side, the acquisition of subject- matter knowledge extends the meaning of everyday knowledge, and on the other side, subject- matter knowledge can only be understood and become functional for children if it builds on children's everyday knowledge. If school teaching succeeds in creating this relation, children's cognition will change, and thus they will be able to use subject-matter concepts as tools for analysis and reflection in their everyday activities.

A second cardinal change takes place when young people (1 3-14 years of age) start to participate in the production.1 Vygotsky (1987) also wrote that not only are young people children of society, but they contribute to its production and creation. Through this participation, young people gradually become more interested in the social, political, and societal aspects of the world. This can be seen in contrast to schoolchildren's interest, which is often connected to different subject- matter areas or leisure time activities.

One of the important aspects of concept formation put forward by Vygotsky is that concepts symbolize both abstract and concrete aspects of the conceptualized subject area. He characterized children's cognitive development as an increase in complexity of the relations between the concrete and abstract aspects of the conceptualized area. He argued that language is a very important mediator in this development. The role of language also changes. In the beginning, an everyday concrete event may take the form of an image that relates to the abstract word. Later, the verbal metaphor can symbolize a concrete event and thereby give this event a general meaning by relating it to an abstract visual representation (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 408).

LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

Vygotsky's (1987) theory of the interdependence between everyday knowledge and subject-matter concepts builds on the assumption that child development can be seen as a progression through stages characterized by cultural practice and determined by children's dominating interests (p. 309). In Vygotsky's theory, interest is explained as culturally determined desires (forces, passions). Vygotsky (1987) argued that these desires cannot be understood by relating them to either biological desires or skill acquisition, but that they are culturally developed (p. 319).~

Vygotsky characterized development as a process that follows learning processes. But accord- ing to Vygotsky (1982, 1987), learning is only developmental if it is located within the ZPD. This zone can be characterized as a developmental room within which children's cognition and interests develop through working on situated problems in interaction with a more competent person. This program has inspired many educational researchers (Brown, 1994; Gallimore & Tharp, 1988; Griffin & Cole, 1984; Wertsch, 1984).

' ~ y ~ o t s k y (1987) wrote that through the acquisition of conceptual systems, a young person can for the first time be conscious of the societal ideologies and of himself or herself as a person in society-that is, his or her self-consciousness develops ("Die Wirklichkeit verstehen, andere verstehen und sich selbst verstehen--das ist also, was das Denken in Begriffen mit sich bringt"; p. 400).

Z~ygotsky's theory about the development of interest was further developed into motives by Leontiev (1978) and by Elkonin (1971) into a theory of an interchange between cognition and motivation that characterizes the culturally determined stages of child development.

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SITUATED LEARNING AND COGNITION 1 1 9

Brown and Campione (1994) created the COL teaching program. The basic conception in this program is Vygotsky's concept of the ZPD. Brown (1994) characterized teaching in the classroom as engineering a COL, and in this approach the activity in the classroom is characterized as "enculturating multiple zones of proximal development" (p. 7). She thereby related Vygotsky's idea of ZPD to the idea of the classroom as a COL.

The COL idea is an important expansion of Vygotsky's ZPD concept in relation to school learning. However, Brown ran into aproblem common to researchers who use Vygotsky's concept of ZPD because she did not consider how to find the children's upper level of the zone. The main point in Vygotsky's (1982) concept of ZPD is that the upper level is defined by what the child can do together with an adult. This implies not only an evaluation of the child's capacities to work with an adult but also the adult's choice of tasks that he or she considers relevant to offer to or accept from the child for this co-operation.

Through the tradition of practice, adults or other more competent people can choose which tasks to formulate, together with the institutions that the children attend. The upper level of the ZPD is normative. In one society, the skill of rowing a kayak around the age of 6 years becomes an expectation for children; in another society, it is riding a bike. In societies where school is an educational institution for all children, the expectation to read and write makes adults choose tasks for children that are related to these skills. It is then expected that the children can read after 1 or 2 years of training in school. For many children, it is a personal problem to be inferior in this skill. It can even become a societal problem if children in general do not acquire this ability to an acceptable degree within the expected time.

The upper level of the ZPD is most often defined in relation to expectations of age-defined capacities taught at home, day care, or school. These expectations imply a developmental stage in relation to which the single child can be compared. Therefore, an explicit theory of development is needed that is anchored in the social practice of society-a practice that differs from one society to the next.

In their COL program, Brown and Campione integrated the positive aspect of everyday practice of situated learning with the special practice that characterizes school life. They built educational activities that are authentic and meaningful in relation to children's life practice. But Brown's request for a theory of child development is not a request for a developmental theory that relates children's skills to the social practice of society. Therefore, it becomes difficult in the COL program to explicate principles for content and method to guide teachers in creating tasks for the classroom as a COL.

Elkonin (1971), one of Vygotsky's co-researchers, developed Vygotsky's conceptions of development into a theory of personality development with a focus on cognitive and motivational development. In his theory of personality development, Elkonin distinguished between three different periods, each of which reflects the societal institution that dominates the different age periods. The three main institutions in industrialized societies are day care, school, and work. Therefore, according to Elkonin, the three main developmental periods in children's lives relate to the respective dominating activities: In preschool age, it is play; in school age, it is learning; and in young and adult age, it is work.3 This does not mean that the activities of learning, play, and work are not found as part of children's activities in the nondominating periods.

3 ~ o r the sake of argument, no further differentiation is needed, although Elkonin (1971) differentiated the aforemen- tioned periods into two stages and although the number of periods and stages can be discussed in relation to the characteristics of today's Western societies.

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In the situated-learning approach, aspects of the learner's personality development have also been conceptualized. Lave (1996) focused on identity formation as the core of learning activity. She wrote:

The way we conceptualize teaching must be rethought within the perspective that takes learners learning, as the fundamental phenomena of which teaching may (or may not) be a part. Learning, taken here to be first and principally the identity-making life projects of participants in communities of practice: The powerful, multiply structured processes of learning in school-settings encompass and subsume what is generally assumed to be the more dominating agenda of school classroom teaching. . . . Whether and how classroom "instruction" results in the incorporation of class activities into the life project of students (and all others in schools), depends on the ways they are taken into those life projects. (p. 157)

Lave's way of stressing that schooling is important for identity formation and the dependence of this development's advance on children's life projects is very close to the cultural-historical approach of Vygotsky and Elkonin. It also parallels German educational traditions that stress the importance of schooling for personality formation (Fichtner & Menck, 1992; Klafki, 1983). In the cultural-historical tradition, as well as in the German tradition, personality formation in school is dialectically connected to children's acquisition of skills and knowledge within different subject- matter domains. In Lave's approach, the focus is mainly on the socializing effects of schooling. Like the tailors' apprentices in Liberia they are learning in practice the salient social divisions and identities of the social formation in which they live their lives. Lave exemplified this conception with research on immigrant children's schooling; from her analysis of this research, she concluded that in the United States, the school's task has been to create Americanized students. Lave questioned if this kind of socialization should be promoted. From the perspective of the cul- tural-historical approach to personality formation in school age, children's learning of specific subjects should form the basis for formation of an identity as a learner and a student. From this perspective, children's development becomes problematic if the school cannot motivate the children through ongoing activities to create an identity as learners and students in this period of their lives.

TEACHING WITHIN THE ZPD: THE DOUBLE MOVE

The lower level of the ZPD is delineated by the traditions of practice that have characterized the students' lives. The upper level is delineated by the possibilities of practices.

Teaching within the ZPD can be characterized as a double move between the students' experience and their exposure to theoretical concepts. The goal of teaching within the ZPD is to use subject-matter knowledge to support the students in their acquisition of theoretical concepts and motives. In the double move approach, the process of instruction runs as a double move between the teacher's model of the subject-matter concepts of a problem area and the student's everyday knowledge. The teacher guides the learning activity both from the perspective of the general concepts and from the perspective of engaging students in "situated" problems that are meaningful in relation to their developmental stage and life situations. The suggestion for this type of teaching and learning in school points to forms of cooperation between master and learner and between learners that are guided by the subject-matter areas deemed important for them to acquire,

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SITUATED LEARNING AND COGNITION 1 2 1

as well as to finding opportunities for personality formation where the children learn to evaluate both knowledge and their own capacities.

In the double move approach (Hedegaard, 1995), teaching and learning in school are not conceptualized as straightforward processes. Rather, a spiral of problem solving is created, in which the teacher in the beginning helps the students become acquainted with a subject domain. Through the process of learning, the students take over and find their own problems, thereby guiding their own learning processes gradually. In the beginning, the students work with situated problems chosen by the teacher that are meaningful for them and that incorporate central concepts of a subject domain. Through this problem-solving activity, the students acquire a conceptual system of central conceptual relations-a core model. Having acquired general concepts, the students are able to evaluate their own learning in relation to how well they can use these concepts in different concrete problem-solving activities, and they can formulate new central problems. Through selection of important situated problems and through evaluating their own learning from the perspective of central conceptual relations of a subject-matter area, the students acquire an identity as capable learners who can take initiatives and guide their own learning.

A 1-year after-school project with Puerto Rican children in East Harlem that I conducted together with Seth Chaiklin and Pedro Pedraza illustrates how it is possible to teach theoretical knowledge of history that relates to both central subject-matter concepts and life in the children's community. The main point of introducing this research project in the present context is to illustrate classroom instruction that functions as a idouble move between children's knowledge of their everyday community and their research into and learning of subject-matter knowledge and procedures of history. The goal of history teaching was for the children to acquire an integrated image of the central concepts of history that could function as a tool for their understanding and analyses of historical and present-day societies. The project's objective was to give students an understanding of ways of living in two different countries in different historical periods-before and after the main immigration.

THE AFTER-SCHOOL PROJECT WITH PUERTO RlCAN CHILDREN

Puerto Rican children are often stigmatized at school. To strengthen their educational proficiency, we believed that through the teaching in this project, the involved children could acquire a positive concept of their membership of a Puerto Rican community in New York. We hoped that this would lead to their forming a more positive attitude toward being schoolchildren and would provide the motivation for learning. Because they belonged to a primarily Puerto Rican community, we thought that teaching about the history of this community would give the children some insight into the positive aspects of belonging to this community and make them feel positive about their own cultural identity.

The history-teaching program described here ran for 1 school year. Fifteen children between 8 and 12 years of age attended the program. The program shared space in a community center in East Harlem with a literacy program for adult women. Both programs were run by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, New York City University.

The teaching was based on three topics: the life conditions in Puerto Rico in the early 20th century (when immigration first began), life conditions in New York for the first immigrants, and life conditions in the present Puerto Rican community in East Harlem. The central conceptual

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1 22 HEDEGAARD

relations in this problem area were the connections between resources, family life, and living conditions in Puerto Rico and New York at the beginning of the 20th century and in the community of East Harlem in relation to present-day New York City. The concepts were related to each other in the core model (see Figure 1). These topics of teaching were chosen because we expected the following:

1. Subject-matter knowledge that could connect to the children's own history and their present community would have both meaning and personal sense and, therefore, would create motivation for subject-matter learning.

2. Connecting knowledge of family life and values of Puerto Rican families with subject matter in school could improve the Puerto Rican children's concept formation and skill acquisition in history as well as reading and writing. Literacy as a skill also has a content, and through working with a content that is both objectively meaningful and has a personal sense, we expected both literacy and historical knowledge would be promoted.

In the after-school teaching project, the problem domain of social history was made into a research area for the children through the following problem formulations: What are our roots? What are the characteristics of the society we live in today? How do we relate to this society as members of a Puerto Rican community? These questions focus on the living conditions in the community and how these conditions are formed in relation to the larger society of New York City, of which the Puerto Rican community in East Harlem is a part. The children were introduced to the activities in the after-school project as members of a "young scientist's club."

The project was an action research program in which the teachers and researchers worked together in preparing tasks and problems through which the children could explore the general problem formulation. The teacher guided the children's activity through formulating questions and tasks so that the children became skilled in using a procedure for exploration. By solving these tasks and by participating in class discussions, the children were guided in their examination of Puerto Rican family traditions and of resources found in Puerto Rico and in New York for making a living and creating a good life. The conceptual relations of the core model were introduced

FIGURE 1 The core model of the teaching.

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SITUATED LEARNING AND COGNITION 123

through a variety of forms. For example, the children analyzed pictures of family life and work in Puerto Rico at the turn of the century and compared them to family life and work in New York City, both when they immigrated and today. They interviewed grandparents and an elderly citizen about life in Puerto Rico and in New York in the old days. They analyzed films: one film about farm life in Puerto Rico in the old days and one about a Puerto Rican child's life in New York today. They went to a New York City museum with a question sheet and walked the streets of East Harlem to count facilities.

As a result of this learning activity, the children's attitudes and motives changed toward cooperating to produce the texts and materials necessary for their activities. The children's motivation toward these activities increased, as did their understanding of themselves in relation to the society in which they lived. By having some general concepts, they were able to reflect on the society in which they lived and discuss problems of society in general in relation to a computer-simulated task, "Island survivors." The acquisition of such conceptual relations as family life and living conditions made it possible to transfer the knowledge acquired in one context and discuss it in relation to another; that is, knowledge from the interview with an elderly citizen was related to the core model of family life in community and at work. The knowledge acquired in the interview could then, by using the conceptual relations, be compared to and used in relation to the visit to the New York City museum and to a discussion of the relation between the actual life of a child seen in a movie and the life in their own community.

DISCUSSION

In this article, I argued that the integration of subject-matter knowledge and everyday knowledge is important for children's conceptual development. Everyday knowledge is a precondition for children's learning of subject-matter knowledge, but development of everyday knowledge does not stop being important. On the contrary, subject-matter knowledge contributes to the develop- ment through integration with children's everyday activity. Thereby, the children's everyday knowledge can develop to more complex levels.

The situated cognition and learning approach has highlighted a very important aspect of cognition and learning that also counts for school learning: the groundedness of all learning in the practical world of everyday life. However, in the situated approach there is no clear differentiation between the psychological aspect situations and the general aspect of a subject area. Personal experience and cultural communities are parts of the same concepts of situated cognition and learning, but it need not be a problem if both aspects are recognized. Learning situations can be defined both from the perspective of cultural practice of societal institutions such as scientific communities (e.g., mathematicians or historians) and from the perspective of the community experiences of the learner. One way of uniting and, at the same time, differentiating the two perspectives is to use the ZPD concept and define the learning situation both from the learner's point of view, as the ZPD lower level, and from the cultural practice perspective, as the ZPD upper level.

An essential aspect is then the determination of the ZPD upper level for learning activity in school. Vygotsky's solution to this problem was to point to the subject-matter concepts of the different science areas as the basis for defining the upper level of the ZPD in school learning activity. The learning process can then be turned into cooperation between the teacher and the student and between students, gradually exploring problem situations with subject-matter con-

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cepts. The result should be an integration of these concepts with the student's everyday knowledge whereby they become a functional part of the student's everyday knowledge.

In the project with Puerto Rican children, the aim was to combine everyday experience with subject-matter concepts of history. The Puerto Rican children were in daily contact with the Puerto Rican way of living, values, and personal relations. These aspects were public through family and street activities and through contacts with and visits to family in Puerto Rico. Through the instructional activities as a double move, the children acquired a research procedure and concepts of social history that gave them the possibility to reflect on and compare their living conditions with living conditions of other communities, historical as well as actual.

This brings me to the last point in the discussion: the relationship between formation of personality and skill and knowledge acquisition. Lave, and Brown and Campione stressed the importance of the student's general development in school, but they did not conceptualize the close connection between subject-matter learning in school age and schoolchildren's formation of personality. This formation takes place in the social practice of school activity, but this practice cannot be understood as social activity nor as an activity only by a COL. The content that this social activity focuses on is defining for the social activity. In a society that stresses the importance of a national identity, history is a very important subject matter for schoolchildren in building this identity. The mediation of this identity can be done through the students' learning of central concepts and content of history as related to the everyday concepts of community life. Examples of this conception can be seen in Britain, where history is part of a national curriculum that specifies the content for all public schools. In the United States, the value put on children's learning mathematics and science is another example. In Denmark, foreign-language learning is valued as an important subject matter in the national curriculum. Children start learning English in fourth grade and German in fifth grade, and in high school one or two more languages are added. The different subjects of anation's school curriculum reflect the dominant societal values. The students' identity development as learners in school comes through the acquisition o.f skills that are highly valued by the society (of a nation). In the acquisition process, the students are not passive but are guided toward and into the content and procedures of the subject-matter area. If this process is to become developmental, the student must be an agent in it, in cooperation with other students using their everyday knowledge.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Seth Chaiklin, James G. Greeno, Mizuko Ito, Ray McDerrnott, Klaus Nielsen, and Ingrid Seyer for discussion of and comments to an earlier version of this article.

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