| Situated learning involves the local use of resources that stem from the physical nature of objects, from discourse including stories and slogans, and from a variety of social relationships that are developed in the course of building an identity as a member of a community of practice. This dissertation is a report on a seven month ethnographic field study of situated learning by refrigeration service technicians who work for a supermarket chain that operates approximately 150 stores in the northeastern United States.;The author used participant observation, document and artifact analysis, unstructured interviews, and video recording to study the work and learning activities of a group of seven refrigeration service technicians.;The service call was used as the basic unit for an analysis of the types of learning activities. These included interpreting and managing troubles with people and equipment, gaining cooperation from the store personnel, and learning a particular speech genre of the technicians.;Changing participation and learning was found to be based on the resources of the physical qualities of objects, on the discursive such as the use of artifacts as discourse markers, and social relationships. The views of the servicemen concerning teaching, learning, and evaluation were found to agree with claims concerning apprenticeship type learning including the absence of a teacher, learning as participation in practice, and evaluation through competent, non-virtuoso production of everyday practice.;The conclusions include: (1) The boundaries between cognitive activity inside the "mind" and in the social world need to be softened, (2) Conversational sensemaking activities, story telling, and discourse style play an important role in learning, (3) Everyday artifacts play a more important role in knowledge construction than previously thought and (4) The activity of instructional and educational design should be critically examined in the same situated terms as any other practice. An analytical view of learning called the Rad approach is outlined in the concluding section. |
