Of all the collaborative intelligence concepts in our course, situated cognition may be the most philosophically disruptive. It challenges the foundational assumption of most formal schooling — that knowledge is an abstract, transferable substance that can be poured from expert to learner in a decontextualised room. Situated cognition says instead that knowing and doing are inseparable, that intelligence is distributed across people, tools, and environments, and that the most powerful learning happens not in classrooms but in authentic communities of practice.

Definition: Situated cognition (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989) is the theory that knowledge is fundamentally tied to the context, activity, and culture in which it is used and learned. Cognitive tools, social interactions, and physical environments are not merely aids to thinking — they are constitutive of it. Learning is therefore not a transfer of knowledge into an individual mind but a process of progressive participation in the practices of a community.

The concept was crystallised in a landmark 1989 paper by John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid, who argued that much of school learning is characterised by "inert knowledge" — information that can be recalled on tests but never applied in the real contexts where it matters. They proposed cognitive apprenticeship as an alternative: embed learners in authentic tasks alongside expert practitioners, make thinking visible, and gradually release responsibility as competence grows. Lave & Wenger (1991) extended this into the concept of legitimate peripheral participation — the idea that newcomers to a community learn by doing real, if peripheral, work alongside more experienced members.

References:

Brown, J.S., Collins, A. & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32–42. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X018001032
Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.
Collins, A., Brown, J.S. & Newman, S.E. (1989). Cognitive apprenticeship. In L. Resnick (Ed.), Knowing, Learning, and Instruction. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Situated cognition: knowledge is not in the head — it is in the world