Educational Enquiry Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Educational Enquiry - Assignment Example These practices are related to different situations under which learning takes place. They have two common practices: one is the cultural and historical activity systems, which is consisted with the work of Engestrom (2001), and the other is the communities of practices, which is consisted with the works of Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998). Their study has supported the rational property of learning. But it has also noted that this rationality is variable in nature. The authors have not seen learning as a separate process; rather, it is interconnected with other concepts and processes. And learning is just the integrating part of the entire social processes of the world. This was the same view pointed out by Lave and Wenger. The basic reason for this finding was pointed out by the authors as the fact that people’s participating practices or activities are the main focus of such accounts. In this context they have argued that learning is embodied. It is viewed that bein g engaged in practices and learning people always get more benefits, compared to any cognitive activity. Their study is about people physically doing things and emotionally reacting to things. In this context, the major focus has been on the concept, called informal learning. This concept is also related to the observation of the property of most participatory studies to be placed outside educational institutions (Hodkinson and Macleod, 2007). Their study has found that it is foremost important to implement participatory learning approaches in colleges, although it cannot be claimed as the second best, compared to the style and pattern of everyday learning. The authors have argued that it is possible to implement both the approaches of learning at the same time and at the same place. In this way they have suggested to overcome the problems of integrating people into theories of learning, that focus on the situations under which learning is taking place (Hodkinson and Macleod, 2007, pp.173-174) But their main focus was on the methodological problems. In this regard, their study has shown that the benefits acquired from the participatory learning generally marginalise the individual learning. The paper also pointed out the similarity between the two types of conceptualisation of learning: one is the research approach based, non-case studies, also called the ethnographic approach, and the other is the participatory approach. Some of the implications of this similarity have also been discussed in the paper (Hodkinson and Macleod, 2007, p.174). They have argued that the individual researches have the advantage of revealing the facts related to both formal and informal learning, whereas it is very difficult to understand both the approaches in case of the participatory learning procedure. This is the most important strength of the research based approaches. Another important fact regarding this approach relates to the observation that ethnographies give less reliabl e conclusions compared to the learning processes, as ethnographies concentrate only on short time frames, whereas learning approaches focused on long time spans covering the entire life’s experiences (Hodkinson and Macleod, 2007, pp.174-175). According to authors, constructivist literature explains learning as a cognitive structure. In this