Abstract

The theory of situated learning claims that every idea and human action is a generalization, adapted to the ongoing environment, because what people see and what they do arise together. From this perspective, thinking is a physical skill. As we create names for things, shuffle around sentences in a paragraph, and interpret what our statements mean, every step is controlled not by reinstantiated grammars and previously constructed plans, but adaptively recoordinated from previous ways of seeing, talking, and moving. Situated learning is the study of how human knowledge develops in the course of activity, and especially how people create and interpret descriptions (representations) of what they are doing. This introduction provides a historical perspective of situated learning, including the work of Dewey, Bartlett, Vygotsky, and Ryle. I provide examples of how situated learning is being applied today in business process redesign.