Innovative Teaching Project: Creating a Situated Learning Environment for Constructing Knowledge

OBJECTIVES:

This innovative course delivery approach is designed to achieve the following objectives:

• To model ‘situated learning’ in delivering a main course of the Department of C&I, through activities that promote learning by doing, in a community of practice;
• To enhance the effectiveness of learning and teaching of the courses;
• To enhance the generic skills of learners, including problem-solving, communication, creativity, collaboration and reflection;
• To contribute to the Department of C&I with a research-based teaching innovation that creates scholarship of teaching.

The key theme of this innovative course curriculum design is ‘situated learning’ which is proposed by Lave & Wenger (1990). As a learning theory in the same branch known as social constructivism, situated learning suggests that learning happens in the learning experience and knowledge acquisition of learners in activities of the real world and the context of learning represents the culture of a group of people who produce and use the knowledge (Vincini, 2003). To imply the theory, classroom-based learning can model the real workplace by presenting an authentic context to students and encouraging them to accomplish tasks that ‘interpret the real world’. Learners will immerse into a thinking process and acquire the knowledge in a community of practice (Kimble & Hildreth, 2008). Table 1 outlines the characteristics of situated learning and compares the situated learning environment with the traditional one.

This curriculum design transforms traditional classroom setting to a community of practice which drives students to adopt a new learning approach to study. This is the most innovative aspect of this project. In this delivery approach, the classroom structure is completely changed to involve students as practitioners who have to come up with solutions and create products while scaffolds and resources will be provided by the teacher. This approach makes learning fun; at the same time it gives learners the responsibility of working out the problems with greater commitment, as they identify themselves as teachers to solve the problems related to their profession.