Learning and Action - Ch. 5

As a future teacher this chapter caught my attention; one quote in particular:
"Learners cannot do much with ots of overt information that a teacher has explicitly told them outside of the context of immersion in actual practice. At the same time, learners cannot learn without some overt information; they cannot discover everything for themselves." After reading this I sat for a second and thought about what it meant. How many times have I been sitting in class while my teacher is lecturing about something. I'm listening and taking my notes and trying to retain as much as possible. Once the lecture is finished my teacher tells us to apply what we just learned in a real-life situation. I start looking through my notes trying to connect the lecture with my life and it is almost impossible. Almost as impossible as if my teacher would have just asked us a question about the lecture without giving it first. There seems to be a happy medium in teaching where kids are actively learning and teachers are scaffolding their students, that is often hard to attain. "The solution is to give information in context and to couch it in ways that make sense in the context of embodied action" says Gee. Easier said than done my friend. I took a geography class last semester and on the first day my teacher told us that it would be impossible to teach geography "in context" in the boring, white-walled, classroom we were in. In order to "actively learn" we would need maps and globes and a many more resources. He told us he would do his best considering the circumstances. I found it very interesting that he made a point of how much the learning environment can affect the learner. Gee discusses Lara Croft and how there is a "training game" where you are taught all the commands to play the other games in the series. He made an interesting point about how the training instructions for that game wouldn't make any sense if you weren't playing it. I think this is a strong argument in the world of education seeing as most of intrustion in today's schools is direct and not interactive.