Hung, D., Looi, C.-K., & Koh, T.-S. (2004). Situated cognition and communities of practice: First-person "lived experiences" vs. third-person perspectives. Educational Technology & Society, 7(4), 193-200.
Hung, Looi and Koh set out to stress what they see as the "nondualistic epistemology and relativistic philosophy of situated cognition" and attempt to critique pervasive pedagogies where situation cognition is invoked within dualistic Cartesian frameworks whereby an positivistic objective knowledge is deemed possible (p. 193).
Within a situated cognition context, identity is seen as always implicated with knowledge construction whereby identity is constituted via local interactions. Thus, situated cognition considers a relational perspective and social process wherein the complexity of a system - context, identity, intersubjectivity, culture, discourse, embodiment - is jointly implicated in the construction of knowledge. In Heidiggerian terms being (and cognition) cannot being isolated (as some kind of entity) from one's embodied actual experience in the world. Communities of practices are seen as situations where cognition, context, identities and knowledge are co-determined .
This leads to the conclusion that descriptions of phenomena within a context cannot be overgeneralised and abstracted across contexts. For example principles of something called "academic writing skills" cannot be gleaned across contexts with different genre expectations. Thus transfer is inherently problematic. This is due they suggest to "the importance of emergence, historicity, and growth within any particular context" (p.195). A key "proverb" within situated cognition is "the map is not the territory" - an especially potent fact in mathematics.
Schools with their usually emphasis on an objectivist understanding of knowledge tend to focus on the map. These authors, however call for a rethinking of pedagogy whereby the dialectic relationship between maps and territories can be addressed.
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