ABSTRACT
In their influential article, Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989) emphasized the importance to education of looking carefully at authentic cognition and of creating cognitive apprenticeships based on authentic tasks, defined most simply as the “ordinary practices of the culture” (p. 34). Our focus on the apprenticeship of pre and in-service teachers (i.e., teacher-learners) has led us toward a consideration of the authentic tasks that would support continued and long-term thinking about classroom cultures, specific problems of practice, and conceptual knowledge. But working within an apprenticeship model inevitably introduces issues of feasibility. For instance, how can we engage teacher-learners in authentic real-world tasks and experiences while staying in the confines of the traditional college and university classroom walls? How can experiences and mentors be provided consistently? Is it possible to provide opportunities to apprentice in a scalable manner?
