ABSTRACT
In Chapters 2 and 3, we referred to a view of learning as mainly being a byproduct of participation in social practices and of becoming a participant in social contexts. However, common forms of institutional learning, normally not depicted as authentic practices from the point of view of the social practice perspective of learning, are fundamentally social. A solitary student, sitting reading a textbook, is trying to find a way into and around a landscape of ideas, concepts, terms and facts shared by others. Scientific knowledge-scientific in a wide sense of the word-is public knowledge. It is in the open and in principle available to everyone. When it comes to teaching-or to being taught-a central idea in our view is that the student should become aware of the teacher’s way of seeing the object of teaching and appropriate it and go beyond it, of course, as we argued in Chapter 6. Nevertheless, seeing something that someone else sees and seeing it as someone else sees it is the baseline of a shared awareness. If we are in the same material and social context, we usually take for granted such a shared nature of the perceived world around us. Such an assumption may turn out to be unjustified-in fact it is quite often unjustified. Frequently, we see a context, a situation or a phenomenon, which ‘objectively’ is the same in qualitatively different ways. If we become aware of others’ ways of seeing this, then we have a certain degree of collective consciousness. We are simply aware of some of the ways in which something appears to others and if we are, we have an interpretative framework for making greater sense of whatever the others may say about the shared object of attention.
