Non-Situated Learning and the Arts

It is the Christmas season in Cairns and the end of the school year. In art class, Grade 1 & 2 children are folding white square paper into eighths, then making careful cuts into the folds and around the edges. The end result – a snowflake to be displayed on the bulletin board. During music, children sing, “I'm dreaming of a White Christmas” and “Santa Claus is coming to Town.” Sprayed-on snow decorates the mural with the large red sleigh in which sits Santa Claus, decked in long red pants, a red jacket with white fur trim, tall black boots, a toque and scarf.

Situated learning is defined as "a theoretical perspective, the basis of claims about the relational character of knowledge and learning, about the negotiated character of meaning, and about the concerned nature of learning activity for the people involved" (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 33).
Situatedness implies learning through apprentice-style partnerships with experts; often learning through observation rather than with formal teaching. It involves the learners in participating in different tasks with the support of the expert, and gradually introducing more complicated tasks (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Hanks (in Lave & Wenger, 1991) states: "a training program that consists of instructional settings separated from actual performance would tend to split the learner's ability to perform the skill" (p. 21). During this apprenticeship, learners may question the expert about various aspects of the task, as a means of constructing their knowledge. Gradually, support is withdrawn as the learner gains mastery and enters into the realm of the experts. Citing a tailor's apprentice as an example of situated learning, Lave & Wenger (1991)  operating theatre, he literally would be an exercise in incompetence. He could take a cup of tea, take the patient's pulse and do nothing else at all, because basically, technology has obviated his original skills. You've taken a schoolteacher from 1900, put her in a classroom in the year 2000, gave her some chalk and a blackboard, she in most subjects could teach a class. Now that speaks unfortunately against the teaching process.
While situated learning allows learners to participate in the world as it currently exists and is presented by experts, it may be more limited in addressing change; as it affects us now and as etropic 5 (2006): Sorin, Non-Situated Learning and the Arts it will affect the world of the future. According to Sorin & Klein (2002), this is a world where individuals will experience multiple changes, requiring varied learning skills. "The set learning required in twentieth century schooling and career preparation is being replaced with broader based knowledges and skills that enable students to develop active citizenship within a social context" (p.1). Outcomes education crowds curricula with hundreds of contentspecific requirements that position learning as a marathon to be completed within a set period of time, often through sacrificing quality and depth of understanding.
Increasingly in Australia, schooling is moving to produce informed and active citizens who can use their creativity to solve problems and discover new ways of doing things. "Our society will require creative individuals able to communicate well, think originally and critically, adapt to change, work cooperatively, remain motivated when faced with difficult circumstances, who connect with both people and ideas and are capable of finding solutions to problems as they occur" (Department of Education, Science and Training, 2003, p. 5).
Rich Tasks, an educational initiative of the Queensland Government, is one of a number of initiatives that challenge this approach. Aiming to cut through diffuse curriculum, it focuses on building skills to address new and challenging life situations. Crossing disciplines and focusing on citizenship and lifelong learning, this approach aims for "developmental, cognitive and intellectual depth and breadth" as an approach to curriculum planning With reference to the talking rabbits of Beatrix Potter or the wizards in Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings , Egan (2001a) notes that between binaries such as reality and fantasy, imagination "allow(s) much freedom in how they [learners] can go about grasping the etropic 5 (2006): Sorin, Non-Situated Learning and the Arts universe of knowledge." It is through development of the imagination that learners mediate their world, making sense of the unknown through images, words and metaphors.
Imaginative skills, along with other intellectual capacities, see their strongest development in the early childhood years, gradually declining as we move towards adulthood. But a welloiled imagination helps learners "to keep us intellectually flexible, creative, and energetic in modern societies" (Egan, 2001b, p.2). Non-situating learning exercises imaginative skills as it takes learners out of their comfort zone and into areas that challenge their understandings.
Scenarios such as the snow-filled Christmas scene in tropical Australia or jumbucks and billabongs on the Canadian prairies can be consciously introduced as gateways to explore imagination and deep understanding.
Non-situated learning, as the term is used in this paper, does not assume that the teacher is the expert who doles out knowledge to students. Framed by the Reggio Emilia approach to teaching (Edwards, Gandini & Forman, 1993), and the construction of the child as agentic (Sorin & Galloway, 2005), the teacher in non-situated learning acts as a guide and co-learner, helping students to identify and follow learning interests and to find resources with which they can engage to develop their understanding.
Unlike Reggio Emilia, where learning is presented in a home-like environment, with plants, decoration and furniture reminiscent of children's own homes, this approach to learning welcomes unfamiliar environments, where learners' imaginations are required to mediate understanding and explore issues. Learning is not a process of scaffolding what the learner already knows, but a process in which new and unexplored possibilities are introduced (Egan, 2001b). Spencer (1969in Egan, 2001b states: "Children should be led to make their own investigations, and draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible" (p.2).

Non-Situated Learning and the Arts
The arts, partnered with language processes such as storytelling, metaphor-building and poetry writing, assist learning and imaginative processes; from remembering or rote learning through to understanding and applying information to new situations, recognising patterns and relationships, creating new information and evaluating existing knowledge. Egan (2001b) states: "We remember things best when we can locate them emotionally and associate them etropic 5 (2006): Sorin, Non-Situated Learning and the Arts with some vivid image…which helps to account for the greater richness we typically experience from generating our own images from text or listening to an oral story than from seeing images presented to us on film or television" (p.4).
The arts help children to develop their intuitive, creative and imaginative abilities. These in turn lead to reflection and deep understanding of the world around them (Queensland School Curriculum Council, 2001) and of worlds far away (Egan, 2001b).
Learning through the Arts , a Toronto-based program that partners teachers with practicing artists in planning and teaching core curriculum through the arts, is an example of how the arts can be used to develop students' imaginations and understanding. In the Science study of "energy", students would be asked to find three shapes that demonstrate potential energy, to create movements for these shapes, and to combine movements to create a dance about potential energy (Houser & Fisher-Lang, 2003).
Teachers can help students to investigate topics through music; communicate through dance or drama; design new, never-before-seen worlds through visual arts; and create new beings through media. A non-situated learning approach utilising the arts (drama, puppet making, face painting and painting) was trialled in a Grade 1 class in Cairns, Australia to examine some of these ideas. There were twenty children in the class, and a few of them had a minimal idea about the topic, but all had experienced various literacy activities that required them to think creatively and make choices.

Sambo and the Pine Needle Stew
Skunks are as unfamiliar to Australians as sea snakes, bilbys or numbats must be to not only had their own ideas, but ideas from two other children. As a group we shared some of these ideas, including that skunks were furry, had big tails and smelled bad. I then suggested that they might like to get more information about skunks and asked them who could give them more information. From their suggestions), we decided to ask a park ranger.
I told them that I would be the park ranger, and put on my "ranger hat". A drama "hot seat" activity followed where, as ranger I asked for their help in locating the skunk and they asked me for further information about skunks. The children shared their knowledge (from imagining the skunk and from the Rumour Mill activity) and we worked out that skunks are about the size of cats, but with different shaped heads and glands that secrete an odour. We discussed what they eat, where they live and how much of a danger they were to people. This activity seemed to provide them with a clearer understanding of skunks. The classroom teacher commented: "The Ranger act was very effective and the children took your changed roles in stride…the way you wove a story into this by 'looking for the skunk' was powerful when questions were not forthcoming'." I then removed my Ranger hat and resumed the role of "narrator".
In the story, when Sambo encounters the skunk, the family hears "A LOT OF NOISE under the floor" (Swan, 2005). We discussed why this would be and what kinds of noises they might have heard, and I produced a number of items with which the children could make sounds, including, leaves, shredded paper, twigs and percussion instruments. I invited small groups of children to come up and make the kinds of noises that might have been heard under the floor. The sounds each group made were carefully produced to match what children had etropic 5 (2006): Sorin, Non-Situated Learning and the Arts imagined, rather than a loud, raucous free-for-all. During this time, one child remarked that Sambo also would have made a sound, and proceeded to yelp like a dog. Another said that a skunk might thump and hiss, and used a wooden instrument to make a thumping sound, while making hissing sounds with his voice. With these two children leading, I asked the whole group to make a noise together, and they produced a soundscape of the noises under the floor.
This followed with moving like Sambo might have moved when running from the skunk, then like the skunk might have moved. As dogs, their bodies moved rapidly, rolling and running to avoid the skunk. But as skunks their backs curved, claws came out and they moved slowly and stealthily like predators.
When we reached the part in the story where the dog was bathed in tomato juice (to remove the skunk odour), I asked the children to pretend they were getting tomato juice shampoos.
They rubbed their heads and a number of them made faces as they contemplated tomato juice in their hair. The story concluded with the neighbour making a pine needle stew (to replace the skunk odour with nicer scents), which we discussed in great detail, linking pine needles to Christmas trees and colder countries and stew to something you would cook to eat. We talked about other things that could go into a pine needle stew, if you lived in a place where there were no pine trees but you wanted interesting smells. They suggested leavers and flowers.
Three activities followed this second reading of the story. Some children went to collect items to make a pine needle stew (leaves, bark, branches and flowers cooked in a large pot and then cooled); others used face paints to paint themselves to look like skunks; and still others made skunk puppets from the variety of materials provided, including old CDs, Paddlepop sticks, paper, yarn, ribbon, etc.
I had planned to do further activities with the class (painting and collage), but due to time had to limit it to the three activities described above. But before leaving the class, I gave the children two pieces of information: the web address of an informative skunk site and the email address of Billy, the young boy in the story (actually the story's author, who had agreed to answer any questions or comments from the children). I gave them no further information, and the children went to eat their lunches.
The classroom teacher describes what happened after I left the class: The [pine needle stew] 'stewed' over the lunch break and through middle session. Just before afternoon tea at 1:20 we saw, smelled and commented on the [school] stew. By then the stew had become a murky brown colour but the ingredients were still clearly visiblebark, leaves, flowers and sticks. Although many children did not like the smell, they described it as reminding them of 'tea , leaves, flowers, baked beans and bark.' For me, the stew smelled like leaves and bark and it was certainly reminiscent of 'tea'.
During the lunch break, a few children who had painted their faces went to the school canteen to purchase their lunches. They reported: The [canteen] ladies thought we were real skunks and one lady said, "Oh, that's that awful smell." The teacher followed up my activities with a painting activity, where a number of children represented their images of skunks on paper, and a group writing activity where the children wrote to Billy from the story. A few days later, one of the children brought a skunk mask to school that she had made at home with her mother. I printed some of the photos that were taken during my visit and sent them to the class, asking if they could write about the pictures.
The teacher suggested further follow-ups, including: illustrating the story, page by page, making a puppet show with their puppets, researching further information on skunks through the website and books, and writing their own stories from drawings, paintings, and photos taken of the event. In this way, fact and fantasy can combine not only to reach deeper levels of understanding, but also to help develop learning and imagination skills necessary to our ever-changing world.

Scenarios Revisited
Using a non-situated approach to learning could re-focus the scenarios presented at the beginning of this paper so that rather than presenting unfamiliar information in ways that tend etropic 5 (2006): Sorin, Non-Situated Learning and the Arts to limit understanding, they could become opportunities for imaginative learning and developing deeper understanding. Children in Australia could be asked to imagine a cold, white, snow-filled Christmas. They could be encouraged to explore snowflake shapes through movement, could make the sounds of falling snow with musical instruments or could dramatise the reindeer moving the sleigh across the world. They could create their own Australian version of Santaone that would better suit the warmer lifestyle. In turn, Canadian children could imagine a very hot Christmas, where Santa would need a wardrobe re-vamp and may have to substitute reindeer for wallabies and a sleigh for a surfboard. The cold and snow could be replaced by sunshine and droplets of sparkling, misty rain.
In non-situated learning, the jumbucks of my school days could be jumping horse-like animals and waltzing could be animals of many colours and unknown species dancing in fields with swaying, not quite human people. Through dance, drama, art and music, these and other ideas could be explored and facts, introduced as a supplement to this exploration, could then be further developed through the arts.

Conclusion
While situated learning, or learning in context, has long been recognised as an effective way of passing on knowledge and skills from experts to novices, it may be less successful in developing the imaginative and creative skills necessary to deal with change as it is occurring in the 21 st century. Non-situated learning, or taking learning out of context and exploring concepts through the arts, is a way of not only exercising the imagination but of helping to develop deep and rich understanding. This is particularly the case when utilising the arts as a medium for this exploration. Learning becomes not only fun and experimental, but incorporates the visual, auditory and kinaesthetic in ways that can suit every learner and content area.

Bibliography
Department of Education, Science and Training. (2003). Australia's Teachers: Australia's Future -Advancing innovation, Science, Technology and Mathematics. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.