Situated Learning and Galperin’s Notion of Object-Oriented Activity

Situated learning theories are largely based on the idea that the knower cannot be separated from the known, i.e. the individual, its context, and its activity in the environment mutually constitute each other. This way of attending the issues of cognition and learning has been heavily criticised by many researchers since sociocultural aspects such as social interaction and tool use are not believed to explain the issues of transfer and generality. The approach developed by Russian psychologist Piotr Galperin (1902–1988), on the other hand, provides substantial support for situated learning theories and should, thus, be considered a valuable complement to the theoretical framework of situated learning.