Situation as construct. A Critical Review of Objectivist Definitions of the Situation

Abstract

The concept of «situation» plays an important role in the research on teaching-and-learning. In a specific way, it draws the attention to the fact that human learning always takes place under concrete environmental conditions, and that the quality of the result of human learning depends – among other things – on the quality of the learning environment concerned.
The high probability of this statement favours to neglect the issue to what extent the learning environment concerned, in the theory of teaching-and-learning, is not only an independent variable but also, and above all, a dependent variable (depending on learning itself). What is meant by “situation” is not a physical fact but the result of an interpretation of facts, that is a theoretical construct. That is true too for the (quality) characteristics of the situation as postulated by teaching-and-learning theory; these are in particular the authenticity and the complexity of desirable learning environments. The article aims at contributing to the clarification of the concept «situated learning».