**1. Introduction**

In 2002, the first season's first episode of the Brazilian TV series City of Men, named "The Emperor's Crown", began with a scene of a History lesson in a public school of Rio de Janeiro. The teacher described the facts related to the journey of the Royal Portuguese Family from Portugal to Brazil in 1808, to escape from the threat of Napoleon's inbreak. She used a map of the Western World as a support to locate some countries involved in important historical events in the early nineteenth century: France, England, Germany, Italy, Russia, Portugal and Brazil. The children, characterized as students who lived in the slums built on the hills of Rio de Janeiro, asked questions about information not given by the teacher, but objects of interest to boys and girls familiar with the slum environment in Rio: modern weapons handling, war, violence and death. Some students expressed that the subject of the lesson was not clear for them (one of them thought that there was a participation of the Ancient Romans in the episode), and some had problems about the meaning of some words, such as the polysemous Portuguese word "coroa" (in English "crown"), but their doubts and questions were not solved by the teacher.

At the end of the episode, one of the students, called Acerola (actually a nickname), faced with the need to repeat the information given by the teacher, went towards the map and transposed the History of napoleonic invasions to the current reality of Rio: the countries became hills, each one of them managed by a head, who behaved as a brazilian druglord; the trade of manufactured goods and raw materials, which were pivotal do the emergent industrial capitalism, became drug trade; Brazil, which was a colony of Portugal at that time, became an immense and available space for occupation, conquer and mightiness. But

© 2012 Lopes Magela Gerhardt, licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

in Acerola's narrative there was still a great lord who wanted to be the biggest leader of all the neighborhood, and for this aim he sent agents he trusted to govern the conquered territories and eliminate possible or real enemies.

Learning in Cognitive Niches 3

This idea, called the Distributed Cognition Hypothesis, enables us to establish for the learning environment the status of a cognitive niche: a dynamic setting where cognitive actions modify the cognizer's behavior and also the environment features and properties,

As to the learning niches, it is important to discuss the idea of affordances, features that emerge from the meaningful relationship between species and environment and are fundamental in the discussion about concept formation, learning, and the value of cognitive

To speak about these issues we are guided by works on cognition which propose a specific mode of observing human actions and cognitive behaviours which establishes that the very act of thinking is not bounded to the brain and the visual system; rather, mind is constructed in a process that includes brain, body and the environment around them. Under this view, the person is someone able to, through reasoning, planning, learning and many other cognitive actions, change himself/herself and the place where he/she lives, interacts and develops.

These premises enable us to relate ideas on environmental perception to facts of conceptualization and meaning construction. Ultimately, it broadens our understanding of what is learning and favors the formulation of pedagogical projects based on the understanding of the learner's cognitive behavior in the classroom environment. In this sense, pedagogical projects which observe the artefacts of the environment as learning resources can accomplish a more productive and authentic relationship among the learner,

The next sections briefly discuss the Distributed Cognition Hypothesis, which is the context of the studies on cognition which emerge from the possibility of observing the ecological dimension of the aspects related to cognitive actions, their motivations and effects. This perspective leads us to recognize the cognitive niches as a level of analysis for studies of learning within the school institution. Subsumed to the idea of cognitive niche, we stress the notion of affordance as a central component of the niche, and the forms of thinking about learning in cognitive niches through the perspective of the detection of affordances. We will focus specifically on didactic actions which can conduct to good or

The Distributed Cognition Hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Hutchins, 1995, 2000; Sinha, 2005, 2010; Bardone, 2011, among others) brings the idea that the continuity among brain, body and the environment structures cognition. Following this premise, studies on distributed cognition are concerned about identifying and describing cognitive processes in

The works affiliated to this hypothesis propose the rupture of the boundaries between internal and external representations and domains of experience, and generate new prospects for the view of what cognition is: no longer biased to the internal or the external

including everything which can be perceived in there.

the contents to be learned and the forms of learning.

**2. The distributed cognition hypothesis** 

terms of the relationship between person and environment.

bad results in classroom activities.

artifacts employed in didactic practices.

Acerola's explanation reveals that he has clear in his mind that the Portuguese Royal Family had to scape to Brazil because of territorial dispute and power interests in 19th century, but we cannot ensure if he knows that, as he "repeats" the teacher's story, he talks about Napoleon, and not about some druglord; and about Europe, not Rio de Janeiro. In other words, by now we cannot be sure that Acerola understood that the invasions and contentions of the 19th century did not happen in the same terms, motivations and conditions which outline many events that we witness nowadays.

This chapter is about Acerola's speech, and the learning questions it arises: can we assert that Acerola really learned the teacher's lesson? What criteria should we employ to say that he learned it or not? If he only had repeated the teacher's words, this could mean learning? To what extent the interference of his previous knowledge about social problems in Rio over those historical facts ceases to be learning and starts to be free interpretation? And as to the map, which was a didactic artefact for both, the teacher and Acerola: is it the same object in both narratives, or could it be, respectively, a map of Western world and afterwards a map of Rio de Janeiro? Or could it be a third thing whose existence lasted only during the time that Acerola told his version of the story?

Whatever the answers we offer to these questions, they do not belie the fact that Acerola actively interacted not only with the contents expressed by the teacher in such a way to deeply alter them, but he also changed the object around which the lesson was taught – the map. Therefore, our answers must take into account his important agentic actions over the classroom setting, and the fact that these actions are closely related to his degree of learning.

To argue about these issues, this chapter aims to present the theoretical basis for observing learning as an agentic accomplishment based on a two-way affectment between the learner and the environment, and as an "adaptive reorganization of a complex system" (Hutchins, 1995, p. 289). As we define this theoretical basis, we need to raise three important criteria in order to not only discuss issues brought up on the observation of Acerola's actions in the classroom, but also establish how we can adjust this concept of learning to institutional terms: what is the view of cognition which allows us to recognize learning not only as internalization of concepts but also an action over the environment; what is the constitution of the learning environment which allows this twofold relationship; through which means it is possible to observe the didactic artifacts found in this environment, and how they contribute and are representative for learning as a cognitive action of constitutive interchange between person and environment.

This three criteria lead us to observe cognition in a distributed fashion, in order to postulate that the use of the environment in the cognitive elaboration does enhances cognitive action, through the access to more resources available than the neural apparatus.

This idea, called the Distributed Cognition Hypothesis, enables us to establish for the learning environment the status of a cognitive niche: a dynamic setting where cognitive actions modify the cognizer's behavior and also the environment features and properties, including everything which can be perceived in there.

As to the learning niches, it is important to discuss the idea of affordances, features that emerge from the meaningful relationship between species and environment and are fundamental in the discussion about concept formation, learning, and the value of cognitive artifacts employed in didactic practices.

To speak about these issues we are guided by works on cognition which propose a specific mode of observing human actions and cognitive behaviours which establishes that the very act of thinking is not bounded to the brain and the visual system; rather, mind is constructed in a process that includes brain, body and the environment around them. Under this view, the person is someone able to, through reasoning, planning, learning and many other cognitive actions, change himself/herself and the place where he/she lives, interacts and develops.

These premises enable us to relate ideas on environmental perception to facts of conceptualization and meaning construction. Ultimately, it broadens our understanding of what is learning and favors the formulation of pedagogical projects based on the understanding of the learner's cognitive behavior in the classroom environment. In this sense, pedagogical projects which observe the artefacts of the environment as learning resources can accomplish a more productive and authentic relationship among the learner, the contents to be learned and the forms of learning.

The next sections briefly discuss the Distributed Cognition Hypothesis, which is the context of the studies on cognition which emerge from the possibility of observing the ecological dimension of the aspects related to cognitive actions, their motivations and effects. This perspective leads us to recognize the cognitive niches as a level of analysis for studies of learning within the school institution. Subsumed to the idea of cognitive niche, we stress the notion of affordance as a central component of the niche, and the forms of thinking about learning in cognitive niches through the perspective of the detection of affordances. We will focus specifically on didactic actions which can conduct to good or bad results in classroom activities.
