The breach between learning and use, which is captured by the folk categories “know what'and" know how”, may well be a product of the structure and practices of our education system. Many methods of didactic education assume a separation between knowing and doing, treating knowl-edge as an integral, self-sufficient substance, theoretically independent of the situations in which it is learned and used. The primary concern of schools often seems to be the transfer of this substance, which comprises abstract, decontextualized formal concepts. The activity and context in which learning takes place are thus regarded as merely ancillary to learning–pedagogically useful, of course, but fundamentally distinct and even neutral with respect to what is learned.

Recent investigations of learning, however, challenge this separating of what is learned from how it is learned and used." The activity in which knowledge is developed and deployed, it is now argued, is not separable from or ancillary to learning and cognition. Nor is it neutral. Rather, it is an integral part of what is learned. Situations might be said to co-produce knowledge through activity. Learning and cognition, it is now possible to argue, are fundamentally situated.