Here I am, already in that once speculative future, doing pretty much the same thing I was doing then: soaking in the bathtub and trying to figure out which theory better defines my thoughts on experiential learning and education. I seem to be right in the borderlands between situated cognition and enactivism. I might be neither; I might be both. Sometimes I wish there were an automatic diagnostic test I could run that would help me to determine what I'm really thinking.
Perhaps, as Fenwick seems to suggest, it doesn't really matter which camp I fall into, so long as I can understand and articulate the differences and deviations in some significant way.
Situated cognition, associated with researchers such as Brown, Collins, & Duguid (1989), Lave & Wenger (1991), Rogoff (1990), and Greeno (1997), rests on the premise that learning occurs by way of participation in a community of practice. This is something of an "on-the-job-training" kind of approach, where learners interact with others in a socially bound context and engage in the shared tools, values, history, culture, practices, etc. of that context. Novice learners are conceived as peripheral participants working towards the center of the community.
Enactivism (Maturana & Varela, 1987; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) takes a similar stance, in the sense that it understands learning as an embedded process. Fenwick warns, however, against collapsing this conceptualization into that of situated cognition; whereas situated cognition takes the individual as the focal point of learning, enactivism envisions individual development as coemergent with its social and ecological environment. Whereas situated cognition sees learners as working towards an idealized center, enactivism sees learner and multiple systems interacting in a series of what they call "structural couplings," mutually influencing evolutionary dynamics within a web of interconnections.
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