CONCEPT
Situated Meaning
Gee's principle that the meaning of any concept is embedded in the specific contexts of experience through which the learner encountered it — not the dictionary definition but the textured, embodied understanding of how the concept behaves in practice.
Situated meaning is Gee's foundational concept for distinguishing decontextualized knowledge (what textbooks provide, what AI can generate on demand) from the rich, textured, experientially grounded understanding that develops through practice in specific contexts. A computer science student who has read about constraints knows the definition. A developer who has spent three weeks watching a scheduling system fail because she misunderstood how constraints interact possesses situated meaning — knowledge of how constraints behave, how they cascade, what they feel like when they're about to break. Situated meaning is more durable than abstract knowledge, more transferable across contexts (counterintuitively), and more generative, because it supports the kind of judgment that lets a practitioner recognize novel problems as instances of familiar patterns.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Gee developed situated meaning through his study of literacy, observing that reading and writing are not abstract skills separable from the Discourses within which they are practiced. A person