This essay addresses the value of leveraging the unique learning, thinking, and knowledge students develop in home-community spaces for school curriculum. The author explores "everyday resistance" to highlight a particular set of enacted political actions and practices in which students, families, and communities participate to negotiate the…

Although intellectual conflict may be an important instructional tool (because of its potential constructive outcomes), conflict is rarely structured in instructional situations (because of its potential destructive outcomes). Many educators may be apprehensive about instigating intellectual conflict among students because of the lack of…

Clarifies the author's position on constructivism and whether nature determines what is produced as knowledge in human development. The author states his form of constructivism as a theory of rational knowing, not a metaphysics of being, for whatever things we know, we know only insofar as having constructed them as viable entities in our…

Argues against Glasersfeld's (1996) position that individual experience, not metaphysics, dictates that knowing is itself a metaphysical position. It further disputes Glasersfeld's assertion that people are necessarily constructed differently in our minds than objects, but agrees with Glasersfeld that proceeding with the business of education does…

Examines the concept of learning from both constructivist and sociocultural perspectives and introduces a third perspective based on K. R. Popper's philosophy of science. It is argued that constructivism cannot adequately account for the immaterial objects that Popper located in his World 3--abstract mathematical and scientific objects. (GLR)

Argues that mathematical learning should be viewed as a process of active individual construction and a process of enculturation into the mathematical practices of wider society. It further argues that the sociocultural perspective theorizes the conditions for the possibility of learning, whereas constructivist perspectives focus on what students…

Presents a view of the interplay among the various factors of personal experience, language, and socialization in the process of learning science in classrooms. Discusses the problematic relations among scientific knowledge, the learning of science, and pedagogy. (GLR)