Learning in science can be seen as part of a continuing cultural process of appropriating the achievements of the past and transforming them into a resource for creative and innovative problem-solving in the present and future.

Vygotsky's theory of learning and development can integrate recent research; by conceptualizing the classroom as a Community of Inquiry, we can see how collaborative group work, dialogic knowledge building, and an inquiry-oriented curriculum are essential and interdependent components.

A diverse set of views on education, especially related to goals for student-centered learning.

Describes a new way of classifying uses of educational technologies, based on a four-part division suggested by John Dewey: inquiry, communication, construction, and expression.

A special issue of Focus: A Magazine for Classroom Innovators from the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics & Science Education.

John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher and educator whose writings and teachings have had profound influences on education in the United States. Dewey's philosophy of education, instrumentalism (also called pragmatism), focused on learning-by-doing rather than rote learning and dogmatic instruction, the current practice of his day.

A project-based curriculum is intended to improve the environment for learning in schools -- to give students a fuller spectrum of opportunities for building their strength and confidence as learners.

Perhaps the most influential thinker about education in the late twentieth century, Freire has been particularly popular with informal educators with his emphasis on dialogue and his concern for the oppressed.

A critique of the traditional lesson plan format an inquiry perspective.

A collection of links to research and theory on social and cultural dimensions of learning.

This paper looks at activity systems from the perspective of the World Wide Web and Web publishing. It discusses notions of value surrounding web artifacts and considers the mediational value to the developer of anonymous communities that appropriate one's own online artifacts. The author investigates the significance of referring links from one web document to another, particularly from the socio-cultural perspective of Activity Theory.

Thoughts on inquiry approaches to learning and teaching science.

Provides full-text access to the ERIC Digest of this name which examines the experiental learning theories of John Dewey and applies them to the Foxfire readers.

Part of the website for Society for Constructivism in the Human Sciences, by Michael J. Mahoney, editor of Cognitive and Constructive Psychotherapies. A concise history of constructivism, from Lao Tzu to Ken Wilber, and its five basic themes. Introduces the emerging new "integral movement."