CONSTRUCTIVIST, EMERGENT, AND SOCIOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVES IN THE CONTEXT OF DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH

Our overall intent is to clarify relations between the psychological c ontructivist, sociocultural, and emergent perspectives. We provide a g rounding for the comparisons in the first part of the article by outli ning an interpretive framework that we developed in the course of a cl assroom-based research project. At this level of classroom processes, the framework involves an emergent approach in which psychological con structivist analyses of individual activity are coordinated with inter actionist analyses of classroom interactions and discourse. In the sec ond part of the article, we describe an elaboration of the framework t hat locates classroom processes in school and societal contexts. The p erspective taken at this level is broadly sociocultural and focuses on the influence of individuals' participation in culturally organized p ractices. In the third part of the article, we use the discussion of t he framework as a backdrop against which to compare and contrast the t hree theoretical perspectives. We discuss how the emergent approach au gments the psychological constructivist perspective by making it possi ble to locate analyses of individual students' constructive activities in social context. In addition, we consider the purposes for which th e emergent and sociocultural perspectives might be particularly approp riate and observe that they together offer characterizations of indivi dual students' activities, the classroom community, and broader commun ities of practice.