Constructivist, emergent, and sociocultural perspectives in the context of developmental research

TLDR

The study adopts a broadly sociocultural perspective, emphasizing how individuals participate in culturally organized practices. The authors aim to clarify the relationships among psychological constructivist, sociocultural, and emergent perspectives and to elaborate a framework that situates classroom processes within school and societal contexts. They develop an interpretive framework through a classroom‑based research project that integrates constructivist analyses of individual activity with interactionist analyses of classroom interactions, then elaborate it to situate classroom processes within school and societal contexts, and finally use it to compare and contrast the three theoretical perspectives.

Abstract

Our overall intent is to clarify relations between the psychological constructivist, sociocultural, and emergent perspectives. We provide a grounding for the comparisons in the first part of the article by outlining an interpretive framework that we developed in the course of a classroom-based research project. At this level of classroom processes, the framework involves an emergent approach in which psychological constructivist analyses of individual activity are coordinated with interactionist analyses of classroom interactions and discourse. In the second part of the article, we describe an elaboration of the framework that locates classroom processes in school and societal contexts. The perspective taken at this level is broadly sociocultural and focuses on the influence of indlividuals' participation in culturally organized practices. In the third part of the article, we use the discussion of the framework as a backdrop against which to compare and contrast the three theoretical perspectives. We disc...