There is considerable agreement about the fact that the presence of researchers in the classroom mediates teaching and learning. Why "should" two very different forms of human activity, one designed to study the other, interact and mediate each other? In this article, we propose cultural-historical activity theory as a framework for understanding…

Reforms of educational practice arise from attractiveness of new ideas rather than from research findings because researchers import frameworks from other disciplines rather than using actual classroom phenomena as a basis for conceptual apparatuses and methods. (JW)

The process of education will be fully understood only by studying it as a process, as a few anthropologists and sociologists have begun to do. The problems of inner city education need more such studies, especially longitudinal investigations of the processes by which exceptional teachers and schools succeed in the education of impoverished…

Teachers engaged in action research are involved in a process that focuses on how they and their students construct and reconstruct learning experiences, thereby extending professionalism and creating additional learning opportunities for students. This paper describes the evolution of an action research project involving an elementary school…