ABSTRACT
This chapter continues with a more formal statement of the assumptions and problems that social culturalists attribute to Enlightenment and Modem thought, both in general, and in psychology and education in particular. This opening section is followed by a clarification of different kinds of social cultural, alternative theorizing and metatheorizing with respect to persons, knowledge, and progress. A subsequent section considers the learner in historical, sociocultural, and developmental context and examines processes of teaching and learning, and the education of persons from a social cultural perspective. Selected examples of social cultural research in each of these areas are presented in considerable detail in order to give readers, many of whom may not be as familiar with social cultural work as they are with more traditional lines of psychological inquiry in education, a clear picture of the theoretical assumptions and types of questions that guide such work, and particular strategies of inquiry that embody and actualize these assumptions and questions. The adoption of this style of presentation necessitates a reasonably detailed consideration of a small number of studies and programs of inquiry to the exclusion of many equally informative investigations. On the other hand, the reader obtains a concrete sense of what was done and why it was done that is not typically available from a more inclusive, but necessarily more cursory, listing of research findings. Despite their relatively small number, the studies selected as examples ofsocial cultural research nonetheless display a reasonably representative array of social cultural concerns and methods, as well as exhibiting work across a considerable range of curriculum areas, instructional contexts, and policy issues. The final section
of the chapter is devoted to a brief, critical consideration of the social cultural perspectives discussed.
