ABSTRACT
Lewin raises four major issues for constructivism in the opening chapter of this section: how we think of ‘self’ within a constructivist framework; how constructivism addresses the notion of paideia-‘the complete process of education through which one becomes a competent participant within a culture’; how science and mathematics differ from the humanities because of different constraints and forms of viability in them; and whether constructivism should produce an ethics of the field. Lewin’s concern with ‘self’ is that without some understanding of how our being arises from our situatedness in time, we are cut off from understanding our conditions as biological organisms and historical persons. Although asking questions about what constitutes self may seem unrelated to mathematics and science education, the way in which students construct their relationship to knowledge (mathematical or scientific) and to their learning and doing of the knowledge in question is one of the major problems confronting constructivist educators in these fields.
