ABSTRACT
In Democracy and Education, Dewey (1916/1944) described the interrelations between the notions of commonalties, community, and communi-cation. He wrote, “Men live in a community in virtue of the things which they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things
in common” (Dewey, 1916/1944, p. 4). Although stated differently in different chapters, the perspectives in this book all appear to be consistent with Dewey’s premise in that what students come to have in common evolves through successive iterations of symbolizing, mathematizing, and communicating. The implication of this assertion leads many of the contributors to call for analyses that incorporate both cultural and psychological processes when attempting to account for individual activity within a given classroom microculture. For example, Bransford et al. (chap. 8) conclude:
Sfard (chap. 3) contends that a coordination of social and cultural factors may lead to a reconceptualization of earlier views of symbolizing. She argues that although symbolizing was once viewed as a one-way process in which one “baptized an object” or attached a linguistic placeholder to an already extant object, she, and many of the authors in this book have come to characterize the relationship between symbolizing and learning as reflexive. In this reconceptualization, symbolizations and meanings are continually revised as students reorganize their current ways of knowing while communicating with others in their classroom community. This is aptly captured in Sfard’s metaphor describing the relationship between discourse and meaning as “two legs that make the movement forward possible thanks to the fact they are never in the same place, and at any given stage, one of them is ahead of the other.” This is also echoed in van Oers’ view (chap. 5) that “meanings and signs inextricably go together and develop concurrently.”
