ABSTRACT
For the past half-century, museums, zoos, botanical gardens, and historical reconstructions have been deliberately fashioning a change in their institutional identities. The lack of coherence is exacerbated by the fact that the learning research community has until recently paid scant attention to informal contexts. Sociocultural theory suggests that understanding a phenomenon entails understanding its development. Sociocultural theory can span the wide variety of informal learning contexts that museums provide and their diverse populations of visitors. Sociocultural theory focuses on processes of learning, not simply its outcomes. An exclusive concern with learning outcomes implicitly assumes that learning is a kind of "product" and that visitors are containers who carry that product out with them when they leave the museum. The final criterion for a useful theory, one that winds through all three mentioned above, is that sociocultural theory foregrounds meaning, not just behavior.
