Abstract
The lion's share of my current research program is devoted to the study of learning in the blooming, buzzing confusion of inner-city classrooms. My high-level goal is to transform grade-school classrooms from work sites where students perform assigned tasks under the management of teachers into communities of learning (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1989; Brown & Campione, 1990) and interpretation (Fish, 1980), where students are given significant opportunity to take charge of their own learning. In my current work, I conduct what Collins (in press) refers to as design experiments, modeled on the procedures of design sciences such as aeronautics and artificial intelligence. As a design scientist in my field, I attempt to engineer innovative educational environments and simultaneously conduct experimental studies of those innovations. This involves orchestrating all aspects of a period of daily life in classrooms, a research activity for which I was not trained. My training was that of a classic learning theorist prepared to work with "subjects" (rats, children, sophomores), in strictly controlled laboratory settings.
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