CELA’s research and development activities are based within a constructivist tradition of learning and instruction, complemented by sociocognitive (Langer, 1984, 1987, 1995) and dialogic (Nystrand, 1986, 1997) perspectives. This view holds that both the social context for learning and the interactions of teachers and learners shape what is understood and what is learned. Thus, if the goal is to change learning (teachers’ or students’), then the quality of the pedagogical and professional interactions, as well as what is understood and valued in the subculture of the learning community (in this case the class, school, or professional group) needs to change. Here, we draw from Vygotsky (1968, 1978) and Bakhtin (1981), from neo-Vygotskians such as Wertsch (1985, 1991), Rogoff (1990) and Lave (1988), and from literacy researchers such as Gutierrez (1994), Freedman (Freedman et al., 1999), Sperling (1996, 1997), Smagorinsky (1995, 1999) and Lee (1993, 1995; Lee & Smagorinsky, 2000).

Bakhtin (1981), in his work on the multivocal nature of language and thought, offers us one component of our framework for teacher and student learning. Rather than seeing values and knowledge as comprised of independent skills and proficiencies that are called upon at needed moments, he offers us a vision in which the learner calls upon a multi-layered history of relevant experiences, cutting across many contexts, assuming that multiple and sometimes competing voices (or ways of interpreting) add richness, depth and eventual clarity to emerging ideas. These diverse voices derive from the many contexts in students’ and teachers’ pasts and present. We would expect the learner – whether a novice literacy learner or a seasoned professional teacher – to be able to have opportunities to become aware of, consider, debate, and discuss these various voices and use these as starting points for examination, reflection, study, and change in ways that improve learning. We expect that our mentoring of teachers will add critical new voices and seek to reshape old. The issue of interest is how teachers can be given the opportunity to address the problem at hand (in this case improving student performance in English and literacy) calling upon the "voices" they have already acquired, to gain new voices, to hone their ability to sift through these multiple sources in creating ideas and arguments, and to enter into forms of discourse and investigation that help them move ahead. Vygotsky’s sociohistorical framework (1962, 1978) offers a way to conceptualize professional development as anchored in a context in which the participants can engage in thoughtful examination and discourse about the improvement of student learning because it is an integral part of the "cultural" ways of knowing and doing that underlie how the professional environment operates and work gets done. This is what Greenleaf and Schoenbach (1999) call "generative" professional development.

Related to this notion is the more recent focus of situative theorists (e.g., Brown, Collins, & Draguid, 1989; Greeno, 1997; Greeno & the Middle School through Applications Project Group, 1998; Lave & Wenger, 1991) who posit that the physical and social contexts in which an activity (including opportunities for student or teacher learning) takes place are an integral part of the activity and concomitantly an integral part of the learning. How people learn particular knowledge and skills and the environment in which this learning takes place become a fundamental part of what gets learned, how it is interpreted, and how it is used. Drawing from this perspective, Putnam and Borko (2000) thus argue that teachers will benefit from focusing on various settings that give rise to different kinds of knowledge. We use these related perspectives to conceptualize our sociocognitive perspective on learning; it demands, by its very name, research and instructional attention to the deeply entwined interrelationships between social features (e.g., culture and communication) and cognition in a variety of settings, for students and teachers alike.

A comprehensive reference list is available.