The social nature of knowing: Toward a sociocultural perspective on conceptual change and knowledge construction

In this chapter, we examine what a sociocultural perspective contributes to the study of conceptual change as represented in the vignettes provided by the editors. The discussion of this question is presented in three parts. In the first part, we describe our approach to a sociocultural perspective. In the second part, we discuss the concept of conceptual change from a philosophy of science perspective building on the work of Toulmin (1972). As part of this discussion, we describe how Posner and Strike and their colleagues (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1982; Strike & Posner, 1992) used this approach to construct a theory of conceptual change in education, and how our sociocultural approach extends this work to provide new understandings of factors that support and/or constrain conceptual change in classrooms.