Philosophy and Transactional Perspective in Learning Sciences

Introduction

Transaction is an important notion in the learning sciences because it extends and improves upon important insights from the literature on the situated and distributed nature of cognition to also include a temporal dimension (Roth and Jornet 2013). When investigating the learning in some classroom, researchers drawing on the transactional approach no longer assume that students do what the curriculum design intended them to do. Instead, they look at behaviors and performances arising in the situation and identify those features of the environment that students actually take up in their actions and talk. Teachers intending to solicit the same or similar behaviors (practices) from different students or student groups provide different materials allowing students to select those that most speak to them and with which they can enter in correspondence. Teachers also come to understand that they never are or can be in the control over the lived (enacted) curriculum, however...