Restructurations: Reformulating Knowledge Disciplines through New Representational Forms

The goals of instruction are usually taken to be fixed, at least in their broad outline. For example, in elementary school mathematics, students progress from counting to addition, multiplication, and fractions. Given this state of affairs, the business of educational research has been to determine how the fixed instructional aims can best be reached. Education researchers have traditionally asked questions such as: What are the typical difficulties that students experience? Which means of instruction – method A or method B – is better for achieving our instructional aims? In contrast, we will describe a line of work in which we have shifted the focus from the means to the object of learning. We are concerned with how the structure and properties of knowledge affect its learnability and the power that it affords to individuals and groups. We briefly review three agent-based restructurations of traditional science content and discuss the consequences for scientific power and learnability.