Jerome Bruner is one of the best-known and most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. His theories about cognitive development dominate psychology around the world today, but it is in the field of education where his influence has been especially felt.In this two volume set, Bruner has selected and assembled his most important writings about education. Volume I spans the twenty years from 1957 to 1978 and Volume II covers 1979 to 2006.Volume I starts with a sp...

What have the social sciences to show for decades of systematic investigation of the problems of economic development? What basic problems have they solved and what remains to be done in the development of viable theoretical approaches to this area of research and policy? In an unusually open discussion, thirty-three experts from the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, geography, sociology, and agriculture here present a stimulating re-examination of their accomplishments...

Meg Logan has not been farther than two miles from home in six years. She has agoraphobia, a debilitating anxiety disorder that entraps its sufferers in the fear of leaving safe havens such as home. Paradoxically, while at this safe haven, agoraphobics spend much of their time ruminating over past panic experiences and imagining similar hypothetical situations. In doing so, they create a narrative that both describes their experience and locks them into it.Constructing Panic

In this classic argument for curriculum reform in early education, Jerome Bruner shows that the basic concepts of science and the humanities can be grasped intuitively at a very early age. He argues persuasively that curricula should he designed to foster such early intuitions and then build on them in increasingly formal and abstract ways as education progresses.Bruner’s foundational case for the spiral curriculum has influenced a generation of educators and will continue to be a ...

What we don't know about learning could fill a book--and it might be a schoolbook. In a masterly commentary on the possibilities of education, the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner reveals how education can usher children into their culture, though it often fails to do so. Applying the newly emerging "cultural psychology" to education, Bruner proposes that the mind reaches its full potential only through participation in the culture--not just its more formal arts and sciences, but its way...

The growing child comes to understand the world, makes sense of experience and becomes a competent social individual. First published in 1987, Making Sense reflected the way in which developmental psychologists had begun to look at these processes in increasingly naturalistic, social situations. Rather than seeing the child as working in isolation, the authors of this collection take the view that 'making sense' involves social interaction and problem-solving. They particularly em...

"Education is in a state of crisis. It has failed to respond to changing social needs—lagging behind rather than leading." The crisis that Jerome Bruner identifies in this volume admits of no easy solutions. But the noted American psychologist makes clear that educational reform must begin with the understanding of how a child acquires information and converts knowledge into action. Drawing on his current work on infant development, Bruner underscores the importance of formulating ...

In this characteristically graceful and provocative book, Jerome Bruner, one of the principal architects of the cognitive revolution, sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of mind. According to Professor Bruner, cognitive science has set its sights too narrowly on the logical, systematic aspects of mental life—those thought processes we use to solve puzzles, test hypotheses, and advance explanations. There is obviously another side to the mind—a side devoted to the irrepr...

Jerome Bruner argues that the cognitive revolution, with its current fixation on mind as “information processor,” has led psychology away from the deeper objective of understanding mind as a creator of meanings. Only by breaking out of the limitations imposed by a computational model of mind can we grasp the special interaction through which mind both constitutes and is constituted by culture.

This country’s most challenging writer on education presents here a distillation, for the general reader, of half a decade’s research and reflection. His theme is dual: how children learn, and how they can best be helped to learn—how they can be brought to the fullest realization of their capacities.Jerome Bruner, Harper’s reports, has “stirred up more excitement than any educator since John Dewey.” His explorations into the nature of intellectual growth and its relation t...

Meg Logan has not been farther than two miles from home in six years. She has agoraphobia, a debilitating anxiety disorder that entraps its sufferers in the fear of leaving safe havens such as home. Paradoxically, while at this safe haven, agoraphobics spend much of their time ruminating over past panic experiences and imagining similar hypothetical situations. In doing so, they create a narrative that both describes their experience and locks them into it.Constructing Panic

Interaction in Human Development unites theoretical essays and empirical accounts bearing directly on the nature of interactions as a principal factor and organizing feature in human mental and social development. The papers discuss all areas of interaction including genetic, environmental, life-span, interpersonal, and cultural. Ideal as a text for students and as a reference for professionals in personality, developmental, educational, and environmental psychology, psychotherapy, behavio...