In reading over the different chapters in this book, one cannot but acknowledge that they constitute a convincing illustration of the theoretical and practical educational pertinence of constructivism conceived as a theory of cognition. In adopting a constructivist stance toward the individual and collective production of knowledge in different contexts, educators have been able to elaborate and test sound and promising pedagogical practices, thereby showing how it is possible to initiate significant transformations at different educational levels.

In another sense, these chapters also constitute a well-articulated response to some of the criticism constructivism has been subject to lately, in particular for supposedly favoring student-centered pedagogies in line with the dominant individualistic ideology in Western societies (Muller and Taylor, 1995). As one may notice in this book, constructivists do not picture the student as an isolated, almost schizophrenic subject, alone in face-to-face interaction with the world. The intrinsic social character of the educational process is taken into account in numerous ways. For instance, different authors posit that, in the process of the construction of the subject, the alter ego, the other, is constitutive of the self and not an indifferent thing-in-the-world. To be sure, this does not mean that the theoretical discussion about the social or psychological nature of learning has undergone closure in the educational field. However, as Cole and Wertsch (1996) argue, in respect of the debate which has most often crystallized around Piaget and Vygotsky, too much emphasis is put on the opposition between psychogenesis and sociogenesis.