This is an account of what happened in one elementary school classroom when teacher and students dwelt for a while in what Newman, Griffin, and Cole (1989) call the “construction zone,” a realm of socially mediated interactions and Vygotsky's zone of proximal development. The domain was literate exploration of a broad mathematical concept, group theory, a view and a topic usually unavailable to American sixth graders.

My goals (I was at that time the classroom teacher) were to give young students an opportunity “to do what mathematicians do,” to explore and make connections between seemingly disparate realms, to construct mutually a literate understanding of a mathematical principle, to participate in a process of concept formation, and to have time to experience cognitive change. I hoped to develop a mathematically rich context, broad enough to encourage

The instructional methodology was an interactionist literacy framework. I was concerned with maintaining a rich classroom climate that would facilitate three of Vygotsky's findings: first, cognitive change proceeds from interpsychological to intrapsychological; second, school learning introduces the zone of proximal development, which “characterizes mental development prospectively” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 78); and third, “the development of the child's spontaneous concepts proceeds upward, and the development of his scientific concepts downward” (Vygotsky, 1962, p. 108).