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Revisiting Piaget and Vygotsky: In Search of a Learning Model for Technology Education.

Technology education has always aimed at forming knowledgeable adults, responsible citizens, and capable professionals. Among its central objectives are: – Familiarizing pupils with the concepts, artifacts, and skills in a given domain of human achievement; – Enabling pupils, through a cultural approach of that domain, to give it meaning and sense; – Giving pupils a basis for grounding their future vocational choices and acquisistions; and – Contributing, through the specific forms of cogni-tive involvement required by that domain, to the pupils' general intellectual development. This article focuses on the last objective of education: cognitive development. Drawing upon Mitcham's (1978) observation that technology education achieves its objectives via a concern with making and using artifacts, I examine here the relationship between cognition and the use of arti-facts in technology education. The idea is to try, from the context of technology education in France, to contribute to a fuller understanding of human-arti-fact interaction in order to provide more information and further guidance for curriculum design and delivery in technology education. Technology education was first introduced into the national general education curriculum for French middle schools (pupils aged approximatively 13 to 15) in the early 1960s and has been present ever since, although under different forms (Lebeaume, 1996). In this first section, an attempt is made to trace the underlying evolution in general philosophy behind curriculum change during that period and to see how it affects the status of artifacts as didactical objects. Roughly three periods can be distinguished within this evolution. During the initial phase, technology was essentially taught by physics teachers. Curriculum design and curriculum delivery were, however, closely supervised by the influential technical education hierarchy which, within French public education, is in charge of separate technical and vocational school systems. Nonetheless, policy was that technology should be strictly general education and any vocational connotations were avoided. Consequently, the emphasis was non-artifact based, not making or using learning. Curriculum centered on an analytical, logical, and experimental approach of artifacts that were dominantly referred to as " technical objects.'' Textbooks presented elaborate theoretical fomalizations of morphology, function, and kinetics. While this described the scientific status of technology, it contrasted with the triviality of the devices-essentially mechanical-actually studied in class (e.g., the notorious door-latch, which left its brand on a whole generation of teachers and pupils). From the cognitive point of view, this first version of school technology clearly tapped the rational and …