Most educators believe that creativity and the arts should be an important part of the school day. But the arts have been struggling to hold their place in the curriculum. The No Child Left Behind Act, with its mandatory annual testing on math and reading, has increased pressure on schools to demonstrate that their students are proficient in math and reading. Low math and reading scores in some school districts have led to an increasing emphasis on teaching these basic skills. When these pressures are combined with tight budgets, as is often the case in districts with high percentages of underprivileged students, administrators often choose to dedicate a larger percentage of the budget to math and literacy instruction. In exchange, the amount invested in arts education is reduced or removed completely.

It is ironic that the arts are losing their place in school curricula at the same time that creativity is increasingly in demand around the globe. In the last several decades many of the world's most developed countries have shifted from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy (e.g., Bell, 1973; Drucker, 1993). Scholars of the knowledge age have argued that creativity, innovation, and ingenuity are today more important than ever before. Florida (2002) argued that “we now have an economy powered by human creativity” (pp. 5–6) and that human creativity is “the defining feature of economic life” (p. 21). Several best-selling books have extended Florida's argument to the international arena. Dan Pink, in A Whole New Mind (2005), argued that any activity that does not involve creativity will someday be automated; ultimately, the only jobs remaining will be those requiring creativity. Tom Friedman, in The World is Flat (2005), argued that creativity is becoming increasingly important due to increasing global competitiveness. And Tony Wagner, in Creating Innovators (2012), argued that schools need to change to better educate young people to become innovators.

Early in this new century, educators began to realize that if the economy was no longer an industrial-age factory economy, then our schools were designed for a quickly vanishing world (Bereiter, 2002; Hargreaves, 2003; Sawyer, 2006b).

These chapters provide substantial insights into the guiding questions stated in the Introduction: “What is the learning sciences?” and “How did it come to be what it is, and what might it become in the future?” In addition, a more general contribution of this book is to help us answer a much more complex question: “What is a scientific discipline, and how does it form and change over time?” This is the realm of historians of science, who for decades have studied how new scientific disciplines, theories, and methodologies emerge and change over time. Such histories are even more challenging when we are speaking of interdisciplinary sciences – when elements from two or more distinct fields come together to form a new network of relations. This new network attains autonomy and independence, even as the elements remain linked to their foundational disciplines.

In these chapters, we read about the many intellectual currents that joined to form the learning sciences (LS). These currents bubble up, flow quickly or slowly, weave around obstacles, and change direction. They merge with other currents and sometimes synergistically become something very different. I use Foucault's theory (1966/1970, 1969/1972) to explain the interdisciplinary roots and the historical trajectory of LS – the multiple parallel scholarly currents that were active before the interdisciplinary LS emerged and became recognized as its own autonomous scholarly domain. I also use Foucault's theories to analyze the contemporary tensions and contradictions in the field, and discuss how these might drive change in the future. By grounding my analysis in Foucault's theory, I treat this book as a case study in the history of science, one that historians of science may find useful as they analyze other interdisciplinary sciences.

The learning sciences (LS) is positioned as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of how children and adults learn. Generally working outside of a laboratory setting, learning scientists attempt to conduct research in authentic settings to test iteratively designs for new learning environments that results in theoretical insights as well as instructional improvements. The focus of LS research has progressed beyond a sole emphasis on individual cognition to include social and cultural considerations as well as the role of the environments in which learning takes place. LS is marked by collaborations among instructional technologists, educational psychologists, content area educators, anthropologists, computer scientists, linguists, philosophers, and many more. LS is, then, an interdisciplinary approach to the study and facilitation of learning in authentic settings.

The first LS program was formed at Northwestern University in 1991 – so the field will have existed close to a quarter century as this book goes to press. Yet, in all of this time, no book has been published that analyzes “learning sciences” itself. There are now LS programs in at least thirty-five US universities and in several countries around the world, and new programs are being created as we write. Two journals dedicated to LS have been founded (The Journal of the Learning Sciences and The International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning), and an international association, the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), holds annual meetings. An original focus on classroom learning has been supplemented by a growing interest in learning in “informal settings” such as museums, after-school programs, and the home. At the same time, LS is having an increasing impact on policy in areas such as mathematics (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics), science (National Science Education Standards), and engineering education (The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century). In addition, LS has been changing in important ways over the course of its existence and continues to do so. This book is the first to document, explore, and extrapolate from these characteristics of LS.

It is true that articles have appeared that reflect on the history of LS as a whole and of the Journal of the Learning Sciences in particular (e.g., Kirby, Hoadley, & Carr-Chellman, 2005; Kolodner, 2004). In addition, two editions of a massive Handbook have summarized the state of the art (Sawyer, 2006, 2014).