E. Davidsson, A. Jakobsson, (eds.), Understanding Interactions at Science Centers and Museums: Approaching Sociocultural Perspectives, 23–44. © 2012 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. DORIS B. ASH, JUDITH LOMBANA AND LUCIA ALCALA CHANGING PRACTICES, CHANGING IDENTITIES AS MUSEUM EDUCATORS From Didactic Telling to Scaffolding in the zpd INTRODUCTION The main goal of this chapter is to describe how research findings on a scaffolding- focused, reflection-oriented community of practice transformed museum educators’ identities as educators. A second goal is to describe the theory, the multiple methodologies drawing on that theory, and the layered analysis that accompanied this research. Our theoretical lens is sociocultural, placing great emphasis on community building, dialogic negotiation, and ongoing reflection and research on practice. Our research represents the confluence of shifting teaching practices for museum educators, such as noticing what learners do and responding to those new understandings, new language (such as scaffolding), collectively negotiated practices as well as new ways of thinking that redefined the community and its members. We argue that these shifting practices and ways of thinking and talking resulted in a fundamental change in identity from didactic teller to museum educator scaffolding in the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1987). We situate these changes within a new community of practice (CoP) (Lave & Wenger, 1991). We present in this chapter the many different markers of change in functioning of both the community and the individuals in it. Like most of our contemporaries, our research efforts are founded upon and reflect the relevance of constructivist theories and methodologies, advancing the idea that children and adults learn most effectively through personal inquiry experiences with others, rather than didactic teaching and telling. Unlike many of our contemporaries, however, we combine these ideas with the powerful, socioculturally-based theories of Vygotsky (1987) (zones of proximal development and social constructivist view of learning and teaching), Bruner (scaffolding, social learning), communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) and cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 1998, 2001; Wells, 1999). We discuss in this chapter how such theoretical insights can translate to transformative museum educator practices 1 . In the research reported here we have found that embedding reflective practices into a changing community of practice (Ash et al., 2009) has transformed museum educator practices and identities by helping them to think in new ways about