**7. Final remarks**

At the end of this text it is time to answer the questions we put to ourselves at its beginning.

We do assert that Acerola really learned the teacher's lesson, since we established that learning and creating concepts are cognitive operations that blend the material and symbolic objects presented in the environment to the previous knowledge of the learner, and this operation brings new, unique and singular concepts. Notice that Acerola's learning can be attested because his speech selected information with great property: he omitted secondary data about countries and names, but kept the main ideas about the historical moment and motivations for the Royal Family's journey to Brazil.

From what is said above we can say that if he had only repeated the teacher's words, this could not mean learning, because in this situation he would not show precisely the conceptual integration which is the cognitive learning operation par excellence. But we have to stress that the interference of his previous knowledge about social problems in Rio over those historical facts ceases to be part of a learning process and starts to be free interpretation when we cannot identify in his speech the data which came from the objects and ideas found in the environment available as resources for creating new concepts.

The map was a didactic artefact for both the teacher and Acerola, but obviously the latter knew how to use it as a real affordance, because he showed that he could clearly understand the task to transport the students to another place and time, and saw the map as a way to go in this journey. This turned the map into something different from a map of Western World and a map of Rio de Janeiro: a map which cannot be taken as "real", but it was completely meaningful and did pertain to that special moment they constructed in the classroom.

In this chapter we intended to deliver some ideas about learning in institutional environments, from the perspective that human cognition operates and develops itself in a distributed fashion, and within the scope of cognitive niches. Taking this premise into account, discussing how learning occurs in the cognitive niches, and defining the classroom as an essential *locus* where this operation takes place, means taking into consideration not only the person who learns, but also the relationships between people themselves, and between people and context. The best advantage that this perspective can bring lies in the epigraph of this text: the more we search to understand what cognition is, in real contexts of cognitive action, and the more we incorporate to Cognitive Science the evidence that our relationship with the world is interchanged with our ways of thinking, the closer we find ourselves to understand who we are, ultimately. And, doing so, we will be able to effectively help the students who present learning problems - which in the past were considered as their problems, but now are seen as an outcome of how the school is being constituted as a niche and as an institution, relatively to the aims it is created for.

This possibilities bring the task to improve didactic practices and pedagogic projects not only from a better understanding about learning as a cognitive accomplishment, but also from comprehending how it is possible to construct a better institutional structure for this aim. To face this challenge, the body of research in Cognitive Science, especially in distributed cognition, can bring resources for a wide and necessary institutional discussion about learning processes. And the assumption of the classroom as a cognitive niche can materialize the necessary interchange between cognitive and social sciences, because its complete comprehension demands the articulation of cognitive and cultural systems.

However, we must say that the non-autonomist and non-essentialist perspective of cognition, in which we are inscribed, is not turned to define *a priori* how people cognize in a given context. But the fact that the classroom is a normatized space, i.e., a space regulated by social and cultural constraints, elicits an attempt to establish some parameters of the way the students deal with symbolic and material artefacts, and deliver possible understandings about the intersubjective structures that can be found in the classroom. Keeping these purposes in mind, the studies on distributed cognition can ally to other achievements which have pointed to the need to problematize school as an institution – its alleged aims and the historical and ideological basis upon which it is funded, in order to provide the students with a better quality of work and learning, during the time that they are there.
