I engineered externally controlled, directed learning environments, and was pretty content in doing so. The stuff worked. Life was good. Quite the opposite, I see many very effective applications of both for teaching and learning. But they weren't enough for me.
Kids say and do the strangest things.
I became a parent for the first time in the mid '70s. Their research and theory was influenced heavily by these observations. I wish I had equivalent motivation, but I didn't. Each child, it seemed, evolved his or her own ways to understand and deal with surroundings. Through interactions among things, ideas, and people, interpretations took new forms.