Most
Prominent Contributors
Giambattista
Vico (18th century)
Richard
Rorty (
Jerome
Bruner
Vygotsky
(ZPD,
Piaget
(leaning more toward social cognition)
Dewey
(situated learning, perturbation)
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Definition of
Learning
- Learning is:
active, contextualized process of constructing rather than acquiring
knowledge. It is an acculturation into (or a change in relationship
to) established communities of practice to which the learner is connected
- Instruction
is: process of supporting construction and social-diaogical activities
rather than transmitting or transferring knowledge.
- Education: the
acquisition of the art of knowledge utilization. (Whitehead, 1929)
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Description of
Theory
- Constructivism
(collaborative and cooperative strategies) is the latest “in” thing—they
are perhaps the instructional strategy of the decade.(1990s)
- Knowledge is
constructed based on personal experiences
and hypotheses of the world and are continuously tested for
viability through social negotiation.
- Everyone’s
interpretation and construction of knowledge is different.
- Shared or common
meaning is not as critical as just knowing where your understanding
is in relation to others.
- Truth does not
exist external to society’s constructs (socio-cultural constructivism)
Key terms
- Learning
as experience, activity and dialogical process.
- Viability,
social validity
- Problem
Based Learning (PBL)
- Anchored
instruction
- Zone of
Proximal Development (ZPD or Zo-ped)
- Scaffolding/cognitive
apprenticeship, coaching
- Meaning
negotiation
- Inquiry,
discovery, reflection, reasoning
- MindAsComputer(MAC),
MindAsBrian(MAB), MindAsRhizome(MAR)
- Filled vs.
empty technology
- Perturbation,
puzzlement, disequilibration
Relation to
other theories
- Related
to post modernism and critical theory in that it questions suppositions.
- Reaction
to didactic approaches behaviorism and programmed instruction.
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Initial (knee-jerk)
Reactions
- Constructivists
devalue what can be learned from history—in some respects they seem
bent on having everyone reinvent and thoroughly understand the wheel
for themselves.
- Fosters too
much reletivism and subjectivism for my tastes.
- Rogoff (1994)
negatively describes an adult-run model where “adults have to be concerned
with how to package the knowledge and how to motivate the children
to make themselves receptive”…I say yes!, and what of it?!
- Constructivist
approaches have existed since the earliest Jewish yeshivas.
- I do agree that
students should be taught to be more generative in constructing
their knowledge, and need to be more critical consumers.
- Constructivism
seems like a very laborious, inefficient, resource-intensive (time,
people) process…is their sufficient ROI?
- Constructivist
learning is difficult to assess, measure and implement in today’s
educational system.
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Relevance to Instructional
Systems Design (ISD)
- Not all things
that are called constructivist are constructivist (widely misused
in education, generously applied to anything non-passive or rote.)
- Focus is on
generative, dialogical activities and strategies, not on the content
itself.
- IDs should design
teaching/learning models and environments that provide a framework
for learner control wherein a learner can get assistance (scaffolding)
on an as-needed basis; environments that encourage exploration, inquiry
and discovery AND social interaction to validate (prove viable) their
discoveries.
- Designers/teachers
should recognize the importance of multiple views/perspectives and
allow for them.
- We must prepare
learners to act effectively in particular contexts (prolem solving
etc.) This will usually also include lower level knowledge acquisition.
- Learner control,
hypertext and hyperlinks, more decentralized, multilinear approaches
should all inform the constructivist designer’s practice.
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What I Don’t Know
yet / Questions
- Why is everything
labeled as black or white? There are truths in all of these theories,
and they don’ all require a unique label!
- The definition
of learning as “an acculturation into an established community of
practice” sounds like a fancy way of saying, “you’ll get to know what
we know soon enough in order to participate in our community —we’ll
just make you take the long way (scenic route) to get there.” Is
this as elitist as it sounds? Or is it just the view of radical contructivists?
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