Constructivism in Education

Leslie P. Steffe, Jerry Gale, Leslie P. Steffe, Jerry Gale

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136476082
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

Unique in offering a multidisciplinary perspective on key issues of alternative epistemologies in education, this collection includes contributions from scholars in family therapy, epistemology, and mathematics, science, and language education. These respected researchers were brought together to develop the theme of constructivism as it applies to many diversified fields. This book examines key distinctions of various constructivist epistemologies, comparing and contrasting the various paradigms. Each section provides both keynote positions on a particular alternative paradigm as well as critical comments by respondents regarding that position. Several chapters also present a synthesis of the alternative epistemological perspectives.

I

Radical Constructivism and Social Constructionism

1

A Constructivist Approach to Teaching

Ernst von Glasersfeld

Scientific Reasoning Research Institute
University of Massachusetts
and
Institute of Behavioral Research
University of Georgia

The development of a constructivist theory of knowing has been the focus of my interest for several decades. It was a philosophical interest that arose originally out of work concerning first the structure and semantics of several languages and later cognitive psychology. Therefore, the title of this chapter may need an explanation. Rosalind Driver, Reinders Duit, Heinrich Bauersfeld, and Paul Cobb can speak about teaching from their own immediate experiences, whereas I have never taught any of the subjects in which readers are experts. When I focus on the theory of constructivism, one may wonder why a proponent of such a peculiar theory of knowing should have anything to say about education in mathematics or science. It is a question I have often asked myself. If all goes well, some justification will be seen at the end of my essay.

One general observation has encouraged me to move in this direction. Education may never have been considered good enough, but whatever its methods and effectiveness were, it seems to have suffered a decline during the last 20 or 30 years. Today, there is a general consensus that something is wrong because children come out of school unable to read and write, unable to operate with numbers sufficiently well for their jobs, and with so little knowledge of the contemporary scientific view of the world that a large section still believes that the phases of the moon are caused by the shadow of the earth.

This has been said not only in official reports, but also by a particularly keen observer of society, the comedian Mark Russell. In one of his recent talks, he made exactly the three points that I just mentioned. The audience laughed because it expects parody or jokes from a comedian. But in this case, he was being serious. Then he added: “Give the teachers more money, and they will teach the right answers.” That was the parody.

Unfortunately, this remark portrays only too well an attitude that has gained ground through the years in school boards, commissions, and, of course, Washington, DC. It is a fatal attitude. Money does not change the philosophy of education, and a philosophy of education that believes in teaching right answers is not worth having.

As a constructivist, I cannot pretend to have an “objective” view of how this dismal misconception came about, but I have a view nonetheless. As I see it, the main root of the trouble is that, for 50 years in this century, we have suffered the virtually undisputed domination of a mindless behaviorism. The behaviorists succeeded in eliminating the distinction between training (for performance) and teaching that aims at the generation of understanding. All learning was reduced to a model that had been derived from experiments with captive pigeons and rats. Its fundamental principle was the “law of effect,” in which Thorndike (1931, p. 101) formulated the not altogether novel observation that animals, including us, tend to repeat the actions that, in their experience, led to satisfactory results. The behaviorists reformulated this by saying that any response that is “reinforced” will be repeated, and then they turned it into a “learning theory” based on the power of reinforcement.

For education, this learning theory has had unfortunate consequences. It has tended to focus attention on students’ performance rather than on the reasons that prompt them to respond or act in a particular way. Reinforcement fosters the repetition of what gets reinforced, regardless of the acting subject’s understanding of the problem that was posed, and of the inherent logic that distinguishes solutions from inadequate responses. Thus, training may modify behavioral responses, but it leaves the responding subject’s comprehension to fortunate accidents.

PROBLEM SOLVING

Some 15 years of research on reasoning at the University of Massachusetts have shown that first-year physics students come quite well trained to give the “right” answers to standard questions. However, when asked to solve a simple problem that is in some way different from the familiar ones of the textbooks, they reveal that they have no understanding of the conceptual relationships indicated by the symbols in the formulas they have learned by heart.

It certainly is not one single factor that is responsible for this state of affairs. I suggest at least a couple. One is the still widespread notion that competence in intelligent behavior could be achieved by drilling performance. This belief has been thoroughly exploded. The many references in contemporary reports to the need to teach problem solving are an eloquent symptom. The solving of problems that are not precisely those presented in the preceding course of instruction requires conceptual understanding, not only of certain abstract building blocks but also of a variety of relationships that can be posited between them. Only the student who has built up such a conceptual repertoire has a chance of success when faced with novel problems. Concepts cannot simply be transferred from teachers to students—they have to be conceived.

The second factor is more delicate and perhaps more insidious. Science, having to a large extent replaced religion in the 20th century, is all too often presented as the way to absolute truth. Yet even high school students have the intuitive awareness that the certainty of mathematical results is something different from the truth claims of biology or physics. If mathematics were explained as a way of operating with a particular kind of abstractions and science as a way of building models to help us manage the world we experience, some of the latent resistances might be allayed. But this, again, would require some delving into conceptual foundations.

It is the growing awareness of this need for conceptual development that has begun to raise the question of how conceptual development should be approached and how it could possibly be fostered. These are questions about knowledge—questions that concern its structure as well as its acquisition. To answer them, one needs a theory of knowledge or, as philosophers say, an epistemology. This is the area in which constructivism has attempted to introduce a new perspective.

Before explaining some aspects of the constructivist approach, I want to forestall a misunderstanding that I may have sometimes helped to create. From what I have said, it should be clear that I am interested in conceptual understanding and performance only insofar as it springs from, and thus demonstrates, such understanding. What I am going to say will deal exclusively with the construction of conceptual knowledge. This does not mean that, from the constructivist point of view, memorization and rote learning are considered useless. There are, indeed, matters that can and perhaps must be learned in a purely mechanical way. The teaching of these matters, however, does not present problems beyond the problem of generating the required discipline in the students. Although I believe that a constructivist approach to conceptual development can help to engender a rapport between teacher and student and a propitious mood among the students, the creation of discipline is essentially a task with which teachers have far more experience than any theoretician.

CONSTRUCTIVISM

Although I do not continually cite Piaget, I sincerely hope one realizes that almost everything I write herein can be written only because Piaget spent some 60 years establishing the basis for a dynamic constructivist theory of knowing.

The reviewer of a paper I recently wrote made a remark that truly delighted me. Constructivism, she said, is postepistemological.¹ 1 am sure most readers have come across the now fashionable expression postmodernist. Postepistemological not only fits this fashion, but it also helps to convey the crucial fact that the constructivist theory of knowing breaks with the epistemological tradition in philosophy.

Constructivism arose for Piaget (as well as for Giambattista Vico, the pioneer of constructivism at the beginning of the 18th century) out of a profound dissatisfaction with the theories of knowledge in the tradition of Western philosophy. In this tradition, the basic epistemological concepts have not changed throughout the 2,500 years of our history, and the paradox to which these concepts lead has never been resolved. In this tradition, knowledge should represent a real world that is thought of as existing, separate and independent of the knower; and this knowledge should be considered true only if it correctly reflects that independent world.

THE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE

From the beginning, in the 5th century B.C., the skeptics have shown that it is logically impossible to establish the “truth’’ of any particular piece of knowledge. The necessary comparison of the piece of knowledge with the reality it is supposed to represent cannot be made because the only rational access to that reality is through yet another act of knowing.

The skeptics have forever reiterated this argument to the embarrassment of all the philosophers who tried to get around the difficulty. Nevertheless, the skeptics did not question the traditional concept of knowing.

This is where constructivism, following the lead of the American prag-matists and a number of European thinkers at the turn of this century, breaks away from the tradition. It holds that there is something wrong with the old concept of knowledge, and it proposes to change it rather than continue the same hopeless struggle to find a solution to the perennial paradox. The change consists of this: Give up the requirement that knowledge represent an independent world, and admit instead that knowledge represents something that is far more important to us, namely what we can do in our experiential world, the successful ways of dealing with the objects we call physical and the successful ways of thinking with abstract concepts.

Often when I say this, there are some who protest that I am denying reality. It is foolish to deny the existence of reality, they say—it leads to solipsism, and solipsism is unacceptable. This is a basic misunderstanding of constructivism, and it springs from the resistance or refusal to change the concept of knowing. I have never denied an absolute reality, I only claim, as the skeptics do, that we have no way of knowing it. As a construedvist, I go one step further: I claim that we can define the meaning of to exist only within the realm of our experiential world and not ontologically. When the word existence is applied to the world that is supposed to be independent of our experiencing (i.e., an ontological world), it loses its meaning and cannot make any sense.

Of course, even as constructivists, we can use the word reality, but it is defined differently. It is made up of the network of things and relationships that we rely on in our living, and on which, we believe, others rely on, too.

KNOWLEDGE IS ADAPTIVE

From the constructivist perspective, as Piaget stressed, knowing is an adaptive activity. This means that one should think of knowledge as a kind of compendium of concepts and actions that one has found to be successful, given the purposes one had in mind. This notion is analogous to the notion of adaptation in evolutionary biology, expanded to include, beyond the goal of survival, the goal of a coherent conceptual organization of the world as we experience it.

An animal that we call adapted has a sufficient repertoire of actions and states to cope with the difficulties presented by the environment in which it lives. The human animal achieves this with relative ease, but the human thinker must also cope with the difficulties that arise on the conceptual level. The independent reality relative to which one speaks of adaptation does not become accessible to human cognition, no matter how well adapted the knower might be. This reality remains forever behind the points where action or conceptualization failed.

The shift to this postepistemological way of thinking has multiple consequences. The most important is that the customary conception of truth as the correct representation of states or events of an external world is replaced by the notion of viability. To the biologist, a living organism is viable as long as it manages to survive in its environment. To the constructivist, concepts, models, theories, and so on are viable if they prove adequate in the contexts in which they were created. Viability—quite unlike truth— is relative to a context of goals and purposes. But these goals and purposes are not limited to the concrete or material. In science, for instance, there is, beyond the goal of solving specific problems, the goal of constructing as coherent a model as possible of the experiential world.

NECESSARY CONCEPTUAL CHANGES

The introduction of the concept of viability does away with the notion that there will be only one ultimate truth that describes the world. Any description is relative to the observer from whose experience it is derived. Consequently, there will always be more than one way of solving a problem or achieving a goal. This does not mean that different solutions must be considered equally desirable. However, if they achieve the desired goal, the preference for a particular way of doing this cannot be justified by its Tightness, but only with reference to some other scale of values such as speed, economy, convention, or elegance.

These are conceptual changes that are difficult to carry through. If one seriously adopts the constructivist approach, one discovers that many more of one’s habitual ways of thinking have to be changed. Rather than burden the reader with further theoretically unsettling particulars, I give some experiential examples of conceptual building blocks that are our own construction.² It may help to make the constructivist view seem a little less unwarranted.

THE REALITY OF A CONSTELLATION

Among the constellations in the northern hemisphere that were well known at the beginning of Greek culture in the first millennium before Christ, one is called Cassiopeia. The Cassiopeia is opposite the Big Bear or Big Dipper, on the other side of the Polar Star. It has the shape of a W or, as the Greeks said, of a crown. The shape has been known and recognized for thousands of years, and it served the navigators of all times to find their way across the seas. It has not changed and has proved as reliable, as “real,” as any visual percept can be.

For an astronomer, the five stars that are taken to compose the W have Greek letters as names, and the astronomer can tell how far these stars are from those who observe them from this planet. Alpha is 45 light years away, Beta 150. The distance to Gamma is 96, to Delta 43, and to Epsilon 520 light years. Consider this spatial arrangement for a moment. If you moved 45 light years toward Cassiopeia, you would have passed Delta and you would be standing on Alpha. The constellation would have fallen apart during your journey. If you moved sideways from our earth, it would disintegrate even more quickly. Where, then, does this image called Cassiopeia exist? The only answer I can suggest is that it exists in our minds. Not only because it is relative to the point from which we look, but also because it is we who pick five specific stars and create a connection between them that we consider appropriate.³ This picking out and connecting is part of what I call the subjective construction of our experiential world.

THE COASTLINE OF THE BRITISH ISLES

A few years ago, a mathematician by the name of Benoit Mandelbrot invented what has become famous as the theory of fractals. In one of the presentations of his theory, he posed a question that seemed quite ridiculous. He asked, what is the length of the coastline of the British Isles? At first glance, there seems to be no problem at all. If the figure is not already known, one would simply make the necessary measurement. But here is the hidden question: How should one measure it? If you do it by the usual method of triangulation, what you measure are the distances between the points you choose for your triangulations, not the coastline. Clearly, if you took a foot ruler and actually measured the coastline, you would run into difficulties. Apart from the time it would take, there would be innumerable places where you would have to decide whether the waterline around a rock, a sandbank, or a pebble should be counted as coastline. Imagine what would happen if you had to do the measuring on the level of molecules—it could not be done at all. In either case, the result would obviously be much larger.

Again one might ask, where does the coastline of the British Isles exist? Again the answer has to be that it is something we construct—something that is very reasonable and appropriate in the conceptual contexts in which we want to use it. Take away the conceptual contexts we have created, and the notion of coastline ceases to have meaning.

THE IDEA OF EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE

The third example is nearer to home for teachers. You go to a chalkboard, draw something, and then turn to your class and say, this is a triangle and because its sides are the same length we call it equilateral. Those students in your class who happened to be listening have no difficulty understanding what you said. They could now all draw an equilateral triangle for themselves. That is not the problem. The point is that neither the tr...