constructivism

Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Sun, 28 Apr 1996 20:09:44 -0700 (PDT)

About constructivism. I no longer have copies of my messages on the
subject, so I do not know in what context, if any, I might have associated
constructivism with chaos in classrooms. To avoid giving more offense
than necessary, let me clarify briefly. I complained about certain
varieties of constructivism, not all of them. And my complaint is not
that the teachers imposed no structure or had no educational goals in
mind. The complaint, rather, was that the structure and goals were often
partly hidden, so that children were overtly encouraged to express their
own natural selves while covertly being encouraged to conform to a set
of values or right answers etc whose nature was not made clear, and whose
existence might even be denied.

I see this complaint as one application of the familiar Vygotskian
critique of Piaget, or at least the critique of a certain simplified
version of Piaget. Vygotsky's insight was that, although children
do construct their own knowledge in an important sense, they do so by
appropriating cultural materials (mediating symbols and interactional
patterns in the context of joint activities). My complaint is with those
varieties of constructivist teaching that do not supply enough of these
materials. This will happen inevitably, despite the best of intentions,
when a distinction is not adequately made between the construction of
individual knowledge (which all children must do as they learn) and
the construction of the cultural materials from which knowledge is made
(which societies do on a collective basis and individual children cannot
do on their own).

I vividly remember from my own childhood schooling the kind of situation
I'm complaining about: I am trying to do what the teacher wants, and I'm
stuck, and I can't figure out what the next step is supposed to be, and
nobody will help me (apparently on purpose), and if I ask what to do then
I'll simply be asked what I think or given some excruciatingly indirect
hints, and if I express my own opinion about what the answer ought to
be (a rare event, at least where I went to school) then everybody will
pretend to be happy while obviously being unhappy inside, or pretend to
encourage me while obviously being surprised and angry. I particularly
remember the tortures of the extra-special constructivist math lessons
to which I was subjected because I was so good at math. This was the
occasion of my second courageous rebellion in school, after I refused
to learn cursive script. I see these lessons in retrospect as a kind
of starvation: the teachers figured that I was supposed to construct
the knowledge for myself, like I was Leonhard Euler or something, so
they deliberately withheld from me the materials I needed to do this.
I realize that things have changed somewhat since then. In any case,
I think it would have been better to arrange joint activities based on
legitimate peripheral participation, in which everyone gets the guidance
they need to keep going in the activity, without anything ever being
hidden for very long.

Phil Agre