Re: All the way with Piaget

Martin Packer (packer who-is-at duq3.cc.duq.edu)
Sun, 3 May 1998 09:15:14 -0700 (PDT)

The suggestion has indeed been made by a number of people in recent years
that constructivist and sociocultural approaches to learning should in some
way be combined. Paul Cobb, for instance, has said that "each tells half
of a good story." At the same time, others, such as Jere Confrey, have
pointed out that any simple combining of Piaget and Vygostky is not easy or
even appropriate.

What's most important in any such enterprise is, as Naoki Ueno says, not to
assume with Piaget the unchanged existence of an "epistemic subject,"
thereby 'building in' an ahistorical conception of the individual at the
outset.

I have just completed a manuscript (written with Jesse Goicoechea, a
student here at Duquesne) that argues that because the cognitive
perspective emphasizes the learner's active involvement while the
sociocultural perspective emphasizes characteristics of social interaction,
relationship, the setting of activity and historical change, some kind of
reconciliation would be desirable. Such a reconciliation requires,
however, consideration of the ontological assumptions (generally
unacknowledged) that each perspective makes.

Both Piaget and von Glasersfeld, the two figures most often cited as the
sources of constructivism, link their work to Kant, whose philosophy was
notorously dualistic. Kant assumed an ontology of two realms, of the
subject and an independent world.

Sociocultural approaches, in contrast, traced back through Vygotsky to Marx
and Hegel, tend to operate with an implicit non-dualistic ontology. Hegel
was deeply dissatisfied with the Kantian distinction between
things-as-they-are and things-as-they-appear, and attempted to formulate a
new ontology, both historical and cultural. While Hegel's grand scheme has
been questioned, his attempts influenced Marx and subsequent dialectical
materialists, including Vygotsky and Ilyenkov, as well as phenomenologists,
including Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, such post-modernists as Derrida,
Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan, and post-structuralists such as Bourdieu and
Latour.

Jesse and I trace the 'tropes' of this non-dualistic ontology, drawing on
these various writers, and argue that the sociocultural perspective has
tended to neglect the fact that membership of a community is never an
unproblematic enculturation, a simple 'putting into' culture. Community
has its costs--the subject is split and divided. The knowing and learning
subject is always both active and acted upon--and subjectivity is shaped in
interaction; so that the cognitive activity that constructivism emphasizes
is itself the product of participation in particular social practices,
culturally and historically situated. The very formation of an 'inner'
mental realm, one of deliberation and cognition, is a product of specific
practices and forms of relationship.

We end by claiming that learning has three faces. First, becoming a member
of a community--which causes splitting and division in the human subject.
Second, building expertise in the ways of that community. Third, taking a
stand on the culture of ones community. Socioculturalism has focused on
the first (while missing the splitting); constructivism on the second. But
the third face holds the others together: it shows how the person can be
both an active agent and a member of community. Community membership sets
the stage for an active search for identity, the result of which is that
both person and community are transformed....

Martin

===========
Martin Packer
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, PA 15282

office: (412) 396-4852
department: (412) 396-6520

packer who-is-at duq3.cc.duq.edu
http://www.duq.edu/liberalarts/gradpsych/packer.html