Constructivist discourses and the field of education: Problems and possibilities

Educational Theory

Volumn 52, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 409-428

  Davis, Brent ^a   Sumara, Dennis ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 31144463126     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2002.00409.x     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. An interesting pattern emerged in our searches of the ERIC database. Considered across the past three decades, the numbers of items that come up on a search for "constructivist" or "constructivism" follow a pattern of smooth exponential growth. In the early 1970s, the numbers of records were in the single digits. By the early 1980s, the numbers had increased to two digits, then to three digits in the early 1990s. In, the number passed 1,000. As for the quantities of materials intended for or developed by practicing teachers, a sense of their proliferation might be gleaned from the internet, where the hits for "constructivism + education" number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, depending on the search engine used.2000.
2. Ernst von Glasersfeld, "An Introduction to Radical Constructivism," In The Invented Reality, ed. Paul Watzlawick (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 17-40.
3. For a discussion of the range of conceptual influences on constructivist discourses, see D.C. Phillips, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Many Faces of Constructivism," Educational Researcher 24, no. 7 (1995): 5-12.
4. Glasersfeld, "Introduction to Radical Constructivism.".
5. Johan Muller, Reclaiming Knowledge: Social Theory, Curriculum, and Education Policy (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2000).
6. D.C. Phillips, Constructivism in Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
7. Paul Cobb, "Constructivism in Mathematics and Science Education," Educational Researcher 23, no. 7 (1994): 4-12.
8. Nancy Spivey, The Constructivist Metaphor: Reading Writing, and the Making of Meaning (San Diego: Academic Press, 1997).
9. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
10. Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child, Trans. Margaret Cook (New York: Ballantine, 1954).
11. For a summary of Piaget's ideas over time, see Ernst von Glasersfeld, Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Doing (London: Falmer, 1995), 53.
12. Les P. Steffe and Thomas F. Kieren, "Radical Constructivism and Mathematics Education," Journal for Research in Mathematics Education 25 (1996), 711-33.
13. Jerome Bruner' The Process of Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960) Is one prominent example of a text in which the divergent meanings of structure were undifferentited.
14. Ferdinand dc Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Trans. Wade Raskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).
15. A detailed account of the movement is provided in Joon Fang, Bourbaki: Towards a Philosophy of Modern Mathematics (St. Catharines, Ontario: Paidcia Press, 1970).
16. To be fair, it should be noted that considerable research has been conducted, particularly in mathematics education, into the sorts of physical experiences, linguistic tools, and manners of presentation that might support learners' efforts to make sense of various subject matters. The point remains, however, that in subject-centered constructivist terms, such strategies and emphases are as chains of perturbation and construal.
17. Francisco J. Varela, Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
18. Ernst von Glasersfeld's response to the question, "How does one deal with the question of solipsism?" (emphasis in original). The full text is available on his interactive website at. Last accessed 16 January 2003.
19. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
20. Lave and Wenger Comment that their theory "is not itself an educational form, much less a pedagogical strategy or teaching technique. It is an analytical viewpoint on learning, a way of understand ing learning"; Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning, 40.
21. Paul Ernest, Social Construction as a Philosophy of Mathematics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
22. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seaview, 1971), 54.
23. Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1962).
24. Shaun Gallagher, Hermeneutics and Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
25. John Dewey, The School and Society (1900, 1915); republished in The Child and the Curriculum and The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 99.
26. Bruner's The Process of Education, Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
27. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery [London: Hutchinson, 1959).
28. Lev S. Vygotsky, Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Order Processes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, (emphasis in original).1978), 57.
29. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (New York: Appleton-Century, 1938).
30. John Caputo, Radical Hermeneuties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
31. These statements were taken from the transcripts of an early meeting of a research collective that was assembled to examine the implications of recent developments in the cognitive sciences for teaching and teacher education. See Brent Davis and Dennis Sumara, "Why Aren't They Getting This? Working through the Regressive Myths of Constructivist Pedagogy," in press in Teaching Education.
32. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979) And Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990).
33. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
34. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
35. These matters are developed in Cleo Cherryholmes, Power and Criticism: Post structural Investigations in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988) and Patti Lather, Getting Smart: Feminist Research With/In the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1991).
36. Sigmund Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogart Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1937), 211-53.23.
37. Elaborated discussions of these matters and their educational import are provided in Deborah Britzman, Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
38. Leslie Brothers, Friday's Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
39. Paul R. Ehrlich, Human Natures: Genes. Cultures, and tlie Human Prospect (New York: Penguin Books, 2000.
40. Humberto "Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala, 1987.
41. Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, trans. Jonathan Sydenham (New York: Viking, 1998).
42. John Dewey, "Introduction," In Essays in Experimental Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), 5.
43. John Dewey, "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy," In The Influenceof Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt, 1910), 6.
44. John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum (1902, 1915); repuhlished in The Child and the Curriculum and The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 11.
45. Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001).
46. In this sentence (and in several others), we deliberately violate a rule of expression that is imposed upon much of academic discourse - namely, the avoidance of anthropomorphic expressions (see The Publica tion Manual of the American Psychological Association). Individual human qualities and intentions are not to be applied or ascribed to nonhuman, subhuman, or superhuman events. Such categories, however, are blurred in the nested logics and organizations of complex phenomena. As mathematician John Allen Paulos notes, in reference to the stock market and other complex adaptive systems, "It might even turn out that we're not always being absurdly anthropomorphic when we tell stories about such systems and their moods"; John Allen Paulos, Once Upon a Number: The Hidden Mathematical Logic of Stores (New York: Basic Books, 1994199S), 185.
47. Such moves, of course, are neither new nor sudden. In addition to Darwin's studies of the evolution of species, other pre-complexity sciences instances of this shift in sensibility include Alan Turing's interest in morphogenesis, Jane Jacobs's characterizations of living (and dying) cities, Lynn Margulis's work on emergent biological forms, and Friedrich Engel's discussion of social collectives. Elaborations of these and other examples are provided by John L. Casti, Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World through the Science of Surprise (New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
48. Steven Johnson, Emergences, and M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science on the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
49. Dewey, "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy," 1-2.
50. William Calvin, How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 120.
51. Leslie C. Aiello and Robin I.M. Dunbar, "Neocortex Size, Group Size, and the Evolution of Language," In Current Anthropology. DOI: 10.1086/204160 34 (1993): 184-93.
52. Brent Davis, Dennis Sumara, and Rebecca Luce-Kapler, Engaging Minds: Learning and Teaching in a Complex World (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000).
53. C.A. Bowers, Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability (Athens: University of Georgia Press) and Patti Lather, Getting Smart.2000.
54. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, xxii.