In this article, I offer a synthesis and a clarification of important aspects of the constructivist theory of learning – under its “radical constructivist” version as developed and promoted by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Drawing from a few of the key principles of constructivism – specifically, concepts of fitting, of reality, of learning, and of the subjectivity-objectivity dialectic – I address issues that have emerged in recent efforts to adapt, assimilate, or apply the theory within varied educational and theoretical contexts. The point is then made that constructivism is not theory of teaching, but a theory of learning. As such, it is argued that constructivism brings a proscriptive discourse on teaching, one that sets boundaries in which to work, but does not prescribe teaching actions. In that sense, constructivism offers implications on pedagogy and on our ways in which we approach the teaching act, and not prescriptions or already made solutions.
But all kinds of experience are essentially subjective, and though I may find reasons to believe that my experience may not be unlike yours, I have no way of knowing that it is the same. (von Glasersfeld, 1995a: 1)
Knowledge cannot and need not be “true” in the sense that it matches ontological reality; it only has to be “viable” in the sense that it fits within the experimental constraints that limits the cognizing organism’s possibilities of acting and thinking. (von Glasersfeld, 1989a: 162; emphasis in original)
As von Glasersfeld says, “the term ‘constructivism’ has become fashionable in recent years” (von Glasersfeld, 1994: 21). Phillips (1995) even says that it is almost a religion. As many writers highlight (Geelan, 1997; Larochelle, Bednarz, and Garrison, 1998; Phillips, 1995), there are numerous ‘constructivist’ types of theories being discussed in educational fields. Whereas this is not a ‘problem’ in itself to have different orientations and emphases in regard to a theory, there is however an important need to not stretch out the theory to a point where it looses its primary foci and key explications, and then does not render justice anymore to the first thinkers who brought their theory and its bases to the fore. In this regard, my intention is, drawing on key notions in Jean Piaget’s work, to “re-equilibrate” some aspects of this theory of knowledge. My discussion will then be framed by von Glasersfeld’s constructivism (called radical constructivism), since he appears to be the author who has brought and promoted extensively Piaget’s writings in education and underscored its potential2.
The article is structured in four parts. The first part elaborates on some of the origins of consturctivism, rooted in Piaget’s studies. The second part is an attempt to elaborate and clarify some of the principal underpinnings of constructivism. I try to explicate important details concerning its aims, foci, and principal concepts. The third part is specifically structured around the question of learning (and knowledge) and what it means for constructivists. The fourth and last part is used to underscore the fact that constructivism has to be seen as a theory of learning and not of teaching, and so provides a proscriptive discourse on teaching and pedagogy (in contrast to a prescriptive one). Some ‘mis’-interpretations3 currently manifest in teaching and pedagogy will be discussed and it will be followed by some potential implications of this particular theory (of learning) for pedagogy4.
Even if many other authors have contributed to numerous aspects of the theory in a tacit or indirect way (e.g., Dewey, Kant, Rousseau, Vico, etc.), the main pioneer of constructivism is without question Jean Piaget. The first step of the theory, which evolved considerably through his 70-year career, can be traced back to its doctoral thesis in the 1920s. What is surprising is that this thesis was not undertaken in psychology, nor in education, nor in epistemology; it was located in biology. The significance of this fact becomes more apparent with an appreciation of the biological roots of his theory5, as developed below.
Piaget’s thesis was focused on the ways that the molluscs were adapted and modified themselves to new habitats – and, reciprocally, how they were also simultaneously modifying and adapting their new habitats. Piaget later made the link between this phenomenon and the adaptive process at work in the individual’s construction of knowledge. The link arises in an analogy drawn between the mollusc’s new habitat and the learner’s ‘new knowledge’ or ‘new experiences’. In the same manner that the mollusc adapts itself to its habitat and modifies its habitat in return, the learner adapts himself or herself to the ‘new knowledge’ and modifies it in relation to his or her own ever-evolving structure of thinking. This is explicated in Piaget’s dictum: “Intelligence organizes the world by organizing itself” (Piaget, 1954: 400).
The biological roots here are of major importance for the construction of knowledge. Piaget was a biologist, and so he saw and interpreted knowledge and its construction from a biological point of view: for Piaget, humans were biological creatures that know. Significantly, when he used ‘construct’, ‘structure’ and ‘construction’ in his writing, his intended meanings were related to a biologically based definition. However, as Davis and Sumara (2002; 2003) state, in the English-speaking literature there are some differences in interpretation of the verbs ‘to construct’ and ‘to construe’. The former usually refers to an architectural sense in which there is an idea of a building project, a structure, a scaffolding, and a physical/manual construction. The latter, ‘to construe’, is in close relation to the emergence of a structure of an organism or an ecosystem – structures in the biological sense of impermanent, unfolding, and ever-evolving, and which are always in a constant process, always subject to re-organisation, and not predetermined in the architectural sense6.
Constructivists are interested in the individual’s construal of knowledge, that is, how a person comes to learn7. They assert that knowledge is an individual, personal construal that is shaped by our own experiences as learners in this world – knowledge is seen as something dependent on the learner.
What is radical constructivism? It is an unconventional approach to the problem of knowledge and knowing. It starts from the assumption that knowledge, no matter how it is defined, is in the heads of the persons, and that the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her experience. (von Glasersfeld, 1995a: 1)
This idea of considering knowledge as a personal construct is not new in itself. Rationalists and empiricists in the 17th century asserted that individuals constructed their own understandings (Davis, 2004). The important shift here is that, within a constructivist perspective, learning and personal knowledge are not seen in terms of an internal construction or a representation of an external world – as Descartes, Locke and other rational-empiricists asserted. Whereas rationalists and empiricists assert that they are able to obtain and prove a universal reality, a universal truth that would be independent of the learner (an objective reality), constructivism claims that we have no access to an objective truth and that all knowledge is subjective and dependent on the learner. Instead of talking about an internal representation that reflects the external world, constructivism describes personal knowing in terms of fitting to and compatibility with the experiential world.
Constructivism goes back to Vico, who considered human knowledge a human construction that was to be evaluated according to its coherence and its fit with the world of human experience, and not as a representation of God’s world as it might be beyond the interface of human experience. Constructivism drops the requirement that knowledge be ‘true’ in the sense that it should match an objective reality. (von Glasersfeld, 1992: 3)
The concept of ‘fitting’ is a key feature of constructivism and, paradoxically, a principal source of ‘mis’-interpretations of the theory. Constructivism discourses begin by drawing a critical difference between ‘matching’ and ‘fitting’.
The theories of knowledge articulated by rationalists and empiricists have been dubbed ‘correspondence theories’ because of their assumption that the accuracy of personal knowledge has to do with its match to objective reality. The idea of ‘matching’ implies a direct relation between two objects – a mapping one to one, a correspondence. In other words, the two objects can be considered exactly the same or, in von Glasersfeld’s (1984) words, defined in terms of “homomorphism”. This is what is intended in the idea of constructing an internal representation of an external world, or the familiar metaphor of personal knowledge as a continuously refined mirror of reality. In opposition, the constructivist idea of ‘fitting’ is speaking in terms of viability and compatibility in relation to the experiential world we live in.
Simply put, the notion of viability means that an action, operation, conceptual structure, or even a theory, is considered “viable” as long as it is useful in accomplishing a task or in achieving a goal that one has set for oneself. (von Glasersfeld, 1998: 24)
Von Glasersfeld explains that “our knowledge can never be interpreted as a picture or a representation of that real world, but only as a key that unlocks possible paths for us” (von Glasersfeld, 1984: 18, my emphasis). He explains that a key fits if it opens the lock. But being able to open a lock is not the same as having a knowledge of its invisible workings, or of how it ‘really’ is, it is only showing a possibility that ‘fits’ with it. And as he would add, we know too well from the examples of professional burglars that many keys can fit one lock; so, there are probably many “keys” that could fit our world: “[…] the viability of an action shows no more than that the ‘real’ world leaves us room to act in that way” (von Glasersfeld, 1990: 24). Knowledge should be seen as a key that unlocks possibilities in our world; and, von Glasersfeld (1990) adds, we human learners face our reality in the same way the professional burglars confront locks they want to unlock8. Along similar lines, Einstein and Infeld assert that
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison. (Einstein and Infeld, 1967: 31)
Einstein’s point applies to everyone, including scientists. Their theories and explanations, no matter how rigorous, no matter how well they work, do not explain reality as though it were independent of the observer that describes it. In von Glasersfeld’s words, “when scientists observe, they categorize their observations by fitting them into concepts which they have formed on the basis of prior experience. These concepts are not given. They are the result of imaginative abstractions from a particular way of seeing or sensing” (von Glasersfeld, 1997: 295).
Von Glasersfeld (1997) explains that there was considerable criticism of the 1973 English translation of Piaget’s book, ‘To understand is to invent’ – a notion which when expressed by Einstein and Infeld six years earlier did not meet with the same broad criticism. Using von Glasersfeld’s (1989b) paraphrase of Rorty, the fact that scientific knowledge permits and enables us to cope with and manage reality does not justify the belief that scientific knowledge provides a picture, a mirror or a representation of the world that corresponds to an absolute and independent reality that would be “irrespective of any observer” (von Glasersfeld, 1985: 9). In a sense, von Glasersfeld replaces the notion of ‘objective and ontological truth’ with that of viability; the key is an adequate fit, not an optimal match.
To better understand this, we have to previously take a moment to elaborate on the idea of the external world in relation to the learners’ knowledge. The sceptics have maintained for a long time that the real world, as an ontological reality, is inaccessible to human reason. This argument was never refuted for the last 2500 years (von Glasersfeld, 1992).
Radical constructivism is an attempt to develop a theory of knowing that is not made illusory from the outset by the traditional assumption that the cognizing activity should lead to a “true” representation of a world that exists in itself and by itself independently of the cognizing agent. Instead, radical constructivism assumes that the cognizing activity is instrumental and neither does nor can concern anything but the experiential world of the knower. This experiential world is constituted and structured by the knower’s own ways and means of perceiving and conceiving, and in this elementary sense it is always and irrevocably subjective. (von Glasersfeld, 1992: 1–2)
Within constructivism, which is concerned with the individual’s construal of a world, it is asserted that all knowledge is personally construed by the learner on the basis of his or her own lived experiences. In other words, the meanings construed by individuals are subjective knowledge in the sense that it is through their own interpretations of their experiences that they came to know. Knowledge is affected by the learner’s own subjective vision of things. The experiences of the learner act as a filter through which all future experiences will be interpreted and understood.
In other words, everything said is influenced by the experience and the person who talks about it, it is his or her interpretation and not an absolute and undeniable truth. As Humberto Maturana said, “Everything said is said by someone”. All this also points to the fact that the “existence”, the “being” of something, does not have any meaning outside of the domain of my own personal experience. Everything I know, everything I say or I talk about is always coloured by my own personal perspective and experience: ‘Everything said is said by someone’! Or, as Vico put it in the 1700s: “God knows the world, because He created it, human beings can know only what they themselves have made” (Vico, cited in von Glasersfeld, 2000: 5)9.
[…] we have no way of checking the truth of our knowledge with the world presumed to be lying beyond our experiential interface, because to do this, we would need anaccess to such a world that does not involve our experiencing it. (von Glasersfeld, 1990: 20; my emphasis)
This implies that all we have access to is our world of experiences. When von Glasersfeld discusses the nature of reality, he explains that ‘to be’ – existing – outside the domain of my own personal experience has no meaning whatsoever, because everything that I could know is based on my own personal experience and then would always be subjective10. It will be dependent on how I’ve come to construe the world, which is rooted in my personal experience. There is no objective and ‘real’ knowledge out there waiting to be acquired/discovered by the learners.
Many authors interpret the constructivist paradigm as a denial of ‘reality’ (e.g., Kitchener, 1986). They argue that if we have different experiential worlds or realities (instead of one ‘true’ reality), we could not agree on things or communicate about them. However, the fact that we do agree on certain things and that we can talk about them in a coherent conversation does not assert the presence of an external and ontological world, as von Glasersfeld would say:
If two people or even a whole society of people look through distorting lenses and agree on what they see, this does not make what they see any more real – it merely means that on the basis of such agreements they can build up a consensus in certain areas of their subjective experiential worlds. Such areas of relative agreement are called “consensual domains.” (von Glasersfeld, 1991: xv-xvi; italics in the original)
If people talk about something and seem to understand each other, it means that their visions of things are compatible and seem to work out for them without any major contradictions – but that is not to say that they have the ‘same’ knowledge or that there is an objective and independent knowledge on which they draw: questions of compatibility – of compatibilities of subjectivities – or, put bluntly, of intersubjectivity, does not at all imply objectivity. Compatibility directs our attention to the fact that people strive, obtain and agree on understandings that are compatible and coherent, which only states that these understandings are not incompatible or incoherent; and, does not state that they are the same or that they are reflection of an objective and external reality – it is a question of proscription, again, the compatibility lies within acceptable boundaries, within common ground and agreement. Understandings need not to be identical to be compatible in matters of consensual accord (von Glasersfeld, 1999b).
We have to be careful not to reduce constructivism to solipsism, which is the extreme idealist view implying that there is no world beyond the knower’s mind. Constructivism does not reject the presence of an external world in which we live, it only asserts that we cannot know it rationally, that this objective, universal “reality is unknowable and that it makes no sense to speak of a representation of something that is inherently inaccessible” (von Glasersfeld, 1992: 2). As Gergen explains, “[H]ow can we ascertain whether our subjectivities match the objective world when we can never confront the external world independent of our subjectivity?” (Gergen, 1995: 20). In this sense, constructivism has no aim to explain the ‘real’ world, it aims at explicating knowledge construals, that is, construals of worlds of significance, of worlds of meaning.
In a sense, since we only have access to our world of experiences, we construe for ourselves our interpretation of our own reality (our world of significance) – based on our experiences and the invariants and constants that we experience in that unknowable ‘real’ world. As von Glasersfeld says, “Radical constructivism does not deny a world beyond our experiential interface, but it denies the possibility of knowing it.”11
In the same way that it does not reject the presence of an external world, constructivism is not implying its existence. Because nothing can exist for me outside the domain of my experience, the concern of constructivism is that of specific experience. As von Glasersfeld further says, “Therefore I limit myself to saying that I do not deny it [an external reality]. Not denying does not imply existence, it is simply part of agnosticism.”12 The experiential world of the knower/learner is the only ‘reality’ that is accessible to him (von Glasersfeld, 1992).
No longer can one maintain that the value of knowledge resides in its more or less ‘true’ reflection of structures supposed to ‘exist’ independently of the experiencer. Instead, its value is now determined exclusively by its successful application or ‘viability’ in the practice of living and thinking. (von Glasersfeld, 1999a: 87)
This summarizes important points that are central in the constructivism theory, I now turn to elaborations of the key concepts concerning what represents learning for constructivists.
One of the first things to say is that for constructivists personal learning is seen as an active process, and not a passive one. It is not a matter of linearly acquiring and accumulating knowledge, but a matter of actively construing and modifying our knowings. “Learning is an ongoing, recursive, elaborative process, not an accumulative one” (Davis, 2004: 130).
I want to stress an important distinction on knowledge (from a constructivist perspective). ‘Knowledge’, as it is understood in the traditional theories that seek to attain and claim universal and true knowledge is seen as something static and fixed, and moreover, knowledge is seen as something that can be absolute. Pierre Simon de Laplace, in the 18th century, explained clearly that in fact it was impossible for us to attain true and absolute knowledge because our brain and consciousness were limited (Laplace, 1795/1951). However, the impossibility to grasp it still assumes the existence of true and absolute knowledge.
In the constructivist’s perspective, the conceptualization of knowledge is even pushed further. Von Glasersfeld tries to move away from those assertions about the existence of absolute knowledge as something that is ‘out there’. This is why von Glasersfled calls his theory a theory of knowing rather than of knowledge – to trace a clear distinction between knowledge as something fixed, and knowledge as a process. It is the latter that is intended; knowledge is an ever-evolving process.
This distinction is also highlighted by the nested nature of learning and knowledge. As mentioned above, in some theories knowledge is seen as something static that gets accumulated. Learning is then defined as the process of accumulating this knowledge, that is, as the process that grasp and stores knowledge in the person’s head. In the constructivist perspective, knowledge, knowing, or ‘to know’ are seen as the stable, but mutable and evolving patterns or capacities to maintain one’s coherence – that is, one’s established (produced) patterns of action. Learning is then defined, in its dynamical nature, as the in-action capacity to continuously, recursively and coherently maintain one’s coherence. Learning and knowledge are then inextricably intertwined.
Personal knowledge is seen as an evolving dynamical process in development, which should be contrasted with the idea of ‘to be completed’, ‘to be perfected’ or ‘in completion’, all of which assign a point and a final state to achieve, a universal knowledge, to get to. This said, knowledge has to ‘fit’ to be relevant, it is not an attempt to be truthful, it is an attempt to be viable for the moment – until it will change and evolve again. Knowledge cannot and need not to be true, it only has to fit and function for the time being; there is no point to claiming truth, the idea is to make it work.
This is not, however, to say that anything goes, or that everything is relative. The idea of subjective knowledge is often seen as a return to a weak relativism in which every utterance is justifiable because everything comes from a specific point of view. Constructivism, with its concept of viability and ‘fitting’, does not imply that anything goes but merely that theories or explanations construed have to fit and be compatible with the experiences lived, as Davis explains:
Constructivists have repeatedly acknowledged that the individual is not free to construct the world in whatever way she or he pleases. Personal interpretations are subject to constraints of physical experience, the associations built into language, and so on. The point is not that the individual is free to construct any world, but that the individual is compelled to construe a reality that fits with the context or circumstance. (Davis, 2004: 121)
Educationally speaking, seeing individual knowledge as useful and as an ever-continuing-growing evolutive process is speaking in terms of expanding the possibilities: “Ongoing learning, that is, seems to be about construal and re-construal of interpretive systems in ways that enable a person to make sense of broader and broader realms of experience” (Davis and Sumara, 2003: 127). Knowledge and learning are always happening. They are continuous processes, of updating and unfolding, that enable and expand their own ever-continuing developments; in opposition to knowledge as acquiring or accumulating information, answers, and facts.
A key concept in learning for constructivists is the principle of equilibration/disequilibration, which refers to the processes that underlie learning. According to Piaget, it is the quest for the equilibrium that prompts the learner to learn. When his or her prior knowledge is rendered contradictory, incoherent and/or inconsistent in the face of new experiences, the learner seeks to adapt and modify his or her knowledge to re-obtain his or her equilibrium and coherence in relation to his or her environment. As Confrey says,
In Piagetian theory, perturbations play a very significant role in learning and knowledge construction. A perturbation is experienced when one encounters an event or set of events that do not seem to be accounted for by one’s theory, yet seem very significant to understanding the phenomena at hand. According to Piagetian theory, it is often through struggling to resolve the disequilibration caused by perturbations that one comes to a resolution that deepens and revises one’s world-view. (Confrey, 1999: 10)
Learning is then a process of self-organisation in which the subject reorganizes his or her activity in order to eliminate perturbations (von Glasersfeld, 1989a). Behind this process of equilibration resides two other concepts, the concept of assimilation and the concept of accommodation. As Piaget would say, “This evolution depends precisely on this progressive equilibrium of assimilation and accommodation” (Piaget, 1971: 108).
The living creature, be it fish, fowl, or human, thrives by abstracting regularities and rules from experiences that enables it to avoid disagreeable situations and, to some extent, to generate agreeable ones. This “abstracting of regularities” is always the result of assimilation. (von Glasersfeld, 1990: 24)
The concept of assimilation refers to the role played by our previous experiences, as a filter in the interpretation of subsequent experiences. In a sense, constructivism asserts that our previous experiences serve as lenses through which we read the world. So to speak, this means that everything we encounter is ‘judged’ in relation to what we already know. We, in a sense, assimilate our new experiences in relation to what we know, and attribute them with a meaning relative to the things we already know – we absorb, integrate and incorporate those experiences to make them fit with what we already know, in a manner that maintains but does not interrupt coherence. That is, assimilation is an adaptive process that occurs without conscious adaptation. New experiences, or knowledge, are understood (i.e., they make sense) on the basis of what we already know and are ‘read’ through the influences and meanings of our previous knowledge.
Piaget’s complement to the absorption-like process of assimilation was accommodation. As von Glasersfeld explains,
The mind primarily assimilates, that is it perceives and categorizes experiences in terms that are already known. Only if the result of this process causes a hitch and creates a perturbation, a review is initiated that may lead to an accommodation. This is to say, it may give rise to change in an existing structure or the formation of a new one. (von Glasersfeld, 1997: 301; italics in the original)
The Oxford dictionary gives interesting definitions of assimilation and accommodation that fit well with what his mentioned above. Assimilation: “Regard as or make similar”; Accomodation: “Adapt to or fit in with” (my emphasis). In fact, both are adaptations, one is conscious (accommodation) and the other one is unconscious (assimilation).
Piaget’s concept of accommodation was rooted in his studies of molluscs’ adaptation. Von Glasersfeld defines it as “change in a way of operating or acting” (von Glasersfeld, 1991: xviii). The learner tries to deliberately adapt – or accommodate – what is already known (previous knowledge) to a new experience that interrupts or contradicts established interpretations (because his prior knowledge is not sufficient or in contradiction with what he or she lives in the experience). The learner is then adapting his or her knowledge, and is also adapting the new knowledge to make it fit and work with his or her own personal schemata of the world – that he or she is modifying.
[Accomodation] takes place when a scheme does not lead to the expected result. This produces a perturbation, and the perturbation may lead either to a modification of the pattern that was abstracted as the “triggering situation” or to a modification of the action. (von Glasersfeld, 1990: 24)
In a sense, for a constructivist, learning is a bumpy road in which we are always seeking an equilibrium in “a cycle of perturbations-and-interpretations” ( Davis, 2004: 137), or as Phillips would say,
[…] Piaget does place enormous stress on the fact that the young knower is both mentally and physically active; indeed, knowledge growth is described by Piaget in terms of the dynamic processes of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration, and the construction and internalization of action schemas. (Phillips, 1995: 9)
After having summarized some of the key aspects of constructivism, the next section will treat aspects concerning some questionable interpretations of constructivism in education and some potential implications for pedagogy and teaching.
4. Constructivism within education
Constructivism is a theory of learning and not a theory of teaching or pedagogy. This is of importance since numerous difficulties have emerged from a direct association between constructivism and teaching or, as Towers and Davis say, from the “problematic phrase, ‘constructivist teaching’” (Towers and Davis, 2002: 314), which would imply that constructivism prescribes some specific teaching approaches or obligatory guidelines (a know-how guide).
The first interest and intention of constructivism is to bear some light on the phenomena of learning and knowledge and so, as Tobin (1993) makes clear, it helps us to understand the emergence of knowledge in any classroom context – a lecture, a group activity, a student-centred classroom, and so on. “Constructivism, after all, just attempts to describe how people learn, and that process will take place even in a formal lecture hall of 300 students” (Lerman, 1996: 146-147). In other words, for a constructivist, if learning happens, it will happen in a constructivist way. And for this matter, constructivists cannot give ultimate techniques or prescribe ways to teach, mostly because
The constructivist view argues that no matter how clear and precise are a teacher’s examples and explanations, students will take these notions, couple them with their existing beliefs and understandings, and fashion some version of the intent at a personal and subjective level. (Goos, Galbraith, and Renshaw, 1999: 59)
The point is not that all teaching methods are created equally, of course, some classroom settings are definitely better than others. (However, this is not related to issues of constructivism.) By foregrounding the fact that there cannot be a linear causal effect relation between a perturbation and a learner’s response, constructivism renders teaching impossible in any linear causal change. This does not mean, however, that it renders teaching impossible or useless, it only means that it cannot prescribe it. As von Glasersfeld would say,
What does this means? It means that Constructivism, and I’ve often said this, cannot tell teachers very much about what they should do, but it can specify a number of things which they can certainly should not do. (von Glasersfeld, 1995b, personal communication)
What is implied by von Glasersfeld, here, is that constructivism offers a proscriptive discourse for teaching, in the sense that it sets boundaries outside of which teaching is rendered impossible (the “should not do”), but inside of which the possible realm of actions is somehow limitless. In other words, constructivism opens a space inside of which teaching and learning can happen, but cannot say how it will happen. Constructivism is a proscriptive discourse, and not a prescriptive one. This said, there can probably be numerous approaches to teaching that could be said to be ‘constructivist’, in the sense that these approaches do not lie outside the boundaries set by the theory in regards to learning – that is, these approaches can be called ‘constructivist’ if they are not incompatible with the theory in regards to what cannot be done in teaching in relation to learning. In that sense, teaching approaches of many sorts (problem-solving, discovery learning, project driven, lecturing, etc.) can all be called ‘constructivist’ as long as their views on learning and its processes are compatible with the theory’s own tenets concerning the phenomenon of learning, that were highlighted in the previous pages.
In regard to this, constructivism does offer proscriptions on teaching – that is, things that cannot be done, or are useless, for creating learning – and these proscriptions create some implications for teaching practices, in the sense that staying ‘inside’ constructivist teaching boundaries has implications for teaching practices; it informs them.
To illustrate the arguments above, here are some ways in which constructivists principles have been taken up in education as prescriptions for teaching – these are called ‘taboos of teaching’. Before explicating these implications, it will be useful to highlight some of the ways in which constructivists principles have been 'mis'-conceived and taken up in education as prescriptions for teaching - these are called 'taboos of teaching
The expression ‘taboos of teaching’ is borrowed from Heinrich Bauersfeld (1994) to flag the actions that are perceived unsuitable for teachers – actions that teachers should not do – but which stem from preconceived understandings. As he explains, these ‘taboos’ represent acting forces in the school reality and are prominently influencing educational practices – it then becomes important to understand where those kinds of taboos come from. The five common ‘taboos’ are discussed here.
The first ‘taboo’ is highlighted by Davis and Sumara (2002) in what they call the “Don’t tell” practice. It seems that many teachers believe they should avoid, whenever they can, giving direct instructions to students. This ‘taboo’ seems to be linked to the idea that teaching is not about linearly transmitting or transferring knowledge from the teacher to the learner and is more about perturbation and construal (Davis and Sumara, 2002). Teachers then stop themselves from explaining and elaborating on notions, fearing that “[…] attempts to tell are sometimes seen as violations of the constructive process, impositions on a person’s sense-making rather than possible contributions to such sense-making.” (Davis and Sumara, 2002: 419) Constructivism is not saying that teachers should not explain, it only renders problematic the assumption that by ‘telling’ or explaining the learners will automatically understand.
The second ‘taboo’ is linked to an implicit suggestion that the learner ‘cannot be wrong’ and that everything he or she says is good, since all knowledge is subjective. This seems to stem from the attribution of relativist principles to constructivism. As explained earlier, learners are not free to create anything, the assertiveness of any claim has to be shown compatible with the situation and ‘experience lived’ to be considered viable. Knowledge has to fit with/in the domain in which it was construed.
Since you ‘cannot tell’ and you cannot say that someone is wrong, a third ‘taboo’ can easily become what is called the pedagogy ‘du laissez-faire’, in which the learner is seen as someone that will develop his or her knowledge by his or herself, rendering teaching as helpless and without consequences. This interpretation is linked to an association of a nativist point of view of knowledge to constructivism. Nativism is a theory that asserts that knowledge is already inside a person at birth, and that education is a process of drawing that knowledge out13. Constructivism does not assert that knowledge is construed by itself in the being, or that it is already there in the head of the learner; it says that you construe your knowledge on the basis of your experience in the world you live, and that this construed knowledge emerges out of your own interpretation of your experiences. In a sense, your knowledge is dependent on you, but was never in you at the beginning, it was construed in the elaboration of your interpretations and perceptions of the reality you live. Learning is then not a process of drawing out, but of actively construing.
In opposition to the third ‘taboo’, the fourth one is related to what Bauersfeld (1994) calls the ‘method of the exhaustion by repeated questioning’. This practice of guiding the learner through a definite path – a “funnel pattern”14 – but without ever telling him or her exactly the words or what to do, could be seen as a consequence of the taboo ‘never tell to the student what he can find by himself” (Bauersfeld, 1994: 188; my translation). Again, constructivism only renders problematic the linear assumed direct relation of teaching and learning. Put bluntly, constructivists would say that even if you did tell the learners directly what to do, nothing would guarantee that it will be learned or understood by these same learners.
The fifth and last ‘taboo of teaching’ concerns the interpretations of expressions like ‘to construct’ and ‘active students’ (particularly in elementary or secondary grades). The idea that learners are active in their learning is often associated with the idea of being physically active, and so are associated with particular sorts of physical engagements with artefacts (manipulatives) specifically designed for the classroom. The expression ‘to construct’ is then in return linked to the idea of the building of something. This is in some ways departing from the biological bases of constructivism. The word ‘active’ should then not be read in a literal sense because it has a broader meaning in constructivism. The idea that the learners have to be active does not imply that they have to construct a model physically with their hands, but instead that they develop their structures of knowledge – by reflecting, analyzing, questioning themselves, working on problems, and so on (mentally, physically, emotionally, etc.).
It was important to highlight these ‘taboos of teaching’ to enable a distinction between direct associations (prescriptions) or even ‘mis’-understandings of the theory’s tenets, and what implications (proscriptions) these tenets could have for teaching. In the following, I highlight some implications of constructivism for teaching, that is, some boundaries implied by a constructivistly informed practice, in particular, issues of prior knowledge, communication, usefulness of knowledge, meaning of mistakes, inventiveness, teaching preparation, and verbalization.
Prior knowledge . Because the learner interprets and adapts new experiences in relation to his or her previous understandings, he or she is not a blank slate for a constructivist. This prior knowledge and experiences are central in the learning event, everything is construed in function and relation to it. This implies the importance of taking into consideration this knowledge in teaching. Understanding that learners do not start from nothing, teachers would be well advised to use these already established understanding to enable the construal of new ones – new ones that would be grounded in the learners existing knowledge, and not imposed from outside as if it was disconnected. This implication is then two-fold. First of all, it implies an explicit recognition of the learner as someone possessing rich previous knowledge, and, secondly, it implies a utilization of that rich existing potential (knowledge) to build next and further meaningful understandings.
The learner plays a role in the communication . Learners are not blank slates, nor are they passive ‘sponges’ accumulating knowledge for constructivists. This said, because knowledge is perceived as actively construed by the learner, only explaining notions and concepts will not automatically make them understood by the learner. Constructivism offers a different conception of communication. In effect, it is a different conception of communication because there is an explicit recognition of the presence of a receiver (and not uniquely of a sender), and its fundamental role in the comprehension of the message sent. This creates an important effect on the teacher’s position in regards to his or her ways of speaking, acting, listening, and so on. There is a shift away from miraculous recipes that guarantees understanding, toward ‘attempts’ and tentativeness that may hold for potential meaning making creations. It implies a consideration of the presence of an active receiver (learner), which sensitizes the message sender (teacher) to an awareness of the role and presence of the learner’s prior knowledge and to the importance of the words and sentences uttered when teaching.
Knowledge as useful . Because constructivists assert that the only thing we have access to is our world of experience, it enables us to distance ourselves from questions of ultimate truth concerning the status of that knowledge. This can have a definitive effect of developing an interest in the usefulness, and not the absolute truthfulness, of knowledge. Which is not to say that knowledge can be false, but mostly that the idea to achieve perfect ultimate knowledge (as learners, teachers, scientists, curriculum specialists, etc.) becomes irrelevant – and impossible. This perspective enables and implies that learners and teachers can stay in the world of usefulness, of the compatible, and of meaning making. Knowledge becomes perceived as a useful key that unlocks possible locks. Knowledge makes sense and is used to solve problems.
The meaning of mistakes . Mistakes have an important place for a constructivist, because they are part of the adaptive process that defines learning. When mistakes happen, constructivists see in them some potential and rich opportunities for pushing forward knowledge and learning. Learners’ mistakes are not seen as failures, they are not seen pejoratively; rather, they are perceived has being naturally part of the learning process and an opportunity for learning.
When people speak of “learning from mistakes,” the assumption is that they have made a humiliating blunder and learned never to repeat it again. But learning from mistakes is something very different from simply correcting errors. It means that we are using the mistake, studying it, almost relishing it as an opportunity for learning. (Jalongo, 1991: 39, emphasis in the original)
Mistakes inform the learning process enormously and enable a better understanding of the domain or concepts worked on – in other words, mistakes illuminate the learner and help him or her to learn and become more adapted to the experience or situation lived. In the same way, for example, that people often by getting lost a number of times while searching for their path, become familiar with the streets of a new city in which they live. Mistakes are sources of learning and adaptation, and because of that, they should not be perceived negatively.
However, it is not saying that learners should be mislead or that mistakes should be celebrated and that we should not want to correct them. The idea mostly resides in the fact that it is possible and advantageous to take them into account and learn from them, because they have the potential to help avoid and predict possible ‘dead-ends’ in the future, to benefit from them and better understand the concepts worked on, to see the differences between a mistake and a suitable answer in specific contexts. For teaching, it calls for a shift away from practices of direct correction of the learner by saying ‘it is not good’ and then showing the ‘good’ way, and toward taking these difficulties and mistakes of learners into account in the knowledge construal, and take advantage of them to build new knowledge from/related to/within them.
Interest toward creativity and invention . In a perspective where there is a place for mistakes (in the sense that they are not perceived as a failure), and where knowledge is perceived as useful and functional, teachers become interested in the knowledge production of learners. In effect, the interest is not only to re-do or simply reproduce what has already been done and what is already standardized, but also to provide a space for the creativity and ‘inventions’ of learners. Here, the word ‘creation’ is used in the sense defined by Jalongo (1991), that is, the ability to produce new ideas by the combination or juxtaposition of elements already existing. The idea is not that learners have to re-invent the wheel or re-do, re-construe and re-invent everything in the sense that there is no curriculum or knowledge already established; but, rather that teachers manifest an opening toward the development and the production of knowledge from their students, “an opening of new spaces of possibilities by exploring current spaces.” (Davis, 2004: 184) Learners often produce new ways of seeing and doing, they question elements that are taken for granted, they simplify some aspects of concepts, and so on.15 Teachers informed by these ideas become interested in learners’ own productions and construals, inasmuch as their often surprising ways to take into account and to appropriate already established and standardized knowledge (Désautels and Larochelle, 2004). In that context, learners are then perceived as ‘subjects of production’ and not ‘objects of reproduction’.
Teaching preparation . Teaching a concept implies the need to be aware of its important themes, reasoning, notions, possible difficulties of learners, recurring conceptions and obstacles that could be encountered by learners, and so on. This attentiveness brings teachers to construe (or choose) exercises, problems, explanations, questions, learning situations in which these above elements are put forward, underlined, questioned, explained, worked on, and so on. It is then by starting from what can be learned (and how), and not only from what can be taught that a constructivist vision of learning can possibly influence teaching practices. The teacher’s role becomes obviously more difficult in this setting, because to the question of ‘what should be taught’ is added the issue of ‘how can this be learned’. This is where an adequate shift from a teaching pedagogy toward a learning pedagogy can be made, in the sense that the idea is to enter at the level of the learner’s learning. The learner is not left to him or herself, but teaching becomes directly influenced by the learner’s learning. The goal shifts from only wanting to teach concepts – in the sense of only wanting to explain them – toward an intention to make learners learn, to provoke their learning. It is then the learning process of the learner that becomes the entering door. Contrary to what some would argue (e.g., Legendre, 1995; Erickson, Minnes Brandes, Mitchell and Mitchell, 2005), this is not asking for a student-centerED pedagogy, or even a teacher-centerED one, but mostly an implicit reframing centered on the learning process of learners themselves (on the way concepts could be learned and understood), a sort of student-learning-process-centerED pedagogy.
The importance of verbalization . For a constructivist, the act of verbalization – putting explications into words – is central for the individual to help him or her in the knowledge construal and the meaning making creation. When someone explicates his or her understandings, they bring forth the meaning and the robustness of what they assert, they become aware of incoherencies and of possible failures in what they are currently explaining, they can also create new links with other ideas, “The act of verbalization requires a review of what is to be verbalized” (von Glasersfeld, 2000: 14). In a certain way, verbalizing is an occasion to learn, because it calls for a constant revision, analysis, and improvement of what is explained. Educationally speaking, a pedagogy influenced by this understanding can have a strong interest to have learners verbalize, so that they explain what they understand and how they came to these understandings. The goal of the teacher becomes two-fold; it is not uniquely to verify and interact with the learners’ learning, but also to enable the learner to continue his or her learning path, that is, to provide him or her with ongoing opportunities for learning. As van Manen paraphrases Merleau-Ponty, “When I speak I discover what it is that I wished to say” (van Manen, 1997: 32). In other words, uttering is a learning event.
Without attempting to have exhaustively listed all possible implications of constructivism for teaching, these seven elements frame important aspects of what constitutes the space of action unfolded by a constructivist perspective of learning.
5. Conclusions
In this article, I have tried to clarify an important theory of learning from its biological roots in Jean Piaget’s studies, and to resituate it in regards to some of its critiques or questionable interpretations. By highlighting the central concepts of the theory and its points of focus, I have tried to emphasize that constructivism is a theory of learning and not a theory of teaching, which underscored the fact that constructivism offers a proscriptive discourse for teaching in what I called implications. Being informed by constructivism sets a fertile ground for enriching knowledge creation and implies an important reframing of teaching intentions, one that brings the teacher to be sensitive to learners’ learning processes in a student-learning-process-centered classroom.
Constructivism sets the ground for an enriched understanding of the learners with whom we interact as teachers, a space of interaction and of teaching in which the learner is considered a ‘subject of production’ and not an ‘object of reproduction’.
I want to thank Dr. Brent Davis for helping me with the ideas and the writing of this article. I also want to thank the two reviewers for their comments and reflections, which brought me to question myself and reflect on my own understandings.
Finally, I wish to thank the students in my MAT 7195 course of summer 2005 at the Université du Québec à Montréal, with whom the ideas in the last section on implications took shape.
1 Please direct all correspondenc to Jérôme Proulx, University of Alberta, Department of Secondary Education, 341 Education South, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2G5, Telephone number (office): (780) 492-3760, E-mail address: jproulx@ualberta.ca .
2 To this end and mostly to avoid confusions, in the rest of the article, unless specified differently, each time that I will use the term ‘constructivism’, I will intend to refer to the ‘radical constructivism’ of von Glasersfeld.
3 I want to be careful with the prefix ‘mis’, since it implies understandings that does not do justice to the core principles of constructivism iself, and “implies that there is a standard set of “correct” conceptions that all learners should have” (Phillips, 1995: 10). I am tempted to use Cobb and Bauersfeld’s phrasing that there are “conceptions that deviate significantly from those that the [speaker] intends” (Cobb and Bauersfeld, 1995: 2), and in which those thinkers would have some difficulties to recognize themselves. This is the reason why I put the word ‘mis’ in parenthesis.
4 As will be obvious in the article, I speak from a francophone perspective and background since I am a francophone who first encountered constructivism literature in French.
5 It is very interesting to know that, as Davis and Sumara (2002) and Davis (2004) highlight, Piaget never really used the term ‘constructivist’ to refer to himself (this goes also for the other related authors mentioned earlier). Piaget mentioned the term only once in his famous debates with Noam Chomsky around language.
6 As hypothesizes Davis and Sumara (2002, 2003), this problematic probably comes from the translation from French to English of the works of Piaget, since the French verb construire can be translated to either ‘to construct’ or ‘to construe’. The reason I took some time to highlight this problematic use of this specific vocabulary early in the article is because from now on, I will take special care to use the verb ‘to construe’ instead of ‘to construct’ since it brings with it a more fruitful and faithful sense of the French verb construire. For a more elaborated explanation on this matter, see Davis and Sumara (2002, 2003).
7 Many of the reproaches directed to von Glasersfeld’s constructivism (and indeed to Piaget’s studies) are in relation to the fact that it does not take into account the importance of the social (e.g., Gergen, 1995; Phillips, 1995). It is important to understand that constructivism does not rejects the importance of the social in the individual construal of knowledge, but it does not position it as the main focus of its theory: constructivism is interested in the individual’s construal of knowledge. In fact, Piaget clearly acknowledged the importance of the social but, however, he was not interested in the causes of perturbations for the learner, but in the mechanisms to adapt to them (von Glasersfeld, 1989b) – for a definition of ‘perturbations’, see Confrey’s quote in part 3 . The social influence is not rejected, but is only seen as one of many important sources of influence, as would be the biological, the neurophysiological, and the cultural, to name some. As Wenger (1998) explains, some theories have specific focuses, which do not imply that they reject other approaches or theories or are incompatible with them. This said, I will however be well advised here not to enter in this ‘great debate’ of social versus individual, as wisely advised by one of the reviewers.
8 It would then be interesting to know what happens when the ‘key’ we use does not ‘fit’ in the lock. In a sense, each wrong key used to open the lock (or any other object we might use for the task) only shows us what the lock is not. It does not explain what the lock is in itself. This means that our failures only show us what our reality is not. It is proscriptive, rather than prescriptive.
9 This is not to say that constructivism asserts the presence of God, but we have to put ourselves back in Vico’s time to better understand this quote.
10 The full text is available in the question section of on von Glasersfeld’s interactive website, under April 2003, at: http://www.oikos.org/vonen.htm#QUESTIONS
11 Ibid. , December 1997.
12 Ibid. , April 2003.
13 Etymologically, the word education means to draw or to drag out.
14 Bauersfeld (1998) talks of a “funnel pattern”, “which is characterized by ‘narrowing the scope of action by response expectations’.” (Voigt, 1985: 79)
15 As an example, children often play an important role in the evolution of a language (Deacon, 1997).
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