Learning from different perspective.
Constructivism to Situated Learning
Joan Bliss,
ÅéóÞãçóç óôï
ÓõíÝäñéï ôïõ ÊÅÅ,
ôïí ÄåêÝìâñéï ôïõ 2007 óôç Èåóóáëïíßêç
Áðüäïóç óôá ÅëëçíéêÜ
NASA’s
history Curator, Steve Garber ( 2007) commented that “History changed on
In
my article ( Bliss 1995 ) I say “The
Americans wondered why their scientists were not the first to go into space.
Huge investments in the USA went into large scale curriculum development in the
sciences, with projects as the Physical Sciences Study Committee ( PSSC), the
Chemical Bond Approach ( CBA) Chem Study, and in biology BSCS.
England
followed in the early 1960’s with more than a dozen curriculum development
projects sponsored by the Nuffield Foundation in Physics, chemistry, biology
and integrated science for pupils between 11- 16 and by 1967, for 16-18 year olds. Many other
countries such as
Primary
education saw parallel developments in many countries, these reforms being very
much influenced by the work of Piaget. Among such
developments were: The Science Curriculum Improved Study ( SCIS) from Laurence
Hall of Science, Berkeley ; in Britain
the Schools Council Science 5-13 and the Nuffield Foundation Mathematics 5-13 ;
in Australia the Australian Science Education Project ( ASEP).”
However in spite of these teaching innovations, students continued to
hold ideas that were very different from those taught in school. Many of them
were very robust, being particularly resisted to teaching. ( Viennot, 1979) .
Hence from the 1970s a world wide trend in science education developed in which
researchers and science educators set out to describe pupils’ ideas about
various scientific concept areas such as dynamics, light , heat, energy,
electricity, etc. This trend also happened in mathematics and other subject
areas. It was from these various research areas that the field of children
conceptions came in being. This research is known under the a variety of
headings as : Alternative, ideas,
Conceptions, Misconceptions, Informal ideas, Intuitive ideas, etc. .
It is crucial to realize than Jean Piaget, whose research, which started
many years ago in the 1920’s , was one of the first to put forward forcefully,
with existing supporting evidence, the notion that children construct their own
knowledge and that this knowledge is different in kind from an adult’s, evolving and changing over years. Thus I
start this talk by referring first to Piaget.
Then I move onto Vygotsky whose
work, with its greater focus on the teacher, haw more recently also attracted
the attention of educators. A common view, but in my opinion one to be strongly
resisted, is to regard Vygotsky as supplanting Piaget as the theorist on whom
to rely. I shall argue than both are essential to an understanding of teaching
and learning and than their ideas are not conflicting but complementary.
Then I go to mention Jerome Bruner, who is a well-known psychologist and educator and whose work has
parallels with Piaget, which I set out. An finally I pass to the School of
Situated Learning, which has recently become very popular in the educational
field since it stresses the importance of the context in which children and
students learning. Clearly I shall only be able to refer in each these areas very
briefly and further reading is available as per attached bibliography. Some of the ideas that are outlined in this
plenary were also presented in a keynote lecture in ESERA Conference ( European
Science Education Research Association ) in
Both Piaget and Vygotsky were born in 1896,and Bruner was born nineteen
years later in 1915. However while Vygotsky died young in 1934, Piaget lived to
a good age, dying only in 1980. Bruner is alive and well in at the moment of
giving this talk.
The fourth approach Situated Learning, covers a whole range of proponents. One of the earliest was Michael
Cole who worked with Luria in
Before the main presentation, a little history could be helpful.
Vygotsky’s work was censured at about the time of his death ( 1934) by the
Russian regime. Thus his ideas were not known in the West until 1962 when his
book on “Thought and Language” was translated and published in the
For Vygotsky who had read Piaget’s early research, language was always social in
origin and so he sought to try and further understand the role and function of
egocentric speech. In order to do this Vygotsky replicated the tasks given by
Piaget to children but he added a series of difficulties and frustrations to
them. In such situations the occurrence of egocentric speech almost doubled. Vygotsky’ s interpretation of this phenomenon was that
children were thinking aloud and trying to help themselves plan in tricky situations by talking to themselves
but aloud . He went on to hypothesise that as children grew older this egocentric speech would gradually internalise itself
and become inner speech, our soundless interior voice, which helps us to
think through our internal ideas, published by Vygotsky’ s in “Thought and
Language, 1934” . Unfortunately Piaget did not hear about Vygotsky’
s work and his interest in egocentric
speech until his book on Thought and Language came out in 1962.
PIAGET
Piaget trained as a biologist. However his life work was focused on what
haw become known as Genetic Epistemology, that is, the growth of knowledge and
the rules that govern this growth. So, although, most people believe that
Piaget’ s interest was in children, it is in fact, a concern with the growth of
knowledge in the “average “ child or what he called “ epistemic “ subject and
not in individual children.
Piaget is often criticized for not discussing the areas of motivation,
socialization and individual differences in children; but since he was dealing
with the “epistemic subject” these were not his concerns.
He was an epistemologist and no a child psychologist. His focus was
always on cognitive development only, for example: number, space, geometry, physical quantities (substance, weight,
volume, area, perimeter speed, time, distance, acceleration), probability,
memory, mental imagery, cause and effect.
Bliss (1995, 2000 ) point out that Piaget, amongst others
, was at origin of Constructivism. The
key idea for Piaget is than children are always active, making sense of world
around them and constructing their vision of it. So actions underlies and is
fundamental to children’ s development of knowledge. Piaget’ s Constructivism
is realist, with intelligence deriving from real actions and real objects. He
argued
“These pages contain an account of an
epistemology that is naturalist without being positivist; that draws attention
to the activity of the subject without being idealist ; that equally bases
itself on the object, which it considers as a limit, therefore existing
independently of us but never completely reached ( known ) and above all sees
knowledge as a continuous construction” ( Piaget, 1968)
Since knowledge evolves, for Piaget each development step is vital and
valid. But children’s ideas are very different from those of the adult and
particularly in specialist areas like science and mathematics. Thus there is a
need to respect children’s views about
world and in any learning sequence to attempt to build on these ( Piaget 1968
and 1972 ) . Not matter how strange or different a child or a student idea
appears from our own, it is vital to the realize that this is how he or she is
understanding the environment around them at that moment of the time.
Piaget is also considered to be a Structuralist. He believed in the
importance of hypothesing mental structures to account for the qualitatively
different stages to describe children intellectual development . And for Piaget
( 1968 ) structure describes “ what is common to development” at each stage.
There are four stages: a. Sensori-motor approx
0 – 18 months, 2 years
b. Pre-operational : approx 18
months – 5/6 years
c. Concrete – operational: approx 6/7 years – 14/15 years
d. Formal operational : approx
15/16 years – onwards
Thus intellectual development entails the assimilation of the world to
these thinking structures, and the accommodation of these to the world. Note
that during the sensori motor period children’s knowledge is acquired through
their actions and movements and through their senses: sight, hearing, touch,
smell and taste. Through this period the ability to represent absent objects
and happenings develop, so that by about 18 months the child is able to
represent absent realities my means of symbols and signs. The beginning of the
preoperational stage is marked by the acquisition of this power to represent.
Young children san now start interiorise their sensori
motor action schemes and learn about the world around them. Other aspects of
this stage are that of egocentrism, that is, not taking account of others’
point of view; that of not being able to separate reality from appearances and
that of being easily confused by causal relations.
A little later, toward the end of the pre-operations stage, there
appears one of the more important features of children’s development, the interiorisation of their actions of the world, which become internal mental structures,
allowed children to imagine actions in the head, which characterizes the
beginning of concrete operations.
They become much less egocentric and are capable of many tasks such as
classification, conservation of basic elements, ordering etc, which require
thinking about the world in terms of objects and transformations. But abstract
thinking is difficult for them and this only becomes easier with the beginning
of formal operational thinking where children are then capable of what is
called hypothetical deductive thinking. It is during this phase that students
are reasoning on propositions about the world, rather than directly on the
world itself.
It is important to note Piaget’ s early writings suggested that the formal operations stage would begin
around the age of 12 or 13 years. Much later research haw shown that formal
abstract thinking tends to be reached by students at a much later age than
Piaget describe, more like 15 or 16 years old and then only by a small
percentage of students approx 20% at 16 years old.
Important features in stages
There are a number of aspects of stages
that are crucial to development
·
The order in which children’s knowledge develops is invariant. In other
words, a child will always go through the stages of knowledge development in
the same sequence.
·
However the age in which children reach any stage will vary from child
to child, depending on a range of factors such as social, cultural background,
motivation, schooling . .
·
The stages are NOT age related in any strict sense. In other words, for
the development of children’ s knowledge- the pattern stays the same but the
pace varies !
Some limitations of Piaget work:
·
For most of
his research, Piaget neglected the role of language and focused always on
action and activity. However, in the late 1960’s he started working with
linguistics and some of his later work refers to the role of language. ( H.
Sinclair-de- Zwart, 1967)
·
There is only
a limited description of formal abstract thinking since most of Piaget’s work
focused on the development of knowledg e from birth until the age of 14/15 years,
which is, the first three stages of development; and not, as he saw it, on the
end point as described in formal thinking.
·
Piaget attempted to postulate structures of
thinking that went beyond his behavioural and psychological descriptions, Thus he
borrowed from logic and mathematics for descriptions of them. But the use of
these two disciplines to provide such descriptions was unfortunate since they
always use closed structures. Our thinking, particularly at the formal level,
tends to be reflective and thus he needed to find appropriate structures for
modeling it. Disciplines such as Cybernetics of Artificial Intelligence might
be able to find ways of modelling “ thought about thought ‘ , that is,
structures that give feedback or reflect on themselves but Piaget did not live
long enough to become familiar with these new disciplines, ( Margaret Boden,
1979)
·
Towards the
end of his life Piaget ( 1979 ) started to work again on cause and effect – his
earlier work in this area have been carried out in the 1930’s . There are at
least one hundred tasks showing interesting and original results as a result of
his work. Initially his approach to causality used inappropriate structures for
modelling children’ s understanding of
causal mechanisms.
Later Piaget worked with Garcia ( 1983,
1987 ) on his work in causality. This allowed him to come closer to a better
description of the physical world, when he suggested that meanings are tied
unambiguously to the nature of things.
“ Two meanings of an object are,
subjectively, what can be done with it and, objectively, what it is made of or
how it is composed ”
In spite of the many criticisms that can be made of
Piaget, Carey ( 1985 ) pointed out,
Piaget’ s stage theory brought order to otherwise
bewilderingly diverse developments . . it offered the hope of reducing the task
of explaining developments changes to manageable proportions.
VIGOTSKY
It is important to remember that the work
of Vygotsky was published before his death in 1934 and only became known to
readers in the West in 1962 with his first translated book on Thought and
Language. Then in the late 1970 his ideas about child development started also
to be translated and published. Vygotsky said many significant things about the
later area.
Today, however, I am choosing the focus on
only four important aspects of this.
First:
The role of the adult in child development
Vygotsky stressed the role of the adult :
parent, teacher or competent peer, as being crucial on the learning process and
so the child’ s intellectual development . In discussing this, Vygotsky ( 1978)
gave a definition of how learning takes place, using the term zone of proximal
development ( ZPD), which is defined as follows:
The ZPD is the distance between the actual
development as determined by independent problem solving and the level of
potential development as determined through problem solving under guidance or
in collaboration with more capable peers
One of
the difficulties of implementing such a definition is that probably the student
will have a different ZPD in every subject area: science, maths, history . .
And to add this, the ZP will be very different for every child
across these different areas. ( Newmann,
Second: The difference between actual and potential development
With this second aspect, potential
development is emphasized. This actually means that there is a new relationship
between development and learning.
In Education in many circumstances
spontaneous development is usually the major concern, particularly, for example
, with the recent important of tests, examinations etc. Kozulin ( 1990) pointed
out that for Vygotsky, psychological development does not precede instruction
but depends on it and went on to say:
ZPD taps those psychological functions
which are in the process of development and which are likely to be overlooked
if the focus is exclusively on the child’ s performance
In
other words, we need to examine how far children can be stretched in school
with the help of the teacher in their discipline. But, in fact, essential
development is what school is about ; that is, taking children from their
initial state of knowledge to a
Wood,
Bruner and Ross ( 1976 ) describe what happens in ZPD as involving a kind of “
scaffolding process’ but little is known about this, particularly in specialist
areas, like science and mathematics where the knowledge to be acquire is not
intuitive. Much more research is needed into how to built bridges or scaffold
these difficult subjects. After a study of scaffolding in science, design and
technology and mathematics, where it proved to be very illusive ( sample
children 9 and 11 years) we concluded ( 1996).
“
Since much school knowledge is specialized ( nesserarily so ) there is
always ambiguity in the teaching learning situation. Teachers need to believe
that children can learn difficult and complex ideas ; this is what school is about . But they must
be content that often pupils can only do this one step or a few at a time .
Graduallly teacher and pupil negotiate path to thiw specialised knowledge .
Care in this
joint
activity of negotiation is crucial to recuce the degree of uncertainty that
pupil face.
Third : The social origins of
culturaldevelopments
Vygotsky
( 1981) stresses the role that social processes play in child development when
he says :
“Any
function in child’ s cultural development appears twice or on two planes. First
it appears on social plane and then on psychological plane. First it appears
between people as an inter- psychological category and then within child as an
intra- psychological category.”
Thus
Vygotsky stresses the importance on socially constructed knowledge – our
cultural and social heritage - passed
from one generation to another, for example, teachers in school as well as
parents and family.
Fourth : The role of language :
For
Vygotsky language is considered as a significant tool, serving as intermediary
between spontaneous concepts and the higher mental functions . The mastery of
language will transform elementary mental functions into the higher metal
functions. Also, according to Vygotsky, language mediates the genesis of the
higher mental functions themselves.
Vygotsky
( 1981) says that language has importace as psychological tool because it helps
change qualitatively how we think. “the psychological tool alters the entire
flow and structure of mental functions”
Piaget and Vygotsky
Does Vygotsky replace or complement
Piaget?
a.
Piaget tells us about knowledge acquired through the child’s own activities (
spontaneous knowledge)
b.
Vygotsky tells uw about knowledge acquired from other people and from social
practices
Both
types of knowledge are necessary to our functions in society so in this respect
Piaget and Vygotsky complement one another.
Where
Piaget and Vygotsky differ is in the relation both to the role of adults and
teachers and the role of language.
Firstly, in
Piaget’s work, the role of others in the development of children’s ideas is
considered, but only in the very waste sense. For example he sees other people
as crucial in the development of decentering process from an initial
egocentricism to a more social point of view through interaction with others.
In the main, however, individual constructivism does not attribute a sufficient
role to the teacher, the parent or the peer, and this has rightly led to the
attention being given to Vygotsky’ s
ideas about the role of the adult or teacher in learning. This is emphasised in the distinction between actual level
and development and his/her potential level that can be reached with assistance
– which is the essence of the adult and teacher’s role.
Secondly, for
Vygotsky linguistic organization always uses the context. Also language is
needed in abstract reflection for concept development, reasoning and thinking.
Vygotsky claims that one instance in the social becoming part of the individual
is through the acquisition of language.
For
Piaget the act of knowing comprises both operative and figurative aspects.
Unfortunately
the figurative aspect, with covers not only perception but also imitation, image
and language, only plays a subsidiary role in understanding. And with the
figurative side, language is only an element, so for Piaget it has a very minor
role. It was only towards the end of his life he gave it more importance.
But for
Piaget, language is critical to formal abstract thinking because abstract
thought is about propositions about the real world and not the real world itself.
Jerom
BRUNER
One of
Bruner’s most important books was The
Process of Education ( 1960). In This book he expressed the view that teachers
often wasted a great deal of pupils’ time because they postponed teaching areas of the curriculum that they
considered too difficult for the pupils to learn. Thus the myth of “readiness
to learn” arose, that is, that students had to be ready to learn something,
otherwise it was pointless teaching it. Bruner rejected this notion and went in
an argue:
«We begin with the hypothesis that any object can be taught effectively
in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development»
Thus
he elaborated the notion of what is known as the spiral curriculum
“ A
curriculum as it develops should revisit the basic ideas repeatedly, building
upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes
with them”
His
work in the social studies program – Man: A Course of Study ( MACOS) in the
mid-1960s was a landmark in curriculum development.
After
working in the field of new trends of
His
approach to cognitive development is very influenced by Piaget’s development approach to knowledge.
But
ruther than describing an alternative theory of knowledge Bruner (1966) focused on three modes of REPRESENTATION of knowledge and the development of three modes.
But
what is REPRESENTATION? To put it simply, representation is a key human
ability. In more detail, it is individual’s ability to use in their mind
actions, symbols, sighs to stand in the place of absent people, object, events
etc. This allows them to bring to mind anything that is not present in their
visual field. It also permits:
·
To recall of what is absent- past events
·
The imagination of what has not yet
happened- future events.
Humans
can live in their imagination whatever they wish to of need to. For example,
any one of us could be placed in solitary conferment, and while it would be an
unpleasant experience, we would have the resources of our imagination to keep
our minds full of ideas and hope.
Bruner
postulated three modes of representation:
ENACTIVE:
This mode is dependent on actions and senses ( birth
to 18 months) It comprises body images of , for example, imitation, tying a
knot, swimming, cycling. In other words it involves representing events through
motor responses, essentially “KNOWING
HOW TO DO SOMETHING”
ICONIC:
This mode is dependent on images ( 18 months to 6/7
years), where the image resembles the object. However these are theindividual’s
own personal omages, which of course, can differ from person to person. Thus a
glamorous person will probably be quite different for a Greek and for a
Scandinavian. There are some images that are common to many, for example, in
SYMBOLIC: This mode is dependent on symbols (from 7 years
onwards) where the link between the symbol and the object it represents is
arbitrary e.g. a book, un livre, Ýíá âéâëßï. Symbols
can illustrate people’s abstract thinking through their ability to consider
propositions about the world using syumbols rather than objects in the world,
for example logic, physics and mathematics.
BRUNER
claimed that once we have acquired all three modes of representation, we can
use whichever one is appropriate for whatever we wish to.
PIAGET- BRUNER
I set out below the stages of Piaget
knowing development and show how Bruner’s stages of the development of modes of
representation run
PIAGET: Development of knowledge
BRYNER: Development of modes of
representation
PIAGET
Sensori – motor Pre- operational
Concrete operational Formal operational
BRUNER
Enactiv
Iconic Symbolic
During the time that Bruner was developing
his theorie of representation. Piaget was also carrying out research in the
field of imagery and produced the book ” L’ image
metale chez l’ enfant” in 1962
SITUATED LEARNING
Situated
Learning probably dates back to the work of Gay and Cole in
The
general idea of this school of thought is that people learn a multidude of
things on informal settings where the social cultural context is important.
From this perspective, cultural practices – employed in socially assembled
situations – are learned systems of activity in which knowledge consists of
standing rules for thought and action appropriate to a particular situation,
which are embodied in the co-operation of individual members of a culture.
There are so many adherents to this way of thinking it is sometimes difficult
to sort out the differences between them. Thus I am referring to a fairly
recent article be Engeström (1999) on Situated Learning in
which he claimed that,
“Situated
Learning should not be seen as unified theory – but a broad and relatively
loose theoretical platform, informed by a number of contextual and
practice-orientred theories and schools of thought, such as . . . “ ( p. 249 )
Then
he lists
Activity theory : Vygotsky,
Leontiev ;
Sociology: Bourdieu, Giddens
Situatedness : Garfinkel,
Suchmann and
Practice-oriented
variant of symbolic interactionism: Srauss
Engeström went on to distinguish two versions of
Situated Learning:
The weak version (proponent : James Greeno ) and
The strong version (proponents: Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger)
The weak version
Greeno (1989) makes three key points, which characterize his approach
1. The locus of thinking and learning is not an
individual’s mind but situated in physical and social contexts
2. The
process of thinking and learning are not uniform across persons and situations.
Divers people and groups have different reasons for holding knowledge to be
true. For example, if we refer to religion and the idea of a deity : Christians
refer to Bible to support their believes. Muslims and Islam, on the other hand,
refer to Koran as their central religious text.
3.
Lastly, thinking and learning are not built up from single components
transmitted through school instruction; they are activities in which children
create, elaborate and reorganize their knowledge and understanding- a statement
not unlike Piaget’s view of intellectual development.
The strong version
Turning now to the stronge version of Situated
Learning, Lave and Wenger (1991) state:
“In our view, learning is not merely
situated in practice – as if it were some independently reifiable process that
just happened to be located somewhere; learning is integral part of generative
social practices in the lived-in world.
Crucial to their ideas is the notion of a “Community
of Practice”, which refers to the process of social learning. It occurs when
people – with a common interest in subject – collaborate at length to share
ideas, find solutions, and build innovations. There are communities of practice
everywhere – at work, at home, at school.
The key notion behind them is that of “shared practices.”
Wenger (1998) goes on to define a community of
practice along three dimensions:
·
What is about – it is a joint enterprise as understood
and renegotiated by its members
·
How it
functions – it is a mutual
enterprise, binding members together in a social entity
·
The
capability it has produced over time – its
shared repertoire of communal resources ( routines, sensibilities, artefacts,
vocabulary, styles, etc.)
Wenger (1998) further asserts that we need to consider
the notion of identity. For him, learning is central to human identity, where
learning is seen as social participation. Thus an individual constructs his/her
identity through active participation in the practices of social communities.
Likewise groups of individuals create their standard identity by participating
in communal activities. A community of practice embodies the beliefs, knowledge
and behaviours that needed to be acquired.
Studies in Situated Learning focus mainly on adults
learning to : weave, pots, ski, tailor or be : midwives, quartermasters,
butchers, etc. For Lave and Wenger ( 1991) learning does not belong to
individuals, but to the social practices of communities of which individuals
are part. Unfortunately there are a few studies focusing in communal or social
practices in formal education: students, pupils, teachers, specialised
knowledge etc. There are however quite a few links with informal education.
Lave and Wenger also claim that it has been their
quest to find a metaphor for learning that exists outside formal educational
contexts and is based on social participation. Their aim is to characterize Situated
Learning through detailed examples that illustrate the types of relationships
and the forms of participation essential to apprenticeships with in. However,
it would seem that Lave has had a long-held scepticism about Situated Learning
being part of formal schooling. For her, Situated Learning requires a “hands
off” policy and appropriate “facilitative structures” for it to be implement in
such a context.
Summarising the two positions, in the weak one of Greeno, learning is
situated in physical and social contexts, thus context must always be into
account – it is the starting point for learning studies
In the strong version, however, learning is a
by-product of participation in any social practice thus the “social practice of
a community carrying out such a practice” is the starting point for research
into learning.
Engeström (1997, 1999) claimed that Situated Learning agenda
needs reformulating. In the past there have been mainly global claims, based on
few studies and not research questions. According to him, recent research
demonstrates the need for focused theoretically grounded questions.
Rogoff, Turkanis,