Thinking Through Practice: Community College Pedagogy in the 21st Century

Slogging through the Constructivist Quagmire

Confusion about what is meant by constructivism (in education) is not endemic only to our seminar conversations. The terminology, it seems, is used a lot as a catch phrase to refer to any kind of teaching that is not based on the old “banking model” (now also often referred to as the "transmission model") of teaching and learning.

I get email from a listserv called “Tomorrow’s Professor” which originates with the Stanford University Center for Teaching & Learning. Here’s a quote from recent article they posted by Jack Meacham, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor, University at Buffalo-State University of New York. The article is from the Fall, 2006 issue of Peer Review, Volume 8, Number 4. Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Meacham’s use of  the term “constructivist” is a pretty common example of how the word has become a sort of catch-all to describe a range of currently popular pedagogical approaches. Meacham writes:

“Once we move beyond a transmission model of teaching and learning, in which students are passive, to a constructivist model of liberal education, in which students are actively engaged, curious, reflective, and thinking critically, the best learning technology becomes the posing of a problem, issue, or question for the students (and this is real, not magic).”

Meacham’s phrase “constructivist model of liberal education” is vague and it reminded me of a similar fuzziness in how we have used the term in the seminar when we have talked about or tried to define certain practices as “constructivist pedagogies.”

Since constructivism is not a kind of teaching, but rather a theory about learning, when we talk about constructivist models of teaching (or pedagogy, or “liberal education”), we mean those informed by constructivist theories of learning. Almost all the articles and websites that try to define constructivist theories of learning say something like this:

“Constructivism's central idea is that human learning is constructed, that learners build new knowledge upon the foundation of previous learning. This view of learning sharply contrasts with one in which learning is the passive transmission of information from one individual to another, a view in which reception, not construction, is key.” (“The Practice Implications of Constructivism.” By Wesley Hoover, http://www.sedl.org/pubs/sedletter/v09n03/practice.html).

This “definition” also feels pretty vague to me and it shares with many of its fellows the need to define “constructivism” negatively, or in contrast to the “transmission” model.

If I had to put it in my own words I might say something (equally annoying) like: Learning is not memorizing a series of facts that a teacher tells you (or that you read in a book) and being able to recite them back on a test. It is rather the ability to integrate new knowledge with what you already know (or believe,) in ways that make sense to you. An important piece of this (which sometimes gets lost) is that this also involves the ability of new knowledge to transform existing (wrong, incomplete or fuzzy) beliefs.

Since this seminar is not a class in educational psychology or philosophy, I think its OK/advisable NOT to belabor Piaget, Dewey, Vygotsky, et al, and instead to do what most of these definers also do (including the first article I gave you on using constructivist pedagogies in an economics class), which is to move quickly from trying to say what constructivism is to trying to define what a teacher who thinks about learning this way might do to promote learning in her classroom.

Again, attempts to describe what constructivist pedagogies might look like vary widely and encompass a lot of generalities (like Meacham’s, “…actively engaged, curious, reflective….” )

Here’s one list (linked below) that comes from a website on technology and school reform that I think is pretty useful because it is more concrete than most, though it suffers a bit from inconsistencies in parallel construction and other grammatical oddities.

http://www.edwebproject.org/constructivism.basics.html

I like this list because it encompasses several issues and practices that have come up already in our conversations, some of which are controversial (i.e. we don’t all agree on their value or place in the classroom or we are concerned about the risks and trade-offs associated with them.

I’m not sure which ‘learning cycle model’ he is referring to in #12; because there are a lot of them out there. I couldn’t find other references to this on his website, but most models are variations on: Challenge/question (presented by teacher or generated by students in response to course material) ->reflection (what do I/we know? What do I/we need to know?)-> Research ->solution(s) or knowledge/creative products-> share and compare.

For your blogs in the next two weeks I would like you to pick two things from this list to try in your class (preferably things that you don’t already regularly do.) Think about specific ways to incorporate them into your teaching and about what your associated goals would be in doing so. Try them, and document the process, including: *why* you chose to try these particular things, what your goals were, to what degree did you achieve your goals, what issues or problems came up, etc.

Toward "constructivism"

            I want to offer a tentative step in the direction of trying to nail down more specifically what we might  mean by “constructivism” or a “constructivist pedagogy” based on what we have been reading and talking about thus far over the semester. I guess am concerned that we don't fall into conceiving of it as equating to something like drawing on student personal experience in the classroom. To do so seems limited and problematic (when do we not draw on their experience – from how we design a syllabus to how we plan a specific class meeting? We don’t/can’t ignore their past experiences as students as we confirm and confound their expectations about what it means to be a "student"…)

            Looking at the Ford and Leclerc article (“Economic Education”) that Belle gave us to look at several things stand out for me:

-         early in the introduction, they criticize the lecture hall experience and point to how students in such situations have “little or no opportunity to ponder the meaning of, react to, or evaluate the relative value of the various points being made.”

-         In the next paragraph they suggest that “constructivism,” drawing upon Vygotsky, Freire and Dewey (talk about distinct!), challenges students to learn by placing them  “in a position in which he/she must construct his/her own meaning and not simply be required to reproduce someone else’s” (483).

These above points point me in a direction I’m more comfortable with: asking of ourselves how or when and why do we create opportunities for students to do the hard work of pondering, of reacting to, of slowing down and looking closely, and of evaluating carefully the value of the subject at hand?  It’s the student “experience” that I get the willies about because I just can’t get my head around that term to make it useful yet; or rather, that term "experience" has a long and troubled history in my own field and I don't want to go there. It’s a term that has been used in similar ways as “voice” (‘I want my students to develop their own, unique voice in their writing.”).

Ford and Leclerc do move the conversation toward experience, however, in the next paragraph on 483 when they base their idea of “constructivism” on using “the students’ own experiences to provide ‘scaffolding’ for the student to construct and increased understanding….” What I think they mean here is their “experience of economics,” not where they grew up, their lives as raced/gendered/sexed students, etc. But it is this distinction that tends to collapse, I think too often.