The Constructivist Approach to Education

December 6, 2013

Constructivist theory aims to facilitate education in creating environments and teaching methods that produce individuals whom have developed analytical skills, thereby enabling them to pinpoint and define problems as well as their own choices. Challenges include surmounting the cultural trend towards the commodification of higher education, which has resulted in an undermining of professional preparedness. Constructivism theorists attempt to remedy this issue by re-framing the constructivist approach in order to promote authentic student-centeredness.

Constructivist Theories

There are three main components and accepted theories to Constructivism. They are as follows: knowledge is socially constructed, learners physically construct knowledge and therefore knowledge must be embodied for a learner to acquire it, and learners symbolically create knowledge, by fashioning their own representations for concepts and meanings.

This can be related to the theories of Stuart Hall, who is a very popular cultural theorist and constructivist who has focused on topics of representation. There are three ways in which people interpret and understand readings and words for their meaning. Our understanding comes from dominant/hegemonic positioning, which is the socially constructed theory of representation. There is the negotiated position, or a mixture of accepting and rejecting elements. Meaning comes out of simultaneously resisting and modifying representations in a way that reflects our own experiences and interests, which is the approach most closely associated to the theory of physically constructed knowledge. The final theory of representation is the oppositional position, in which the consumer of a reading understands the literal meaning, but due to his background, decodes messages through individual interpretations. This is most closely related to symbolically created knowledge, or the third constructivist theory aforementioned.

Aims of Constructivism in Education

Constructivism is used to instruct problem-based and learner-centered approaches. It is the basis for why educators’ attempt to incorporate community engagement into planning and public administration methods. These are counter to ‘traditionally’ described methods: the ‘chalk and talk’ and ‘drill and kill’. The chalk and talk, or traditional lecture method, poses concerns due to students getting little from lectures, as these tend to bore them. Lectures also marginalize students, as professors act as experts, instead of fostering learning goals. The drill and kill describes homework, and although the rhyming phrase is more than enough to describe the resulting impact, the purpose of homework is to reinforce learning through a repetitive pathway.

Constructivists advise to avoid serving as ‘sages on the stage’ and to act as ‘guides on the side’, mentoring and facilitating rather than preaching to the students. Constructivism does not pose a viable solution to replace these tactics—there is mixed feeling about the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of these tactics. Empirical evidence has NOT shown that constructivist strategies have improved learning for learners in all contexts. Studies have suggested, however, that constructivist methods could increase post-secondary educational success and retention for disadvantaged groups.

Constructivism, Educational Commodification, and Authenticity

School curricula is developed using several learning theories, not just Constructivism. Behaviorism, as we know to be associated with Pavlov and Skinner, has been applied to how students are graded. Learners respond to how their behavior is perceived by external actors (teachers, administrators, the state) and behave accordingly. Grades and progress reports are used to set incremental goals, and progress is rewarded (good grades, high GPA, graduating with honors, making the Dean’s list) while regression is punished (academic probation, suspension, reduction of scholarships).

Cognitivism, or the focus on information processing, breaks down into four areas: attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval (capacity for recall). Constructivists argue that behaviorists and cognitivists marginalize learners. Students are not passive receptors of knowledge, and meanings are constructed from concepts. Therefore, instructors teach best by posing meaningful questions, with no single set of accepted teaching practices. They prefer to engage students in activities such as games, role-play, theater, and dance. This is most closely related to Project-Based Learning, which has over the past decade played a large role in curriculum development across the K-12 spectrum.

Student-centered models suggest that learners assume an active role, and evaluation needs to move away from value judgments concerning participants’ work. However, education has been greatly commodified, especially in a time when educational costs have skyrocketed and the divide between affordable education and value has also inflated. The neo-liberal pressures on education seek to maximize the role of markets in society, as they have in economics. There is an assumption that markets pose the ideal balance for the organization of political and social life. Instead, this has altered the climate in which higher education occurs, emphasizing the role of knowledge production for corporate advancement. We as students and our parents ask “have we invested in the right schools, and is the education received paying off?” This has also altered our perception of the authenticity of our education: is education there to inform us, and are we being genuinely informed, or is knowledge being blindly passed to us and regurgitated on tests that are used to rank us nationally?

Based on a survey by the national survey of America’s college students, more than 75% of students at 2-year and more than 50% of students at 4 year colleges did not score at the proficient level of literacy on the National Survey of America’s College Students.

Unfortunately, with a greater focus on PBL and constructivist theory in curricula design, this has shown that there are conflicts with constructivist teaching methods, and constructivist approach does not claim to fix this issue. On the same note of authenticity, we bring up the issue of accountability: if the system is accountable to parents and to broader society, it is a question of whether parents, employers, and taxpayers are ‘getting what they pay for’, raising the point that we value parental expectations more than those of students. This also commodifies higher education as a market good.

Educational Paradoxes

There are several paradoxes within education. The paradox of professionalization, where social and cultural change have undermined state-sponsored technocratic managerialism, has sidelined the aims for educational democratization. This is due to modernist governmentality pushing to set specific, expertise-driven standards in many professions, resulting in rigid standards that have resulted in a ‘crisis’ of identity for some professional fields. Constructivism comes from a desire to shape knowledge democratically, but this is counter to current trends. Students are willing to commodify and narrow the reach of the subject to ensure that they possess what they believe to be the skills needed to gain employment, though ironically the development of job-related and market-relevant skills, rather than the development of sophisticated analytical capacities are counter to the values that employers tend to desire.

There is a paradox of privilege, under which constructivist ideals of power-sharing and political, economic, and social equality, are downplayed due to a lack of common ground. We all come from different socially privileged groups and bring in many experiences, which are hard to recognize and therefore instructors may not recognize that students fail to see their roles as members of a collective democratic group compared to members of consumer groups and consumer status group.

This lack of democratization and equality extends to the paradox of authority, under which professional institutional hierarchies still exist. Although there are collaborative, pluralistic methods that dominate many arenas of study, instructors are situated in contexts of power and hierarchy and have had to navigate scholarship and professional practice themselves. In addition, tenured and seasoned educators may not necessary accept newcomers and junior faculty as equals.

A Tempered Approach

Although I have regurgitated a lot of content from this article, and made it seem as if we were in a dire educational crisis and at the edge of peril, we need to take into account the dangers of overemphasizing criticisms. We must balance an approach between preparing students for a work-a-day world, and also compel them to undertake professional responsibilities they find intriguing. Even though post-modern culture has emphasized individual preferences, it has also made it difficult for educators to make demands against student preference.

Constructivism has only exacerbated this tendency, and though it desires to dignify and liberate students, it can also result in students resenting claims that counter their own. This presents a greeater disposition among learners, and with teachers yielding a large share of authority in order to meet the demands of liberated and apathetic students, this has presented a Machiavellian paradox itself—what is the balance in fairness and power by which an educational environment should abide?

Constructivists need to rethink some of the assumptions, and re-frame the desire under which students are empowered. Teachers need to dignify students, but also assume responsibility for active mentoring. Just because authority becomes lax to an authoritative liberalization, it does not mean that a removal of authority results in guaranteed equity and justice. It is also naive to assume that such a simple, stagnant power relationship exists. Many other factors contribute to power relationships, and a tenable position acknowledges these realities and stresses the ethics of classroom power and interaction.

Reaction

This article raised a great deal of points regarding curricula design, and many of the topics we have covered in lecture. I was engaged in the reading, both due to the fact that I am a student and therefore interested by the relevancy of the topic, but also because it is important in my view to understand how curricula is designed. I was previously not aware that so much on learning pathway theories are used, and it has opened by eyes to the difficulties in designing material that targets individuals equally and fairly to create learning environments. In generally, I agree with the points raised in this article. I personally have always favored individualistic approaches, and the need for projects and open-ended approaches to learning in the classroom. I do disagree that active mentoring is the only way that educators need to run the classroom. There is certainly a need for the ‘chalk and talk’ approach, and a stress on Cognitivism. Behaviorist approach is also important, as we know that fear serves as a strong motivator, such as the fear of poor results. We need to acknowledge that there is a widespread apathy in education, as well as a lack of direction in areas that we ourselves aren’t personally motivated to do well in. Outside of logical reasoning for good performance, there needs to be an instilled thrill for knowledge and a thirst for it. I did dislike that there wasn’t a greater stress on a balance between all the theories in educational design, as Constructivism does not and will not address all the paradoxes raised in the article.

Implications

Educational tourism is a large part of the tourist industry. Every year thousands of students flock to areas such as the east coast to visit historic sites, and learn about our country’s history. It is important that tours such as these are designed in ways that light the fire to drive our burning desire for knowledge, rather than designed to extinguish the desire in favor of opportunities to explore gift shops for memorabilia driven by commercialized design.

As technologies such as 3D printers become common household items, as indeed they are becoming, the lack of value that exists in digital products will transition into the material world. We will be able to, given scans from museums, construct historic objects that are perfect replicas. We will be able to bring historic artifacts into classrooms and our homes at marginalized costs, affecting how we see commercial value. Museums will be reconstructed in schools, but whether this will engage or disengage students to learn about history is yet to be seen.

Sports and education go hand in hand. Many studies have shown that exercise and physical health contribute to greater levels of energy, necessary during long study sessions, as well as greater retention abilities and lower levels of stress. In a world where intellectual capital is continuing to be of the utmost importance, resulting in brain-drains and a growing outsourcing of manufacturing to the poorest countries, healthy lifestyles are becoming more and more critical. At the same time, the growing focus on intellectual capital has propagated a new challenge for directing leisure activities away from electronics. Our hand-held devices that we watch movies on and play games are also our portals to educational content, and with many companies having BYOD, or bring your own device policies that allow access corporate portals, we have started to create a mixed gradient between leisure and work. The implications of how RST will construct activities and environments to promote mentally and physically healthy lifestyles in the technological age are vast.

I myself am a computer science major. However, there are many aspects to CS other than just cubicle-style programming: CS stresses constructivist approach beyond basic concepts, because at the industry level you are required to apply analytical approaches to design technical infrastructure systems, create software interfaces that follow good design principles as well as hold an anchoring in human-computer, or socio-computer, interaction.

Defining and creating data-driven systems as well as educational software that finds individual weaknesses as well as determines what areas a student should focus more of their time on takes not only a constructivist approach but also behaviorist and cognitivist ones as well. I don’t believe that there is one right way to teach, and as technology and “one tablet per child” initiatives pass, I think that computers will be able to provide additional targeted resources to better educate an individual based on personalized needs. However, as much as technology unites us, it can be a distraction and also make use feel isolated, so again it is not the sole solution to educational reform. In the same way that Constructivism must find a balance among the other aforementioned theories and approaches, technology must be balanced with leisure and natural human interaction as well.

References

The content in this article is based on a review of the following scholarly article:

Schweitzer, L. S., & Stephenson, M. S. (2008). Charting the challenges and paradoxes of constructivism: A view from professional education. Teaching in Higher Education , 13(5), 583-593. doi: 10.1080/13562510802334947 Lisa Schweitzer, Associate Professor, PhD. Urban Planning, USC Max O. Stephenson, Jr.Professor, UAP; and Director, IPG