Why Constructivist Leanings? (About the Blog’s Title)

Originaly published here on February 23, 2008

I grew up thinking that reality was, well, you know - real.

I did my undergraduate work in psychology at a small Georgia college. Gerald Ford was President when I started and BF Skinner was still held in pretty high esteem. Constructivism was just beginning to come into vogue. And the psych faculty of my college thought that the best way to study behavior was to begin small, with something like rats, and come up with principles that could be generalized.

It was general psychology, not educational psychology. The idea that the mind could be meaningfully studied was largely scoffed at because the mind (if it existed at all) was unobservable. Don't get me wrong. We got a nice dose of Piaget and a sprinkling of Bandura, statistics, the philosophy of science, and Behaviorism took pride of place in the department.

In retrospect, I remember one professor we had who was a registered nurse before she got her PhD in psychology. She was dyslexic. She would write on the board a lot. Periodically she'd realize that students were either puzzled or snickering, and she'd begin to point at letters and say, "Is it this one?" She'd erase the offending letter (usually written backward) and write it correctly. I suppose it should have dawned on someone in the room, what with all of us studying psychology, that maybe observable behavior could prove that not everyone perceived reality the same way...

I didn't recognize it as such at the time, but I suppose my constructivist leanings began as a graduate student in linguistics at the Australian National University. It's amazing the amount of perceptual diversity that you come across by looking at languages. An easy example is that we're communicating at the moment in a language that doesn't assign gender to very many inanimate objects. A Mercedes in Germany, for example, is seen as somehow masculine: der Mercedes. A newspaper is feminine for some reason: die zeitung. And water, for reasons that escape me (but seem obvious to German-speakers) is neuter: das wasser. That's a pretty different perception of reality. A newspaper is a newspaper (or so I'd always thought), but Germans see them differently than I do.

I've since discovered that Noam Chomsky shredded Skinner's ideas about language all the way back in 1967, when he began to review Skinner's 1957 book, Verbal Behavior.

I graduated from the Australian National University with a Graduate Diploma in General Linguistics (with Merit) in 1993.

My real interest in Constructivism as a learning theory and philosophical school began only recently when I wrote a short piece for Suite101 on the 21st Century Learning Initiative. I realized that in order to understand and evaluate 21st Century Learning I was going to have to understand Constructivism better. So I started reading about it.

I learned that I have Constructivist leanings. I'm not sure I'm a full blown Constructivist (though that could come with time). And some of the more extreme forms of Constructivism still seem almost silly to me. But it's clear to me that meaning is personal and happens inside a student's head.

Can I change that word, meaning, to knowledge? I suppose that depends on your definition of knowledge. But ask me again in a few months.

In the mean time, I'm trying to come to grips with my Constructivist leanings...