Yes, well, indeed, what IS constructivism?

This is my first attempt to grapple with the contradictions of constructivism, as generally espoused, which I find an odd thing to be doing as it is transparently obvious to me that knowledge is now and generally has been (seen as) "constructed". Presenting this as an insight of Dewey , when it appear to have been an obsession of Socrates some two-and-one-half thousand years previously confuses me. Or, I could pluck a quote out of the mid-nineteenth century: "To learn is not to know; memory makes the one and philosophy the other" (Dumas pere). Is it a coincidence that a Doctorate of Philosphy is the highest accolade of the academy?

Maybe it isn't fair to pick on Koohang, Riley, Smith, & Schreurs, but they happened to be standing in the door at the time.

OK, so, in the "E-Learning and Constructivism: From Theory to Application" article they define constructivism for us:

… The key idea is that students actively construct their own knowledge: the mind of the student mediates input from the outside world to determine what the student will learn. Learning is active mental work, not passive reception of teaching.


Do you think it's possible to passively construct knowledge? If it were, wouldn't it still be knowledge? After all, it would still have been constructed, and that seems pretty suggestive. What's the word "actively" telling us here?


Mind is a pretty loaded word too; it's certainly smuggling something into the discussion. I hate the word mind and its compounds. I don't trust them; I find myself letting the use of it pass for the sake of politeness, and suddenly I'm apparently committed to a whole bunch of bizarre stuff. Particularly I want to know, what is this mind that is not the brain, or the brain plus the neural network attached? Anyway, I'm letting it pass again (it would take weeks to pick through it), but making the point explicit. I remain uncommitted.

Mediates, I don't understand that word. Is there an implication that it is possible to turn the mind off, and let the "outside world" flood in unmediated? I have the germ of an idea that that is the basis of autism, so should I understand that there are two mind-states? Autism, and learning? Maybe three, asleep.

Input from the outside world? So, no input from the inside world? Maybe that's the mediation, the mind mediates between itself-as-inside-world and input-as-outside-world. Of course, that's what the brain is always doing; for example, information arrives in the form of photons with a wavelength of 650 nanometers. (That, BTW, is really "pure" information in a digital 1-0 it's-there-or-it's-not kind of way. When you talk about digital learning, remember that for all time sight has been digital in a very very deep way). They eye turns the photon (well, chunks of them) into an electro-chemical signal for the brain & your brain provides a mass of associated data in various contexts; that might include the word "red" in an english-speaking brain and the idea "sex" in a contemporary of the Wife of Bath.

So, was that bit of mediated input (colour processing) from the outside world, learning? It doesn't seem very active does it? Perhaps we should bar automated brain processes. Not "mind-y" enough. Hmm, OK. What about language then? Obviously I didn't start learning English (it's my native language) until I was 8 and started actively thinking about how it worked & how to use it. The 5 or 6 thousand words I already knew by then - hang, on, could I have known them if I hadn't learned them? - plus the several hundred grammatical features with which I was familiar (great language, there's a euphemism for everything, "familiar" = "know") were acquired without effort. So, to be a constructivist, I apparently have to hold that one's native language isn't learned, nor is it known. I'm glad I started writing this down. No-one has drawn that to my attention before.

I love the idea that I get to determine what I learn. Would that be the little homunculus in the brain that makes the decision? (When he's finished mediating, no doubt) I wonder why, every time I try to study French, he decides that I can't learn it? I am really startled to hear that one learns what one decides to learn. It's very annoying that I decided to forget all that stuff that I have forgotten & and only remember that I have forgotten it. I know sarcasm isn't the soundest foundation for an argument, but this kind of determinism makes me cross. I've just discovered that everything I thought I knew because I remember reading/discussing/seeing/(pick a sense-ing)it previously, isn't actually knowledge. I mean, I've always felt pretty stupid, but now I feel a whole lot more so.

Putting aside the emotion though, maybe this is just a requirement of the constructivist view; but like the requirement for "active" mediation which ruled out language acquisition as learning & therefore knowledge, this requirement for determinism (and let me just reiterate what a fraught concept that is in the 21st century) is going to rule out a lot of stuff as knowledge as well. That may be OK, but the other stuff is still around, and has to be accounted for. I haven't seen any discussion of this in the literature so far (OK, I'm a novice in it) but frankly, the limiting seems to be a bit stealthy. When I consider the rhetorical dross that occupies large chunks of academic writing to re-inform me of the blindingly obvious, I have to say that I wouldn't mind another line reminding me that constructivism as a view of learning/knowledge is a seriously narrow view that leaves out an awful lot of stuff that the unwary non-specialist might be inclined to assume was actually in there.

I've already had a go at "active", but now I want to look at "passive reception of teaching". Is the "passive reception of teaching" actually possible? If the authors didn't think it were possible, presumably they wouldn't be trying to contrast it with the active reception of teaching, but what do you thinkg that "passive reception of teaching" actually looks like? Be careful, it's not the passive IGNORING of teaching. Is it some kind of code to denigrate the (2500 Asian years old) practice of rote learning? Do you think the writers have actually every tried to do rote learning? It's not in the least bit passive. Or, does this definition of learning actually privilege rote-learning, because of its activity? Is the student who attends lectures, takes notes (is that passive?) or listens carefully (is that passive?) or stays awake (but passively) and then accidentally remembers the lecture, learning? Or what?

This whole statement is so problematic that it looks like a memorised and recycled mantra that has undergone precisely no critical thinking on the part of its recyclers. Does that disqualify it as knowledge? It does for me; within about a page this article has gone from potentially extremely interesting to pure cant.

And that annoys me intensely, because I am a constructivist, or at least I thought I was, and being compelled to associate with this sort of nonsense makes me feel dirty.

I was originally going to post an anlysis of the whole article here, but it might get a bit long. I'll close now by quoting again:

Honebein (1996) advanced a set of goals that aid the design of constructivism in learning settings.

Pardon me while I speculate whether the definition of constructivism just offered to us qualifies for the word "design".

Relationship of mind to world
Mediated	Unmediated
Learning	Autistic	Asleep

Acquisition Method	Found in brain?	Is knowledge
thought	no	yes
thought	yes	yes
talk	yes	?
rote	yes	?
reading	yes	?
listening	yes	?
unconscious	yes	no
accidental	yes	no

So, just a couple of closing remarks on the tables: the question of retention isn't actually canvassed by the definition, but I only highlighted that for "thought". It's possible to guess that "talk" will be constituted as knowledge, because when you read the rest of the paper you find lots of emphasis on social construction, but listening is not so clear. It may be social, but it's hardly active.