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Thursday, September 2, 2010
Treading water to save my life....
It seems that the swimming and wading has now gone to another level for me. I am treading like crazy with this Constructivism and the Technolog of Instruction. I have been looking at it for five days now...and can't seem to really get into the meaning. They all seem like snippets - I cannot seem to grasp the big picture. Am I even getting the meaning of Constructivism? I am seeing it based on the idea that we all "construct" our own sense of reality???? That the learning is different for each person because each person has had their own experiences and their own perspectives - so this effects the way that person learns? The way they have lived their life and the way that life has impacted them influences the way that person learns and sees the content? It is more about problem solving problems that they are not really engaged in? It is an abstract world? I give my statements with question marks, because I feel that I am actually still struggling with the definition itself. I know that we are supposed to be talking about the articles...but I need to back the boat up...and really grasp the meaning of the term first. (Get it -backing the boat up - sticking to the water theme). Someone throw me a life jacket...and talk to me about this!
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You're on the right track, I think.
ReplyDeleteKey concepts:
1. Everybody has a unique context that colors and shapes each experience.
2. There is no objective truth that exists outside of perception.
3. Reality consists of a mutually agreed upon set of ideas. What you think is real to you. What I think is real to me. What we both think and can confirm for each other is "real" while anything that we do not agree on is not.
This seems weird when you think about things like rocks and trees, but even those ideas break down if I happen to think that--for example--trees have a living spirit that connects with every other living thing at some spiritual level that we can't perceive with our five senses but which I know exists because I can feel it resonate within me when I'm in the forest. Our mutually constructed view of reality ends at the bark, as it were. We agree with the idea of "tree" only up to a point. After that, reality shifts for each of us.
On a less theoretical idea, consider the construct of "Learning Styles"--which many teachers believe in--the notion that every person has a preferred mode of learning based on some inherent characteristic that overrides context and content in a situation where he or she strives to construct meaning.
For many teachers this construct is real. They see it evidenced every day. For many others (I'm one), this is an interesting superstition that has no credible corroborative research to support it and which seems completely counter-intuitive on its face. A "visual learner" will not learn to ride a bicycle by watching an expert ride nor learn about Beethoven's music by reading the scores or watching an orchestra. Yet that's what the theory says and, by extension, what many teachers say they believe.
That breakdown in agreement is the borderline between individual realities which identifies where the shared construction ends.
The idea of learning to a constructivist is the process of building agreement across some specific knowledge domain--whether it's math, language, history, or whatever. There's a fundamental construction where the individual works out what he or she thinks, and then there's social construction where what I think is tested against what you think. Where we agree, we find reality. The more different times we find agreement, the stronger the reality becomes.
I see what your saying Lisa, and I'm like Chris this is just going over my head. I kind of understand but yet not sure what I'm understanding. But I like how Dr. Lowell explains it.
ReplyDeleteIt is sort of like a memory. I remember events from a certain time in my life and my brother remembers something entirely different although, some things are the same. I guess the same memory of certain things would be the "concrete knowledge" as Lisa puts it.