Constructivism Finale: The Emperor's New Rhetoric

What we mean when we say that we “construct” knowledge is problematic, because we are often using language we inherit from the Piagetian developmental tradition without fidelity to or understanding of that tradition.

According to Piaget, learning results when acting on objects, which disturbs our cognitive “equilibrium” and in turn forces us to either assimilate the new experience that confirms or extends our existing cognitive structures or accommodate the new learning that corrects the new contradictions to our cognitive structures.  These things appear to happen “naturally,” tacitly.  Few academics who declare that we “construct knowledge” show any appreciation of the roots of their language.

It is not always clear in Piaget what kind of “structure” he is referring to, though, “behind the scenes” cognitive structures or conscious mental models derived from reflection on our experience.  Nevertheless, Piaget and his constructivist successors, heirs to Kantian idealism, are adamant about our inability to know the world directly, that we “filter” the world through conceptual schemes.  So far so good.

The rub:  Piagetian understanding of learning is so colored by his studies of pre-school age children that his theories are applied universally, where they appear to break down.  His justification seems to be analogical:  If process A describes learning by an infant and, as biological creatures, we have evolved by learning the same way, then juvenile and adult learning reflects or even requires the same process.  Therefore it, too, must involve active engagement with an object.  And so college teachers are increasingly transforming their classrooms into hives of small group inquiry. 

Not bad in itself, the “active” model has to be stretched to accommodate lecture and reading, probably the oldest university teaching methods we practice.  Much of our reading is for information that we do not have the experience or capability or time to discover for ourselves.  Particle physics, brain physiology, or even Piaget’s developmental psychology come to mind.  I suspect there are others.  Piaget’s theory does not consider these constraints when applied to the classroom.  Lectures are sometimes self-conscious interpretations of course material (Worthen), sometimes simply replacements for the reading students are unable or unwilling to do.  Unlike many other teaching methods, lecture has one important advantage over others:  experts in their field—teachers—are able to tie loose ends together in the context of their classroom to achieve some coherence in the material students are inquiring about.

I have already argued elsewhere that all learning is active, so I won’t spend time defending these practices again.  Instead, I’d like to explore Piaget’s understanding of knowledge versus the contemporary philosophical position that knowledge is justified belief.

If we can have no access to the world except through our conceptions of it, and if our conceptions of it are colored by our personal “interests” and values, then justification for a constructivist can involve only the absence of contradiction, pragmatic viability” (does it work for the individual?), and social confirmation (Cardellini).  If justification is thus limited, then we will have trouble explaining the persistent ability of quantum mechanics, despite what Einstein or anyone else felt about it, to provide the justification required for its assertions to be true, because it is successful at “making predictions so accurate as to defy belief” (Derman 5).

Similarly, in the literature classroom the various schools of literary criticism have to start with the reality of the text (Rabinowitz 30).  We don’t (or shouldn’t) honor an interpretation of War and Peace as prototypical science fiction.  Here, Hirsch’s distinction between meaning and significance is useful (8).  If we are going to talk about the same novel, we have to agree who the characters are and what events take place, using evidence from the text and backgrounded literary conventions.  When we disagree about these, someone is generally guilty of misreading, and we can settle these differences by referring to the text.  How we assign significance to those characters and events is what divides us and leads to arguments, interesting and petty alike, that references to the text generally can’t resolve.

Just as the text constrains our interpretations and the laws of physics hold whether we know them or not, external reality limits the scope of our understanding and efficacy (Weisman).  We understand this world through the models or schemas we build of it.  Piaget explains in structuralist terms how we interact with that external reality, but even in his telling, it is the external, physical fact that imposes itself on our schema, not the other way around.  Despite the infant’s apparent belief that the toy, hidden under the blanket, no longer exists, it in fact does.  Our knowledge is justified, not by our schema, our models, but instead by the realities our schemas encounter.

This is a blessing.  If we are dependent on our subjective filtering of the world, and our only justification comes from whether it works (Cardellini), we leave ourselves hopelessly vulnerable to self-deception.  Our resistance to external information that contradicts our schemas is a well-known subject in studies of cognitive dissonance, the Dunning Kruger effect, and biased assimilation.  There are good reasons for some of that resistance—physicists did not allow the announcement from Cern that neutrinos were found to travel faster than light to disrupt their Einsteinian view of the universe (Brufiel).  The wisdom of their resistance was confirmed a year later (Cho).  Still, disconfirmation is all too often resisted in ways dysfunctional and destructive of self and community.  Mental illness, addiction, violence, learning disabilities, and political extremism (cf Hoffer, The True Believer) might be rooted in distinguishable constructions that may intensify evil effects.  This is not something constructivism can explain, because what “works” is left to individuals to decide.

Social constraints are growing more feeble as well, and so offer fewer sources of “perturbation.” True believers can isolate themselves from contradiction by engaging only with those who think as they do, through social media and ideological enclaves.  Bill Bishop, in The Big Sort, documents how, over the last thirty-five years or so, Americans have chosen to move to places where the people are just like them in terms of race, education, religion, economics, and politics.  We often nurture gated minds.

This resistance to disconfirmation is real.  A constructivist psychology offers no hope for the deluded if valuation is strictly personal and correction is dependent on weakened social influences.  What kind of perturbation can there be in such a self-protected psyche?  Disillusion comes soon after “reality sets in.”  Soviet sympathizers in the West of the twenties and thirties eventually came to realize the brutality of Stalinism.  It required an awakening. 

Similarly, regardless of our awareness, our knowledge, our interpretations, our conceptions, our concern, lurk other realities.  Poverty is real.  Climate change is real.  War is real and so, too, the dislocations it causes.  ISIL’s beheading of non-Muslims and even Muslims is real.  Attacks on Muslim girls in school are real.  They need not be “constructed.”

There is a great deal in the universe that exists that we have not discovered.  That word “discovered” is operative in a realistic approach to learning.  We discover not only by confronting data and inductively generalizing from it, but also by hearing and reading the conclusions of others who do go through that process.  Others’ insights, spoken or written directly and explicitly, are often new to us, and help us make sense of the world and ourselves.  Sometimes, we adapt or accept wholesale other people’s constructions—their integrations and models and, occasionally, ideologies.  Some people call that entering a tradition or a profession or a practice.

However, it is claimed that such behavior is not indicative of individual agency and power.  Consequently, someone like Andrea Lunsford, a ubiquitous writer on issues regarding college composition, can put on the cover of her textbook The Everyday Writer, “Today’s students want to be producers of knowledge, not just consumers of things others have said.” Yet she has written a book full of direct, explicit instruction—something an “other” has said.  We are all “consumers of things others have said,” because that is one way we learn.  Only in the contemporary academy is that equated with crass commercialism.

Through that rhetoric we aim at an admirable end:  increasing the empowerment and agency of our students.  But traditional methods of teaching and learning exist because they, too, work, and have for centuries.  Otherwise, how could it be that teachers have been wrong for so long, while universities the world over have produced so many educated, knowledgeable, inventive people?  If the construction of knowledge is not a wholly adequate description of what we are doing when we learn, why use the term?

My answer is that the language of constructivism has become the shibboleth of the academy, a sign of membership, because we are au courant with contemporary thought and practice.  Hardly a researcher or writer on education can avoid defining learning as construction.

As a consequence, we find ways to widen the circle of permissible pedagogy so as to leave our current practices intact (Carillo 5; Worthen).  And, contrary to constructivist ideology, we require students to provide verifiable evidence for their arguments.   We are still wedded to fact-based justification in which we look to the real world for confirmation (Lunsford 136).  Our rhetoric is a nod and a wink to the likes of Piaget and von Glasersfeld, but our intuition and experience generally prevail.  It’s time to stop being defensive.

References

Bishop, Bill.  The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.  New York:  Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

Brufiel, Jeff.  “Particles Found to Travel Faster Than Speed of Light.” Nature.  22 September 2011.  Web. 19 Feb 2016 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/particles-found-to-travel/

Cardellini, Liberato.  “The Foundations of Radical Constructivism:  An Interview with Ernst von Glasersfeld.” Foundations of Chemistry.  8: 177-187.  2006. Print.

Carillo, Ellen C.  Securing a Place for Reading in Composition:  The Importance of Teaching for Transfer.  Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2015.

Cho, Adrian.  “Once Again, Physicists Debunk Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos.”  Science AAAS.  8 Jun 2012. 19 Feb 2016. Web.

Derman, Emanuel. Models. Behaving. Badly.:  Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster on Wall Street and in Life.  New York:  Free Press, 2011.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr.  Validity in Interpretation. New Haven:  Yale UP, 1967.

Hoffer, Eric.  The True Believer:  Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.  New York:  Harper & Row, 1951. 

Lunsford, Andrea.  The Everyday Writer. 6^th Edition.  New York: Bedford St. Martins, 2016.

Rabinowitz, Peter J.  Before Reading:  Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation.  Ithaca, NY:  Cornell UP, 1987.

Weisman, David.  Truth’s Debt to Value.  New Haven:  Yale UP, 1997.

Worthen, Molly.  “Lecture Me.  Really.”  NY Times. 17 October 2015.  SR1.  Print.