Jan
10
Constructivist Theory applied to Instruction: the continuing debate.
Alexander Romiszowski
(Educational Technology 48/1, January-February 2008, pp62-63)
Why bring this topic up again?
I am currently back in Brazil, after a nine month long stay in Africa, where I was working on several projects related to distance education and the use of ICT for Development (ICT4D). Shortly before going to Africa, I was engaged on program planning and implementation for the twenty second ICDE World Conference on Distance Education. During the last month or two, since my return from Africa, I was similarly engaged, assisting the program planning committee of the Brazilian Association for Educational Technology (ABT – Associação Brasileira de Tecnologia Educacional) to organize the program of its annual conference. As I write this column, the ABT conference has just finished. Some aspects of discussions at this conference have stimulated me to focus this month’s column on a topic which we have already addressed in a previous column – the apparent misalignment between theory and practice as regards constructivism and instruction, and the forces that are really shaping instructional change.
I was also driven to once more address this issue when I was informed by Tom Duffy and Sigmund Tobias that they are in the process of planning an edited book on the same topic, also stimulated by the recent article in the Educational Psychologist by Kirchner, Sweller, and Clark (Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based ,experiential and inquiry-based teaching.). Tom sees this project as “the next edition of the conversation begun with the Duffy and Jonassen 1992 book, Constructivism and the Design of Instruction: A Conversation.” At that time, says Tom, “most people did not have a clear sense of the implications of constructivist theories for instruction – while there were clear examples of the application, the main stream of instruction still thought of learning in behavioral or information processing terms”. However, he maintains that things have changed considerably in the last fifteen years – constructivist theories and a “constructivist practice” now dominate the fields of learning sciences, instructional technology, and educational psychology – and there is a firm belief that this is how people learn.
However, both Duffy and Tobias admit that there are some notable failures, “at least on the surface”, and that strong evidence in support of the constructivist model is sparse. They suggest that this is because the holistic view of the learning environment in the constructivist framework makes it impossible to isolate variables in the traditional, objectivist sense, or to develop comparison conditions that the opponents of the view find satisfying. However, let’s look at some other prfactitioner-perspectives on this issue.
The ICDE-22 Conference Debate.
At the ICDE conference in Rio, in September of 2006, I also organized a panel to debate the above mentioned paper and its implications for educational practice. As this was in the context of an international conference on distance education, the panelists were DE practitioners and researchers drawn from different world regions. One of the panelists, Som Naidu, from Australia, presented a reasoned argument for the differences that appear between theory and practice, focusing especially on the need for fundamental systemic change in schools as a pre-requisite to the implementation of constructivist theory in practice.
Another of the panelists was Peter Knight, at that time head of the Institute for Educational Technology at the Open University of the UK (since deceased – God bless his soul), who drew a detailed, hilarious, and somewhat cynical analogy between the typical actors in the drama of instructional theory versus practice and the main characters in “The Simpsons”: Homer Simpson - crude, incompetent, intolerant, clumsy, thoughtless and extraordinarily stupid, but who occasionally displays flashes of brilliance and an integrity reflecting his own values; Marge - the well-meaning and extremely patient wife; Bart – the oldest child, whose most prominent character traits are his mischievousness, disrespect for authority and sharp tongue; Maggie – the youngest of the five main family members, who is eternally a baby; and Lisa Marie Simpson – “an extremely intelligent girl, one of the brightest characters on the show, who serves as a mouthpiece for the show’s writers, many of whom are postgraduates, to voice their knowledge of philosophy, science and history” (here I am quoting Wikipedia). Peter offered a prize for identifying the educational-system roles of each character. There were few takers in the audience – perhaps because the majority of the international audience might have had difficulty in relating to the peculiarities of the British sense of humor.
A third panelist, the Brazilian economist and educational systems planner, Claudio de Moura Castro, drew our attention to the manner in which constructivist theorists often damage their own case by their fervent evangelism, which “turns theory and philosophy into a form of religion and practical implementation into something that resembles the Inquisition”. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that Claudio is a Brazilian and was speaking to a predominantly Brazilian audience on a phenomenon that is particularly prevalent among Brazilian educators, this contribution to the debate produced the most heated response from the floor, similar in fervor – if not in militant action – of the reaction to the cartoons on Islam that were recently published in a Danish newspaper.
Lessons from the ABT Conference.
The five international keynote speakers at the ABT conference were all selected and invited to present their take on what was really happening in their part of the world as regards the real impact of ICT on education. The keynote speaker representing North America was Bernard (“Bernie”) Dodge, from San Diego State University, well known (also in Brazil) for his work on the Web Quest methodology – a decidedly constructivist approach to the use of the Web for knowledge-construction through collaborative learning. Bernie did not devote his time to expounding the principles and practice of Web Quest, but instead focused on a comparison of such learning strategies and what is really happening, and indeed continues to be formally promoted, in USA schools. He explained how the basically sound philosophies underlying Government programs like “No Child left Behind” get to be distorted during implementation in order to match the established philosophies and practices of objective testing of the superficial outcomes of learning.
Once the policy is established, the “money follows on. Bernie showed by means of examples how the educational products of publishers and equipment providers tend to follow the established political pattern, thus further reinforcing the status quo – if you have a budget to spend, you will tend to be influenced by what the market offers and promotes, and this in turn is influenced by what the educational politicians and administrators tend to promote through their funding decisions. One example quoted by Bernie – the large and growing number of systems on the market, based on handheld electronic responders, that provide instant feedback to the teacher of student responses to objective test questions – immediately reminded me of the application of this methodology, albeit by less convenient and “sexy” technologies, in the hard-wired “feedback classrooms” of the programmed instruction era.
I used such classrooms quite extensively in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s in the UK, and found them very useful and effective in my context – the teaching of standard procedures to automobile factory employees and equipment maintenance technicians. Later, when I moved to working in a university context, teaching instructional design, I found these environments less useful. Indeed, when I first joined the IDD&E faculty at Syracuse University, I discovered a feedback-auditorium, hard-wired for some hundreds of students, installed in the Newhouse School of Communication. But I never saw the facility in use – indeed a year later, it was deemed to be a white elephant, or even a dinosaur left over from an earlier era, and dismantled. Now the purveyors of new educational technologies are making huge profits (and getting Federal R&D money) by reviving the dinosaur in a new context and in a micro-size.
Bernie did, of course, mention the Web Quest methodology in his lecture, but here again he concentrated on illustrating the way in which many practicing teachers distort the underlying philosophies and theories, developing Web-based learning activities which they label as Web Quests, but which in reality run diametrically in opposition to constructivist principles. This example was picked up and elaborated by the other speakers who showed how, in other contexts, for example the learning object movement, innovative theory is distorted to fit the status quo.
One of the other speakers, John Hedberg, who was representing Australia, based his lecture on a basic premise that 21st Century digitally literate learners (“digital natives”) are different from previous generations: they monitor multiple inputs rather than multitask; they collaborate expeditiously; they “rip, mix, mod and burn their tasks”. Therefore, in today’s education systems, effective instruction and learning must take into consideration the social impact of new technologies. The “digital native” students learn through multiple modalities and, as they spend thousands of hours playing videogames, using mobiles and other technological tools, they develop new learning skills and shape new expectations for the educational process.
John introduced the concepts of “disruptive” and “sustaining” technologies. The latter is any innovation that tends to support doing what we do now more effectively or efficiently. The former is an innovation that tends to disrupt, undermine, and ultimately change the status quo. As an example, he argued that we are leaving behind the Gutenberg era which was dominated by print and the printed book and which for five hundred years “has disrupted the idea of what intellectual work really is: knowledge creation now recalls the cultural norms that prevailed in the pre-Gutenberg oral and folk culture of the Middle Ages”. So, print as it is typically used in schools, once was a disruptive technology, but has now become a sustaining technology that tends to impede change. However, it depends how you use it. Annotation of print can a disruptive pedagogy, introducing new ways and possibly ethical standards for using other peoples’ content as part of a “mashup” in which you can overlay your work on the work of others.
Blogging, according to John, is another example of a potentially disruptive pedagogy, somewhere between a conversation and an essay. A blog may be used to publish and distribute a student’s production in a poetry class. In the first instance, the new poem is subjected to analysis and critique by the student’s peer group as well as the teacher. But it does not stop there. The audience may be more than the one class – earlier years may have later years commenting on their work – the general public may also show an interest and also contribute their critiques. Blogs may expand the ways of teaching content by providing a rapid way of presenting new internet links in a personal form and allowing construction of personal post-lecture essays and feedback on an instant website.
Schools are basically about groups led by teachers. At home or out-of-school, students can and already do meet in groups and link by other virtual means. So, at school the technologies that are used are more likely to be those that support existing teacher practices, but at home alternative technologies and tools are possible and are indeed enthusiastically chosen by students. As teachers, we tend to choose sustaining technologies, such as the interactive whiteboard, which tend to support teacher-centered control and already familiar forms of pedagogy. Students, however, tend to choose disruptive technologies such as SMS, instant messaging, blogs, and multimedia “mashups”. So, learners can take charge – the students can use their newly acquired tech-skills to interact and explore new content, either on their own or under teacher facilitation – the end result depends on the teacher’s ability to accept and adapt to change.
In Conclusion: what needs to be discussed?
The viewpoints reviewed in this column are just some of the many that have some contribution to make on the questions of what forces really might lead to significant change in today’s educational systems, and what is the whole range of reasons for the lack of impact of apparently sound theoretical innovations on educational practice. Also, I believe they are viewpoints that may enrich the academic discussion of why research data do not necessarily support the predictions of new theoretical positions. The debate is wider than educational psychology – it involves sociological, organizational and political theory as well. Therefore, it involves an interdisciplinary and systemic approach – the true sense of cybernetics.
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