Constructivism, Cybernetics, and Information Processing: Implications for Technologies of Research on Learning / Thompson, Patrick W.

In: Constructivism in Education, ed. By L.P. Steffe and J. Gale, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. - s. 123-133. - 1995

Constructivism, as a philosophical orientation, has only been widely accepted in mathematics and science education since the early 1980s. As it became more broadly accepted, it also became clear that there were incongruous images of it. In 1984, von Glasersfeld introduced a distinction, echoed in Steier's chapter 5, between what he called naive constructivism and radical constructivism. At the risk of oversiinplification, suffice it to say that naive constructivism is the acceptance that learners construct their own knowledge, whereas radical constructivism is the acceptance that naive constructivism applies to everyone-researchers and philosophers included. von Glasersfeld's distinction had a pejorative ring to it and rightly so. Unreflective acceptance of naive constructivism easily became dogmatic ideology, which had, and continues to have, many unwanted consequences.(1) On the other hand, I attempt to make a case that to do research, we must spend a good part of our time acting as naive constructivists, even when operating within a radical constructivist or ecological constructionist framework. The orientation I have in mind is not unreflexive, therefore I call it utilitarian constructivism, and use the chapters by Steier and Spiro et al. (chaps. 5 and 6, respectively) as starting points in its explication.

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