“Constructionism” Begins In The Mind
They are many Papertians in the field of education, which is to say, many people who have been influenced by the book “Mindstorms” and its ideas.
Makerspaces are very popular these days, and we can learn much through “making things”. The creative impulse is hotly debated in K-12 education, but is probably still underused in general across its many subjects. But making things, tangible physical objects in the real world is not the only goal of constructionism. We can debate how “tangible” lines of code are, for example, but they lead to something new- a program that can be executed. Coding in K-12 education is also hotly debated these days, but this post is not about that.
Constructing new ideas in our heads, as a learner, is likely more important than constructing things in the physical world. So you have a little bit of knowledge about a topic, how can you construct or “build in” more to your mental model? Classrooms should pay more attention to how knowledge is constructed.
The shortest path to helping a learner, any learner, learn something, is to tell them. This approach, clearly telling, is often derided as transmission, and, make no mistake, human heads are not buckets to be filled with random bits of knowledge. But not all knowledge needs to be actively constructed. Important and big ideas typically should be constructed as much as possible.
Here is an example from middle elementary.
We need to learn about the Pythagorean relationship.
Here is the short instructional path:
- explain the formula
- work a few examples
- set yourself or your students to work
In this example, you are constructing usable knowledge about the Pythagorean relationship, mostly through an algebraic mode.
Consider a second instructional path:
- examine a few right-angled triangles, and see what you notice
- look at a visual proof of the Pythagorean relationship, typically involving area of squares “stuck” to the sides of the triangle.
- see what you notice. “Develop” the formula.
- use the formula
The first example is more efficient if you are short of time, and the good news is you can add in the visuals later. The second path is a much broader process of construction, that adds in visual models.
Papert speaks of this process of knowledge building nicely:
“Constructionism — the N word as opposed to the V word — shares constructivism’s view of learning as “building knowledge structures” through progressive internalization of actions… It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it’s a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe ( Papert, 1991, p.1)
(quoted in Ackerman, http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf)
I added bolding to the phrase above to show that we are really talking about internal processes, which are then made external. The point is constructing knowledge in the mind in some usable form, and then making it manifest in the world.
I point to the mental processes of constructionism for one reason: it is typically used as an argument for coding in the classroom. Coding in the classroom is a very good thing, but there must be some mental process building ideas about coding in the learner’s mind before they code. A good question is then: what needs to be understood about coding before we begin to code?
Learning is a process of “bringing into being”: thoughts come into being, and thoughts become ordered into some schema (or not), and then the thinker can do things with these thoughts. “Bringing into being” applies to thoughts, and then, eventually objects, such as artwork, lines of code, or working the Pythagorean theorem.
This is why I often say:
