Dare to Know: Radical Constructivism

Radical constructivism is the one way of limiting field of rational thought from the inside that you can sort of grope until you come to the boundaries. One of these boundaries is consciousness whereas we have no rational model of consciousness. In addition, we have no model of memory that is the reason I believe that what lies outside is much more important.

 Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is hierarchical and variant like organisms assimilate from the food as a metaphorical representation from biology. Whereas, assimilation means that you take out of a present experience what fits experiences that you have had before. You have a pattern and whatever fits that pattern, you are ready to take the rest you discard you do not know about it, that’s the reason that it is quite easy to observe it with children since they take in what they know already and the rest include that they do not even experience or see. This is also valid for adults who catch themselves as an individual perception, for example; when you look at something, you recognize it so this is in your pattern that you have already had but you may also notice after couple of minutes that pattern is not there at all since you may discard the most important part of that experience. If so, you need to modify and accommodate but accommodation itself is making another pattern of your own which fits your situation. It is a much more complex to differentiate; assimilation means to take things out of reality and accommodation is a kind of modifying it yourself depending on your reality. That is totally misleading since human beings do not take the things out of external world and see the external situation in terms of their experiences. In addition, accommodation is a particular pattern that you applied is not useful in that context which does not work and get you where you want to reach. We revise what we perceived and understood, then a scheme is created. (Glasersfeld, 1981)

In addition, Piaget became very interested in reflexes of infants to a sensory signal and reaction that produces something that is desirable and beneficiary effect at the end of action. If the action does not produce what you want, there is an incentive to accommodate and it changes your scheme. PJ classified the “scheme” in three parts including “stimulus situation, the action and the result of the action” so if the result is left away, it does not work for your understanding referring to the behaviorist perspectives.

 On the other, radical constructivist fashion can be perceived as a therapy for people who find many things in their lives become easier and agreeable. If we really get into constructivist thinking, we can realize that we do not have to be right or even convince people that “your way is the best way” as it reminds me a quote by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz which was “This is the best of all possible worlds” since it is perfectly good enough if it works for you. Most of our time is passing by convincing other to believe our ideas or way of looking that is a waste of effort.

Moreover, it has been obvious that we cannot transfer any knowledge from the teacher to a student or even transport from one head into another. Namely, students has to build their own knowledge and this is a different process assumed to be a reception of something that is ready made into the head which does not happen. From the lenses of behaviorism, teaching starts with a method of teaching behavior but it does not teach thinking actually. Following the commands of your commander in military or training a dog to sit or roll down by giving a chewy biscuits where reinforcement work wonderfully as like a teacher wants students to repeat an idiom like “ it’s raining cats and dogs”. Nevertheless, this may be implemented very well but applying it in their own decisions of acting may not mean understanding. In teaching world, I believe that this is a dilemma among the scholars and teachers besides, teaching what a phrase imply or why it is useful is more crucial than teaching what it is in the textbook. In a nutshell, applying that idiom for example, with a decision of acting helps to construct in a meaningful way in which the teacher is there only to make the learners construct means as well as getting them actively build knowledge.

As opposed to old-fashioned teachers’ point of view in teaching, it is quite risky because we never know what the student really knows or builds in the situation that is presented. From this perspective of radical constructivism, teachers need to present particular situation and we all learn from the learners to shape and modify our method of teaching in order to make it viable. More specifically, it is an effective constructivist teaching example follows as: Breaking out the students into groups of four or five by giving a task and observe what comes out and getting them to report what they have done afterwards. This practice makes the activity fruitful by leading students to ponder on what they are doing and how they think. All these require reflection which is an important step in understanding a situation.

To sum up, radical constructivism breaks with convention and develop a theory of knowledge that reflect non-objective reality but exclusively an adaptation of functional senses by our experiences. That ideas lies in the same vein with “intelligence organizes the world by organizing itself” by Piaget with his massive contributions for emerging the frame of constructivism. It begins with the assumption of cognitive activities that take place in goal directed situations within experiential world of learning. Once this has been fully internalized, radical constructivism ought to be perceived as a possible model of knowing and acquiring of knowledge on the basis of one’s own experience.

References

Driscoll, M. P., (2005). Constructivism (pp.385-402).

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1979). Cybernetics, experience, and the concept of self, In

M.N.Ozer (Ed.), A cybernetic approach to the assessment of children: Toward a

more humane use of human beings. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 67–113.