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Figure 1. Semiotic triangle relating signs, the worldly thing they refer to (Referent), and the series of interpretations and contexts within which the sign takes its meaning (Interpretant). |
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Wolff-Michael Roth
Lansdowne Chair
Applied Cognitive Science and Science Education
Faculty of Education
University of Victoria
Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4
Tel: (250) 721-7885...FAX: (250) 472-4616
e-mail: mroth@uvic.ca
http://www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/
In a recently published argumentative paper, Illman (1998) proposed to replace "constructivism" with "objectivism" and the constructivist metaphors for teaching and learning with an Ausubelian theory of learning. Much like the arguments in HPSST circles (e.g., Matthews, 1997), the author leaves no doubt about the nature of his statements: they are "right."
It appears to me that much of this debate for and against constructivism is misguided and little more than battling windmills. I say this from the position of someone who had obtained an M.Sc. in physics and worked as a researcher in that domain, who was a member of that community in which the world as an imperfect implementation of the mathematical nature of the universe appears to be taken for granted.
First, the word "constructivism" is used so widely to explain so many things, sometimes everything, that it is -- like all theories that attempt to do so -- explaining very little or anything at all. Second, "objectvism" and other "isms" is not different but to be placed in the same category of words that are so general that they explain nothing. Here, I take a semiotic perspective and work out the relationship between texts, signs, world, and individuals.
From a semiotic perspective, especially in the Anglo-Saxon tradition deriving from Charles Sanders Peirce (e.g., Eco, 1976, 1984), the relation between a sign (e.g., concept, theory, model, etc.), interpretant, and referent to which the sign refers is given in the following form:
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Figure 1. Semiotic triangle relating signs, the worldly thing they refer to (Referent), and the series of interpretations and contexts within which the sign takes its meaning (Interpretant). |
The sign is anything such a concept, graph, model, theory, etc. which refers to something else in the world, such as an event, a phenomenon, clusters of events, and so forth. However, phenomena are never directly accessible but only as, what Eco (1984) called Immediate Objects, that is, already as objects within a particular worldview which in many cases is common sense. Onto this triangle, we can graft another one which relates the knowing subject, immediate objects and the world more generally, and the knowledge of the subject:
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Figure 2. Knowledge triangle grafted onto the semiotic triangle relating knowledge, the worldly thing it refers to (world), and the knower (subject). |
This triangle then brings to relief the relation between the knower, knowledge and the world. After birth, humans therefore construct not only the world but also knowledge about the world. These two constructions are different, but are interrelated. I conceptualize these differences in terms of the metaphor of map and territories and the relation between maps and territories.
Unlike presented by so-called "objectivist" science educators, those who use the "constructivist" label to refer to themselves do not deny the existence of a material world. What they do emphasize is that knowledge and the world are, on ontological grounds, not the same. This is the very argument others have made for some time: the map (knowledge) and the territory (world) are not the same (Bateson, 1980). And as we all know, maps are used for specific purposes, to achieve particular means, and more generally constructed as useful by the people who employ them. Thus, the maps made by different people to represent the area between my home and the nearest beach will differ: the geologist will represent the geological strata which highlight the fault lines that are going to be the site of the next earth quake; the politicians in the area are concerned with representing voting districts which they want to change to get a more favorable population distribution during the next election; the builders and constructors are interested in maps that show which areas are zoned for residential purposes so that they can buy and built new housing projects; and the list goes on. There even exists a poster featuring an aerial photograph of the area.
Natural scientist are concerned with the construction of knowledge about the things (Immediate Objects) in the world. They have established their procedures, their cultural practices to do so in a uniform fashion around the world. No "constructivist" will argue that. No "constructivist" will argue that as the results of these efforts, rockets have been sent to the moon, Mars, and the outer planets. But constructivists are concerned with the relationship of this knowledge to the world and they do that by pointing out that the knowledge is not the world; but they also point out that knowledge is constructed such as to be successful, in von Glasersfeld's terms, to be viable. Viability is not unlike the concept of "adaptation of the fit" used in ecology to explain the evolution of particular species with particular genotypic and phenotypic expressions.
The assumption that scientific knowledge is viable (rather than the structure of the world itself) is a minimum or more conservative assumption than assuming that knowledge and world are actually the same. We simply have no evidence to make a decision about knowledge other than that it is successful. There are no means, that is, there are no decidability criteria, that permit us to decide whether human cultural knowledge permits us to land space craft on the moon because knowledge and world are identical, or that knowledge is simply viable.
For those who doubt the comments in the last paragraph, they should remember one of the standard activities students conducted in physical science programs such as IPS: There is a box with sticks and stuff inside which makes noise. Using the various noises as empirical evidence, students were to construct models of the interior of the black boxes consistent with the evidence without ever being able to look inside. The moral is clear: if we can't look inside, there is no way that we test whether our model (i.e., scientific knowledge), will have an isomorphic relation to the world it describes.
The efforts of recent scholarship appear to be thus: post-modern, feminist, social constructivist, and deconstructionist scholars all point out that, much like the maps of the area where I live, are related to the purposes and interests of people, related to their daily struggles of political influence, predicting the next earthquake, providing for more housing, and so on. But the fundamental relation between all these maps and the valley between my home and the sea is still that of the map and the territory&emdash;they are fundamentally different. Furthermore, there are no maps that represent my experience in that valley, my biking experiences, the walks close to sun-set, the late afternoons at the beach, the first walks in the spring.
"Objectvism" is not a better paradigm for learning than "constructivism" as claimed by some authors including Illman (1998) and Matthews (1997). "Objectvism" and "constructivism" are just signs that refer us to something else (see Figure 1) without specifying the nature of this relationship, and without ever being able to specify what they refer to independent of a community in which such relationships are negotiated and agreed-upon. We know that all the curricula base on "discovery learning" failed because the world did not disclose itself or any "correct" maps when our students looked at and investigated it. Rather, there is considerable research that shows that there are many ways of making observations and categorizing them. In a recent project, we showed that although 24 grade 12 students in an Australian physics classroom looked at the same teacher demonstration, they disagreed before the demo about what they expect to be happening, and after the demonstration about what they was seen and about how to explain the events (Roth, McRobbie, Lucas, & Boutonné, 1997b). Furthermore, when we investigated what the same students learned during their laboratory activities, we found a wide range of observations and claims, few of which were actually compatible with the canonical framework of physics (Roth, McRobbie, Lucas, & Boutonné, 1997a).
But it also needs to be stated that "constructivism" is not an inherently better paradigm for teaching. In my observations, many people (teachers and researchers) have adopted a constructivist discourse without noticeably changing their practices. And many teachers have taken constructivism as meaning laissez-faire and thereby depriving the children in their care an introduction to a new way of looking at and talking about the world.
Now, rather than debating whether one "ism" is better than another, we need to acknowledge that students do not see the same things although they appear to be looking at the same events. What students learn from looking at these things will therefore not only be looking different, they will also be leading to different kinds of changes in the persons experience and in the way the person talks about these. This is what some science and mathematics educators have been saying for some time; and despite the variation between different science educators (e.g., Philips, 1995), they all have come to be labeled as "constructivists" (and in some nasty way also linked to indoctrination and fascism). What so-called social-constructivists have added was the notion that the community regulates and agrees on the general knowledge framework that is to be regarded as the standard.
As a physicist, I find it striking and untenable that Illman (1998) would use nuclear power issue as an argument against constructivism and for objectivism and transmission of information. I do not want to belabor the issue between constructivism and objectivism, but about the "transmission of knowledge." This latter claim (a) does not follow from the contrast of constructivism and objectivism and (b) furthermore is inconsistent with current research in the brain sciences. The brain or more specifically the neurons and neuronal connections adapt themselves through activity. Thus, they only learn when they enact that very knowledge that they are said to learn. However, the "information" processed by neurons is not content free but always already a function of what the cognitive system currently knows. Thus, what is "information" to one cognitive system is "non-information" for another; that is, what one cognitive system constructs as salient information may be background noise at best to another. Knowledge (information), whether in a constructivist or objectivist paradigm cannot be transferred to a living, biological cognitive system as the computer metaphor appears to suggest and makes so easy to accept. Furthermore, children do learn to deal with "abstract" things that have little to do with physical experiences: Just think of mathematics, like factoring a polynomial. In mathematics as in the area of nuclear physics, the knowledge people construct is about Immediate Objects which are themselves elements from a discourse about other aspects of the world; nuclear physics and mathematics are themselves referents, worlds, or domains (see Figures 1 and 2).
It seems important to me that the individuals in the debate become more reflective and reflexive about their own activity. The problem with words (concepts) such as Constructivism and Objectivism is that at the bottom of it, their referents are multitudes of texts, generated by multitudes of authors. That is, the use of "isms" impoverishes the debate. In each camp (constructivist, objectvist, etc.), labels are used to categorize large numbers of texts. Thus, in terms of our semiotic triangle (Figure 1), the sign "constructivism" refers to an (objectively available) world of texts in which different authors speak about, and often commit themselves to, a constructivist epistemology. However, any textual analysis reveals the large interindividual and even intraindivdual variations between and within these texts. Philips (1995) therefore referred to the "many faces" of constructivism. But the same can be said about objectivism, at least once one begins to notice the variations between and within the texts its speakers pronounce.
Like the maps that reduce the reality of the countryside near my home, and in fact put it in different contexts, the labels "constructivism" and "objectivism" reduce the complexity of the phenomena and thereby permit discussants to engage in Don Quixotic battles of strawpersons and windmills. Rather than engaging in such efforts, we might begin to ask educational questions in specific contexts. Rather than attempting to construct frameworks around unitary and binary constructs (including isms), we may engage in asking questions, at a local level, where we want to go and what we want to happen. For example, at issue is how to go about setting up learning experiences and how to go about teaching children. The important questions, however, go deeper than distinguishing between constructivist and objectivist strawpersons and windmills. At issue are questions such as
I had become a physicist in part because I believed that I would come to hold the key to knowing the structure of the world; later, I found myself in admiration of anthropologists such as Levi-Strauss who used structural models not unlike those in physics to describe and explain cultural phenomena. Still later, I learned that I had been an objectivist and structuralist and successively "became" a Piagetian, radical, and social constructivist. But then I came to realize and experience the violence all these terms did to me as a person. My peers associated me with some label and, by transference with the texts and descriptions others associated with my past and current labels. Rather than talking to and with me, trying to understand what I was saying, in all its heterogeneity and multi-vocality across settings, they pigeon-holed me, clothed me with the drapes of an ...ism strawperson, and thereby objectivized me. I now refuse such efforts that attempt to reduce me, and I refuse myself to make categorization easy by providing others with labels for myself. This forces us to engage in conversation in which we can com-municate, come to share, what we and our ideas are about.
Bateson, G. (1980). Mind and nature: A necessary unity. Toronto: Bantam Books.
Eco, U. (1976). A theory of semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Eco, U. (1984). Semiotics and the philosophy of language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977). Sein und zeit [Being and time]. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer.
Illman, T. H. "Constructivism" and cooperation between scientists and educators : A reply to Crowther. [Online] Electronic Journal of Science Education, 2(3). Available: [http://unr.edu/homepage/jcannon/ejse/illman.html[1998, March]
Matthews, M. R. (1997). James T. Robinson's account of philosophy of science and science teaching: Some lessons for today from the 1960s. Science Education, 81, 295-315.
Phillips, D. C. (1995, October). The good, the bad, and the ugly: The many faces of constructivism. Educational Researcher, 24(7), 5-12.
Roth, W.-M., & McGinn, M. K. (1997). Deinstitutionalizing school science: Implications of a strong view of situated cognition. Research in Science Education, 27, 497-513.
Roth, W.-M., McRobbie, C., Lucas, K. B., & Boutonné, S. (1997a). The local production of order in traditional science laboratories: A phenomenological analysis. Learning and Instruction, 7, 107-136.
Roth, W.-M., McRobbie, C., Lucas, K. B., & Boutonné, S. (1997b). Why do students fail to learn from demonstrations? A social practice perspective on learning in physics. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 34, 509-533.
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