References
1 I will document this paper with quotes from relevant publications. See these for additional information on constructivism and its application in education. I have also indicated how the views in this paper relate to a number of ether presentations at this conference.
2 "Constructivism asserts two main principles whose applications have far-reaching consequences for the study of cognitive development and learning as well as for the practice of teaching, psychotherapy, and interpersonal management in general. The two principles are (1) knowledge is mot passively received but actively built up by the experiential world, not the discovery of ontological reality." International Encyclopedia of Education. "Constructivism In Education," 1987.
3 The ideas I will discuss here have been touched upon by other speakers at this conference, for example Tomislav Sola in his general orientation; Samuel Sas stated that "in the modem Museum the visitor is at the center, not the object;" Maria Horta Baretto stressed that the meaning of an object is given to it by the viewer; and Yaron Ezrahi discussed the subjectivity of the images of science.
4 Every genuine experience has an active side which changes in some degree the objective conditions under which experiences are had. The difference between civilization and savagery to take an example on a large scale is found in the degree in which previous experiences have changed the objective conditions under which subsequent experiences take place." J. Dewey. Experience and Education. Kappa Delta Pi, 1938.
"If the view is adopted that 'knowledge' is the conceptual means to make sense of experience rather than the 'representation' of something that is supposed to lie beyond it, this shift of perspective brings with it an important corollary: the concepts and relations in terms of which we perceive and conceive the experiential world are necessarily generated by ourselves. In this sense we are responsible for the world we are experiencing." E. von Glaserfield. "An exposition of Constructivism: Why some like it radical" in R. B. Davis. C.A. Maher and N. Noddings, editors. Constructivist Views of the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics. Washington, D.C. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1991.
5 As a participant stated in our discussion group, "History is made by people: it isn't a collection of facts." or as Avner Shalev stated "The role of education is not to instruct but tutorial: an approach that allows the visitor to be a consumer."
6 The meanings that learners construct do, in fact, concentrate on a limited number of conclusions. This is related to the notion that learning is social, as it happens within a culture, and perhaps for other reasons as well. A discussion of why certain views appear repeatedly is beyond the scope of this paper. That they do is evident when we consider, for example, the consistent Aristotelian" views in naive science explanations.
7 "Study is effectual in the degree in which the pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is dealing with in carrying to fruition activities in which he is concerned. This connection of an object and a topic with the promotion of an activity having a purpose is the first and last word of a genuine theory of interest in education." J. Dewey. Democracy and Education. MacMillan, 1916.
8 "The most important message modern research on the nature of thinking is that the kinds of activities traditionally associated with thinking are not limited to advanced levels of development. Instead these activities are an intimate part of even elementary levels of reading, mathematics and other branches of learning." L.B. Resnick . Learning to Think. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
9 ''The object enters into dialog with the learner only after being transformed by him or her. In fact, it is the set of significant units organized by the learner and the relationships that he or she constructs between them that constitutes the cognitive object that, in turn, constitutes knowledge." A Henriques. "Experiments in Teaching," in E. Duckworth, J. Easley, D. Hawkins and A Henriques. Science Education: A Minds On Approach to the Elementary Years. Erlbaum, 1990.
10 "The relationship between thought and word is not a thing but a process. a continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to thought: .... thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them." L.V. Vigotsky. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 1962.
11 "Vigotsky was proposing that children's understanding is shaped not only through adaptive encounters with the physical world but through interactions between people in relation to the world---a world not merely physical and apprehended by the senses, but cultural, meaningful and significant, and made so primarily by language. Human knowledge and thought are themselves therefore fundamentally cultural, deriving their distinctive properties form the nature social activity, of language, discourse and other cultural forms." D. Edwards and N. Mercer. Common Knowledge: The Development of Understanding in the Classroom. London: Methuen, 1987.
12 As Mooly Broog stated in the discussion group "When you say Jerusalem, what is the visitor's concept? Each visitor, from a different community, has a totally different idea of what the city is."
13 "A fundamental way of changing the requirements for success on a particular task is to recontextualize the text presented to, and understood by, the learner. In all sample cases, the subject is initially presented with the activity---the whole task---embedded in, contextualized as part of some larger activity. For the subjects themselves, the recontextualization involves familiar scripts and human intentions." M. Cole and P. Griffin. Contextual Factors in Education. Madison, WI: Wisconsin Center for Educational Research, 1987.
14 Maria Baretto referred to this point when she stated that "we cannot identify and recognize what we don't already know ."
15 "We can learn most easily when we already know enough to have organizing schemas in L.B. Resnick and L.E Klopfer, editors. Towards the Thinking Curriculum: Current Cognitive Research. 1989 ASCD Yearbook. Alexandria, VA: American Association for Curriculum Development, 1989.
16 "Research... confirmed that acquiring skills and strategies, no matter how good one became at them, would not make one into a competent reader, writer, problem solver or thinker... The habit or disposition to use the skill and strategies, and the knowledge of when they are applied, needed to be developed as well." Resnick and Klopfer., op cit.
17 Increasingly we find that the limitations of timing described by Piaget extend longer into adulthood than Piaget would have had us believe. Research by Shayler and Adey suggests that English children shift from concrete to hypothetical-deductive later than Piaget argued; a considerable amount of research on college students indicates that many are still in concrete stages, and work with adults on science concepts often indicates that they hold "childish" views on a range of topics.
18 Teacher. New York. Simon & Schuster, 1963.
19 "...the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined by problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers." L. Vigotsky. Mind and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.