Constructivism, or more precisely, a constructivist
metatheory, presently prevails throughout
professional education circles. Most
educators easily accept constructivism's central
premise that learners approach tasks with
prior knowledge and expectations based on
their knowledge of the world around them.
Naturally, then, constructivist educational
technologists have been guided by the implicit
(and increasingly explicit) desire to create
"authentic" environments for learning: environments
that correspond to the real world. In
this paper, I argue that technologists have
tended to paper over the critical epistemological
dimension of constructivism by " preauthenticating"
learning environments:
creating environments that are predetermined
to reflect the real world even though constructivist
theory contrindicates precisely this. I
suggest that a rhetorical perspective on constructivism
offers a way out of this bind and l
propose some guidelines to assist developers of
educational technologies in accommodating
the essentially dialogic nature of teaching and
learning.
[] Unlike earlier efforts to motivate students by
making learning relevant, today's educators are
facing a much weightier challenge. Renewed
interest in various threads of constructivism,
such as the movement to situate cognition, has
sparked a lively debate on the differences
between thinking and learning in formal and
laboratory settings as opposed to learning
within more informal, everyday contexts. This
more rigorous interest in authentic learning has
been watched closely by educational technologists
who have been working to apply the lessons
of constructivism to the task of contextualizing
pedagogy.
In this article, I will argue that educational
technologists have fundamentally misunderstood
the challenges posed by constructivism.
This is seen in an approach to contextualizing
learning that I call preauthentication, or the
attempt to make learning materials and environments
correspond to the real world prior to the
learner's interaction with them. Preauthentication
allows technologists to employ constructivistic
rules-of-thumb to justify this or that
learning environment, but ignores the epistemological
dimension constructivism brings with it.
I further argue that careful consideration of
constructivism's epistemological implications
suggests that we need to convince learners of a
problem's authenticity rather than to promote
environments that deliver preauthenticated
problems. Therefore, I conclude that the goal of
authenticating learning requires a look best
afforded by the discipline of rhetoric: the study
of persuasion and argumentation.