Thoughts on constructivism

Everything about the constructivist approach seems like the most effective way to organize a classroom and implement instruction: student agency/ownership of their work, knowledge is multiple and fluid rather than a static entity, personal experience is valued, social contexts of learning is taken into account, and the students' cultural backgrounds are believed to influence their own construction of meaning (Smagorinsky 8-9). Certainly, as students of education, many of us hold these as ideals we would like to influence, if not completely guide, our approach to teaching. Constructivism is democratic and allows a teacher to enact the social justice side of education by suggesting that it is each individual student who possesses a unique perspective based on their personal (and socio-economic) backgrounds. This perspective affects classroom instruction by creating a truly idiosyncratic community within each set of students. All students possess a particular variety of knowledge and each student constructs new knowledge in a similarly individual way, which in turn influences the overall classroom-wide construction of knowledge. Essentially, constructivism models each classroom as a democracy in action, giving each participant equal access and opportunity to control how meaning is discovered and also the language used to convey that meaning.

As with every ideal, we have to negotiate with reality. Not every student will be motivated to become agents of their own knowledge construction and most students will find that very notion to be either a dishonesty or simply not inspiring in itself.  Many questions arise with the constructivist classroom (as they do in any classroom): How do we, as teachers, communicate the ideals and message of constructivism to our students, especially considering the possibly harsh realities of their daily life? How do we abandon the traditional models of education with students who have gone through the system following those very models? One question that I find particularly important has to do with authority and classroom management: How do we impart a sense of equal ownership of the classroom and identify ourselves as facilitators rather than arbiters of knowledge and still maintain our students' respect as teachers and obedience to classroom rules?

I don't expect any of us to have guaranteed solutions to these problems at this stage in our training, nor do I suspect we will ever have them solidified twenty years into our teaching careers. But I do believe they are important, for if we are going to undertake the ideals of constructivism, we will have to continually create our own conception of what that actually means and looks like.

-Michael