Re: Introduction(Jeff)

[earlyfire@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

If we could translate the difference between instruction and construction into an imagination, it would be possible to say that practice discovery learning, the essence of constructionism embraces a much wider bandwidth of motives than the passing down of information in a pre-organized curriculum. Simply, construction honors the PROCESS of coming to create knowledge, rather than the transfer of already predigested, "industrially" organized facts and relationships.

 

Creativity lives in the space where courage and a desire for unrehearsed, spontaneous learning, replaces teaching. Constructionism redefines the role of the teacher from a secular priest, an authority possessed of power and privelege, to muse, who, though equal in expertise to the other role, functions as an inspirer, that is to say, a muse. The constructionist teacher creates the energy level, the enchantment, the will focus required to birth knowledge as a side effect of confronting, meeting and embracing an unknown set of circumstances. To rob the student of the right to discover, to independently investigate relationships, dishonors bravery, without which a school degenerates into a factory, a collection of prescribed habits and formularized procedures and "esssential skills". If this simple fact is offensively reductionist, how much more is the untheoretical peril of the loss of cultural continuity caused by school systems which trivialize nurturing the ability of men to dream and imagine, elements of experience indivorcable from the intent of constructivist philosophy and environments.

 

More on all this later, if there is interest to continue with discussion,

 

Warm Regards,

Harvey

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Knope
Sent: Dec 15, 2005 9:36 AM
To: mwforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [MWForum] Introduction(Jeff)

I am so far out of my element here that I don't even get the connection
between what I wrote and Dale's reference.

What I meant is that being self-taught, all of my learning sprang from my
own desire to know; and each advance in my knowledge was motivated by a
desire to solve some self-assigned problem. My experience was that these
aspects of my learning imparted a vitality to the adventure, and anchored
what I learned, in a way I don't find when learning by following predefined
curricula. Isn't this the central notion of Constructivism?

"The basic premise is that an individual learner must actively "build"
knowledge and skills ... and that information exists within these built
constructs rather than in the external environment. ... all advocates of
constructivism agree that it is the individual's processing of stimuli from
the environment and the resulting cognitive structures, that produce
adaptive behavior, rather than the stimuli themselves." --from
"Constructivism" by W. Huitt (2003).

Jeff