Going+beyond+constructivism

> >  **"**  > In current educational discourse, there is much talk about //constructivism//. It is a general slogan that is used to separate "modern" and "advanced" practices of learning and instruction from old-fashioned and "obsolete" practices. The problem is that this kind of labeling does not help to understand what is going on when people are or are not learning something. Practically all processes or structures associated with learning may be said to be constructed; this kind of declaration does not get teachers and researchers very far. In practical pedagogical situations, putative "constructivist" assumptions may also be dangerous and counter-productive if they guide teachers or students to belief that sophisticated knowledge and skills can be attained by relying only on a student's own constructive efforts without teachers’ systematic and deliberate efforts to help all students to adopt cultural knowledge. >  We do not think that constructivism would provide a very sophisticated theory of learning. Practically all researchers agree that they represent some sort of constructivism and almost any process associated with learning may, in some sense, be considered as 'constructed'. People who have followed constructivism discussion across the last 20 years know that constructive "theory" of learning, generally, has not at all become more specific or articulated or gained any increased explanatory power or unification. There has not been any progressive problem shift after the 80s but a continuation of a very general and ideologically colored discussion. >  It is our impression that approaches that declare themselves to represent constructivism are frequently not only suffering lack of specific theoretical ideas but also rely on methodologies that fail to facilitate investigation of actual processes of creating knowledge. More serious approaches have always something more substantial to say about specific processes of individual or communal processes of learning rather than associate themselves with this kind of theoretically unspecific and fuzzy notion. The problem also is that this kind of general approach does not help teachers to solve serious problems encountered when some students are achieving the level of desired conceptual understanding, or some of them are actively avoiding learning. >  We are trying to go beyond the naive constructivism discussion by engaging in a concrete analysis of processes and activities that are in the background of knowledge construction. If you take your task to be to transform educational practices, it is not sufficient to label phenomena, but provide some new ideas how students' active engagement, meaningful learning and knowledge advancement could be facilitated. One approach that we are taking is to examine metaphors of learning and their mutual relations; the acquisition metaphor, participation metaphor, and knowledge-creation metaphor. ||
 * > === **DEVELOPMENT OF LEARNING THEORIES** ===
 *  [|New Metaphors of Learning: Going Beyond "Constructivism"]
 *  [|Progressive Inquiry (PI-Model)]
 *  [|Knowledge building]
 *  [|Collaborative Nature of Learning and Cognitive Growth]
 *  [|Collaborative Nature of Learning and Cognitive Growth]