Socio-constructivism

Definition

The social world of a learner includes the people that directly affect that person, including teachers, friends, students, administrators, and participants in all forms of activity. This takes into account the social nature of both the local processes in collaborative learning and in the discussion of wider social collaboration in a given subject, such as science.

Many of the authors that identify with social constructivism trace their ideas back to Vygotsky (1978), who focussed on the roles that society played in the development of an individual.
Cobb (1994) examines whether the "mind" is located in the head or in social action, and argues that both perspectives should be used in concert, as they are each as useful as the other. What is seen from one perspective as reasoning of a collection of individuals mutually adapting to each other's actions can be seen in another as the norms and practices of a classroom community (Cobb, 1998). This dialectic is examined in more detail by Salomon and Perkins (1998), who suggest ways that these "acquisition" and "participation" metaphors of learning interrelate and interact in synergistic ways. They model the social entity as a learner (for example, a football team, a business or a family), compare it with the learning of an individual in a social setting, and identify three main types of relations:

• Individual learning can be less or more socially-mediated learning.
• Individuals can participate in the learning of a collective, sometimes with what is learned distributed throughout the collective more than in the mind of any one individual.
• Individuals and social aspects of learning in both of these senses, can interact over time to strengthen one another in a 'reciprocal spiral relationship'.

Teaching strategies using social constructivism as a referent include teaching in contexts that might be personally meaningful to students, negotiating taken-as-shared meanings with students, class discussion, small-group collaboration, and valuing meaningful activity over correct answers (Wood et al, 1995). Cobb (1994) contrasts the approach of delivering mathematics as "content" against the technique of fostering the emergence of mathematical ideas from the collective practices of the classroom community. Emphasis is growing on the teacher's use of multiple epistemologies, to maintain dialectic tension between teacher guidance and student-initiated exploration, as well as between social learning and individual learning.

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See Also

constructivism,discovery learning, web quest,...