Socio-constructivism

Definition

Incorporating influences traditionally associated with sociology and anthropology, socioconstructivism emphasizes the impact of collaboration, social context, and negotiation on thinking and learning. A central notion in socio-constructivism is assisted learning (See below).

Socio-constructivism can be defined as an approach according to which interpersonal knowledge can only be achieved by social construction of it. Especially relevant in this respect are the communication processes occurring in the situations where there are at least two persons trying to solve a problem. The social world of a learner is central concept in socio-constructivism. It 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. Assisted learning for example, occurs in the now-familiar zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) where more able others actively scaffold the individual's performance at a level beyond which the individual could perform alone. Contemporary cognitive theorists have expanded this notion to give nonsocial aspects of the environment an active role in the individual's learning as well. Rather than a solitary process, these newer perspectives assume that effective learning occurs via interaction with and support from people and objects in the world.

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.

(Back to constructivism)

See Also

constructivism, discovery learning, Situated Learning, WebQuest,...

References

Cobb, P. (1994) Where is the mind? Constructivist and Sociocultural Perspectives on Mathematical Development, Educational Researcher, 23(7), pp 13-20

Cobb, P. (1998) Analyzing the mathematical learning of the classroom community: the case of statistical data analysis, In: Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education 1, pp 33-48, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa

Dougiamas, M. (1998). A journey into Constructivism, http://dougiamas.com/writing/constructivism.html

Hickey, D.T. Motivation and Contemporary Socio-Constructivist Instructional Perspectives Vanderbilt University http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=80937209

Salomon, G. and Perkins, D. (1998) Individual and Social Aspects of Learning, In: P. Pearson and A. Iran-Nejad (Eds) Review of Research in Education 23, pp 1-24, American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC

Theoretical Corner-Stones and Applications of Socio-Constructivism in Virtual Learning. http://www.esscs.org/workshop/freiburg2003.html

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wood, T., Cobb, P. & Yackel, E. (1995). Reflections on learning and teaching mathematics in elementary school. In L. P. Steffe & J.Gale (Eds) Constructivism in education (pp 401-422). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.