JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING VOL. 29, NO. 8, PP. 791-820 (1992)

Rethinking Science Education: Beyond Piagetian Constructivism Toward a Sociocultural Model of Teaching and Learning*

Michael O’Loughlin

Department of Curriculum and Teaching, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11550

Abstract

In the first part of the article I present an epistemological critique of forms of pedagogy founded on Piagetian constructivism. Despite the appeal of the notion that learners construct their understanding, I argue that constructivism is problematic because it ignores the subjectivity of the learner and the socially and historically situated nature of knowing; it denies the essentially collaborative and social nature of meaning making; and it privileges only one form of knowledge, namely, the technical rational. I then present a critique of active learning and student-centered forms of pedagogy. I argue that in our models of teaching we rely on too many unexamined assumptions from developmental psychology and we take for granted the problematic notion that children learn by doing. My central thesis is that constructivism is flawed because of its inability to come to grips with the essential issues of culture, power, and discourse in the classroom. In the concluding section of the article I present a preliminary account of a sociocultural approach to teaching and learning that takes seriously the notion that learning is situated in contexts, that students bring their own subjectivities and cultural perspectives to bear in constructing understanding, that issues of power exist in the classroom that need to be addressed, and that education into scientific ways of knowing requires understanding modes of classroom discourse and enabling students to negotiate these modes effectively so that they may master and critique scientific ways of knowing without, in the process, sacrificing their own personally and culturally constructed ways of knowing.

The kind of sustained radical reform in science education called for in the lead article of this issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching (Shymansky & Kyle, 1992) is unlikely to take place unless we are willing to bring the implicit assumptions in which our pedagogy is rooted to the surface so that we may subject them to criticial interrogation. In this article I wish to contribute to that dialogue by inquiring into one of these root assumptions, namely, the notion that learners actively construct their own interpretation of events. For educators seeking an alternative to the traditional positivist view that teaching is the transmission of objective knowledge and that leaming is the uncritical absorption of knowledge, the notion that understanding

* This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL, April 1991.

0 1992 by the National Association for Research in Science Teaching Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-4308/92/08079 1-30

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is actively constructed by the learner is a welcome alternative. The idea is intuitively appealing and calls forth images of active, student-centered, participatory learning. As Walkerdine ( 1984) notes, contrasting active learning and passive remembering has long served as the foundation for progressive and child-centered approaches to pedagogy.

The picture on the cover of Margaret Donaldson’s Children’s minds (1978) serves as a metaphor for both the power and the beguiling simplicity of constructivism. The picture shows a young girl manipulating two pieces of wood presumably in the process of constructing an understanding of some phenomenon. The power of the image lies in the contrast between the passive, powerless learner in the traditional approach, and this image of an active, constructive knower, empowered to take charge of his or her own learning. Presented in this manner, constructivism makes a strong appeal to our commonsense understanding of how learning ought to be. As Shymansky and Kyle (1992) note, a constructivist epistemology underlies much of the current reform initiative in science education and it is being invoked, also, as the basis for reform in other areas such as mathematics education (e.g., Cobb, 1987; Lerman, 1989; Steffe, 1988) and teacher education (e.g., Fosnot, 1989; O’Loughlin, 1989, 1990a; Sigel, 1978; Tobin, 1990).

But what does it mean to say that learners construct their understanding? How do learners come to know, and does constructivism provide an adequate foundation for the kind of transformative and empowering educational vision laid out for us by Shymansky and Kyle? Consider again, for example, the photograph from Donaldson’s book as an archetype of constructivist learning. Note that the child is presented to us in a totally decontextualized fashion. There is no hint of the learning environment in which she is functioning. Neither is there any indication that she is working on a problem in the presence of peers or a teacher. All we see is a solitary learner, working on her own, to figure out the solution to a problem. Does the absence of peers suggest that learning is a highly individualistic and mentalistic process? Is there room within constructivism for the kind of social communication and interaction that leads to collaborative meaning malung? Do children need to talk in order to develop understanding? Is any provision made for dialogue and negotiation of meaning? What is the significance of the absence of a teacher? Is it the case that in constructivist modes of learning the teacher has a minimal role to play? If the teacher’s role is changed, does that mean that power relations between teacher and students are also subject to renegotiation? The picture is silent too regarding the historical, social, cultural, and physical contexts of the learning process, as well as the specific biographical influences that have shaped this child’s epistemological stance. Does constructivist theorizing include consideration of how issues such as the cultural and political nature of schooling and the race, class, and gender backgrounds of teachers and students, as well as their prior learning histories, influence the kinds of meanings that are made possible in the classroom? Finally, stepping back a little, what can we conclude from the picture of a young girl puzzling over the interlocking of two pieces of wood on the cover of a book entitled Children’s minds? Does this image of the solitary child struggling to understand her physical world symbolize the essence of intellectual development as a purely mental accomplishment of gaining understanding of the world? Is there provision anywhere within constructivist theory for the notion of learning as an empowering social activity that enables learners to understand their social reality so that they might act to transform it?

A difficulty appears to arise in attempting to answer these questions because of the lack of agreement among proponents of constructivism as to what the term denotes.

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Some constructivist educators hew to a fairly orthodox Piagetian line (e.g., Forman & Kuschner, 1983; Fosnot, 1989; Sigel, 1978). Others, while acknowledging Piaget’s influence, tend to focus more on deriving curricular or pedagogical implications from the idea that learners construct their understanding or that students need to be active leaners (e.g., Donaldson, 1978; Duckworth, 1987; National Association for the Education of Young Children [NAEYC], 1988). Still others, following von Glasersfeld (1987), describe themselves as radical constructivists; although radical constructivism, too, owes an intellectual debt to Piaget’s theory (von Glasersfeld, 1984). In short, despite their differences, many of the pedagogical approaches that describe themselves as constructivist share a common heritage in Piaget’s theory. Nowhere is this more true than in science education, where, as Shymansky and Kyle noted, constructivism is being increasingly appropriated by science educators as the basis for research and curricular recommendations.

The danger in accepting a given theoretical foundation-Piaget’s theory in this case-without critically interrogating its assumptions, is that we become bound by that theory’s metatheoretical assumptions. In the first half of this article I will present a critique of the epistemological assumptions underlying Piagetian constructivism. I will explain why these assumptions are problematic and I will illustrate how they impede the possibilities for developing a truly emancipatory and transformative, learner- centered pedagogy. In the second part of the article I will argue that the answer does not lie with rejecting constructivism. Instead I will show how constructivist assumptions can be grounded in a sociocultural model of teaching, learning, and knowing that addresses the deficiencies in Piagetian constructivism by placing emphasis on the dialogical meaning-making activities of individual learners in socially, culturally, his- torically, and politically situated contexts. I will present examples of the kind of research and pedagogical opportunities this model opens up and I will suggest that this model promises to provide the basis for validating a genuinely emancipatory form of pedagogy.

I. Piagetian Constructivism

Piaget’s Structuralism: The Roots of Constructivism

Piaget’s theory is a complex blend of biology, epistemology, philosophy, and psychology. As Broughton (1981a) notes, Piaget was not a classic French structuralist. Instead, he developed his own version of structuralism, which posits evolving logico- mathematical structures in the mind. Piaget’s concern was with describing what he referred to as “objectivity” (Piaget, 1970), namely, the process by which we gain knowledge about the world. Piaget viewed the entire purpose of intellectual growth as one of coming to know reality more objectively through developing increasingly decentenxi-and hence more objective-perceptions of reality. Fw Piaget “the structure of the mind is the source of our understanding of the world” (Venn & Walkerdine, 1977, p. 73). Piaget was not an innatist who believed that interpretive schemes preexist in the mind, nor did he believe that we could apprehend reality through direct experience as behaviorists do. Piaget suggested that our interpretive schemes evolve as a result of successively more complex interactions with the world. Piaget’s theory is developmental in orientation, suggesting that we begin by developing operations to act on our world, and eventually, by the stage of formal operations, we have acquired abstract, logico- mathematical reasoning capacities that allow us to detach ourselves from the object

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world so that we can reason about it in strictly logical terms. Piaget conceptualized the process of coming to know in biological terms because he viewed intellectual adaptation as merely a specific case of the larger process by which organisms engage in biological adaptation to the environment.

Using the biology of the digestive system as an analogy, Piaget proposed an alimentary model to explain the relationship between mental processes and incoming information, describing intellectual adaptation in terms of the dialectical balance between processes of assimilation and accommodation. As Piaget notes, “from a biological point of view, assimilation is the integration of external elements into evolving or completed structures of an organism” (1970, p. 707). As far as possible, Piaget says, new elements are grafted onto existing structures and new ideas are understood in terms of existing understanding. However, as Broughton notes, “when the world, the object of knowledge, resists breakdown and absorption, the subject ‘accommodates,’ meaning that its structures adapt as far as possible to make the experience assimilable, to make it easier to comprehend” (1981a, p. 261). Piaget’s theory is premised on the biological assumption of self-regulation, namely, that the organism constantly strives toward the reduction of conflict in order to gain equilibrium. Equilibrium is established through the dialectical interplay of assimilation and accommodation. The end result of this process of adaptation is an increasing ability to come to view knowledge objectively, a process Piaget refers to as decentering:

. . . the gradually emerging equilibration between assimilation and accommodation is the result of successive decentrations, which make it possible for the subject to take the points of view of other subjects or objects themselves. We formerly described this process merely in terms of egocentrism and socialization. But it is far more general and more fundamental to knowledge in all its forms. For cognitive progress is not only assimilation of information; it entails a systematic decentration process which is a necessary condition of objectivity itself. (1970, p. 710)

A number of other features of Piaget’s concept of intellectual development must be noted. Piaget was not so much interested in individual human reasoning as in the general trajectory of epistemological development. As Venn and Walkerdine note: “The subject of these constructions is thus only an epistemic subject who abstracts from experience logical schemes and discards the experiences themselves as empty shells” (1977, p. 79). Piaget focused only on the general principles of human reasoning and excluded from consideration particularities such as the social and historical context of reasoning and the autobiographical experiences of the individuals he studied. Fur- thermore, Piaget focused primarily on logico-mathematical reasoning, the kind of “purposive-rational, goal-directed behavior” (Broughton, 198 la, p. 270) that we normally equate with mathematical problem solving and empiricist conceptions of scientific rationality. This is no coincidence, as Piaget regarded the hypothetico-deductive method of systematic hypothesis testing that empirical scientists supposedly engage in’ as the standard against which individual rationality should be assessed. Piaget viewed the progression toward formal operations in terms of the metaphor of the “child as scientist.”

’ I use the word “supposedly” here because studies in the sociology of science (e.g., Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Knorr-Cetina & Mukay, 1983; Latour & Woolgar, 1979) and the philosophy of science (e.g., T.S. Kuhn, 1970) reveal that the actions of scientists are much more constructivist in nature than many empirical scientists might care to admit.

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The image presented here is of children actively engaging in hypothesis testing and isolation-of-variables reasoning in order to better understand their physical world. At the level of formal operations, the highest stage of reasoning in Piaget’s scheme, all content is excluded and the entire reasoning process is described in terms of a set of logical operations conducted in the head. The focus on scientific rationality, the interest in describing intellectual advancement in terms of increasing decentration from subjectivity and toward objectivity, and the desire to express the highest forms of reasoning in terms of content-free logical operations all point to a model of cognitive development in which reasoning that is ahistorical, value-free, and abstract is regarded as the telos of cognitive development. From Piaget’s perspective the absence of interest in sociocultural and contextual factors can be explained in terms of his exclusive interest in isolating universals of cognitive development. Real difficulties arise, however, when constructivists appropriate this universalist theory to deal with classroom learning processes that are inherently constrained by sociocultural and contextual factors.

Illustration of Constructivist Approaches

Some examples of constructivist approaches will be presented to illustrate the link with Piagetian structuralism and to lay the foundation for the critique to follow. These examples are drawn from areas of literature with which I am most familiar, and the knowledgeable reader is invited to engage in a similar analysis of the competing constructivist strands that are to be found in science education. As I noted earlier, the link between Piagetian theory and constructivist applications to pedagogy is quite direct for some writers. The writings of Fosnot (1989) and Sigel (1978), two leading advocates of the application of constructivism to teaching and teacher education, present a case in point. Consider, for example, how Fosnot made the connection in her course “Piaget for teachers” one semester:

I spent approximately half the semester lecturing about Piaget’s theory, believing that students couldn’t begin to apply it in the classrooms until they understood it. I placed special emphasis on Piaget’s notion of equilibration, explaining assimilation as an active process of making meaning out of experience, and accommodation as the changing of one’s own thinking in order to strive toward equilibrium. Next, I moved on to explain developmental differences in the way children assimilate by describing the typical Piagetian tasks and the way in which logical reasoning changes from preoperational thinking to eventual formal operational structures. Finally, I defined constructivist teaching as a model that emphasizes that learners need to be actively involved, to reflect on their learning and make inferences, and to experience cognitive conflict. (p. 3)

The Piagetian influence on Fosnot’s thinking is clearly evident, too, in the four foundational principles of constructivism that she enunciates in her book. The first principle is that “knowledge consists of past constructions” (p. 19). Fosnot explains that we construct our experience of the objective world by viewing it through a “logical framework” that “transforms, organizes and interprets our experiences” (p. 19). Fosnot then presents the Piagetian doctrine that these logical structures evolve through a process of self-regulation analogous to the process of biological development. Fosnot ’s second principle of constructivism is that “constructions come about through assimilation and accommodation” (p. 19). Fosnot says that we use assimilation as a logical framework

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within which to interpret new information, with accommodation coming into play to resolve contradictions as part of the larger self-regulative process. Getting to the heart of the constructivist process, Fosnot’s third principle refers to learning as “an organic process of invention, rather than a mechanical process of accumulation” (p. 20). In her discussion Fosnot contrasts this active learning with traditional, passive learning to make the case for a learner-centered pedagogy. Note that active learning-and indeed constructivism-is equated with the kind of rational scientific reasoning processes so familiar from Piaget’s theory:

A constructivist takes the position that the learner must have experience with hypothesizing and predicting, manipulating objects, posing questions, researching answers, imagining, investigating, and inventing, in order for new constructions to be developed. From this perspective, the teacher cannot insure that learners acquire knowledge just by having the teacher dispense it; a learner-centered, active instructional model is mandated. The learner must construct the knowledge; the teacher serves as creative mediator of the process. (p. 20)

Fosnot’s fourth principle refers to the mechanism by which cognitive growth occurs: “Meaningful learning occurs through reflection and resolution of cognitive conflict and thus serves to negate earlier, incomplete levels of understanding” (p. 20). Fosnot points out that cognitive conflict occurs only when the learner notes a discrepancy between two contradictory schemes, and she points out that although a teacher can serve to “mediate this process,” the change can only occur at the child’s initiative.

Fosnot also draws upon Piaget’s (1973) notion that understanding occurs through invention rather than through more discovery of preordained answers. She says that children need to construct answers rather than be led to solutions. Although this sounds like the essence of constructivism, Fbsnot does not address the changes in communication and power relations between teacher and students that are entailed in this process. In fact, her distinction between this constructive process of invention and the activity of reading the teacher’s mind to discover known answers is quite problematic, as this quote from one of the students in her math-for-teachers workshop indicates:

I’m sure that you probably did plan for us to solve the problem with a place-value system, but it didn’t feel that way. It really felt like shared discovery, that there was no answer in particular that you were looking for. In fact, I want to change the word “discover” to the word “invent,” because discovery is the uncovering of what someone else wants you to find. Invention is more powerful and connotes ownership. I felt like I owned the solution. (p. 86)

Fosnot argues that this kind of active learning leads to student empowerment:

These processes all mandate far more active learners, as well as a different model of education than the one subscribed to at present by most institutions. Rather than being powerless and dependent on the institution, learners need to be empowered to think and to learn for themselves. Thus, learning needs to be conceived of as something a learner does, not as something that is done to a learner. (p. 5)

With respect to teaching, Fosnot’s belief is that teachers should become developmental psychologists who can engage in the kind of clinical inquiry pioneered by Piaget:

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Rather than being told what developmental psychologists have found, they would become psychologists themselves. Rather than being told how to teach they would construct their own pedagogy. (p. 137)

In her book (pp. 37-40) Fosnot makes it clear that her goal is that teachers learn the clinical interviewing and assessment skills to enable them to engage students in Piagetian- style cognitive activities and to enable them to assess their developmental progress in terms of the kinds of developmental indicators associated with classic Piagetian tasks.

In his work Sigel reports that he is “guided by a constructivist approach similar, but not identical, to that of Piaget” (1987, p. 250). The outcome in Sigel’s case is the development of a specific inquiry approach to pedagogy designed to promote cognitive advancement in students. For Sigel, constructivism is embodied in the mental interpretation of external experience: “to the constructivist the individual’s behavior is a function of how he organizes experiences and how he places his own imprint on these experiences” (1978, p. 334). Quoting from his own earlier work on constructivism Sigel offers the following definition of constructivism:

Constructivism refers to that process of constructing, in effect, creating a concept which serves as a guideline against which objects or people can be gauged. During the course of interactions with objects, people, or events the individual constructs a reality of them . . . This mental construction then guides subsequent actions with the object or events (Sigel & Cocking, 1977a, cited in Sigel, 1978, p. 334).

Sigel uses a synthesis of Piaget’s work and Kelly’s (1958) personal construct theory to argue for the necessity of considering each individual as a scientist, constantly engaged in dialectical interaction with reality, and constantly evaluating information for its congruence with current representations of reality. For Sigel the key issue is the development of mental representations of reality. He argues that to develop abstract representations we need to detach ourselves from our own reality, and to increase the accuracy and complexity of our representations we need to be confronted with con- tradictions and discrepancies that induce cognitive conflict and thus force us to reevaluate our existing interpretations in light of the discrepant information.

Based on these two premises Sigel and Cocking (1977b) argue for a mode of teaching by questioning, known as distancing education,* that is designed to distance students from their own perspectives and that is designed to induce cognitive conflict. Distancing is accomplished by means of a set of inquiry and questioning strategies that are designed to cause a “cognitive separation between the individual and the immediate present” and which demand “active engagement” (p. 212). Cognitive conflict is induced by the introduction of discrepancies that are designed to cause the student to rethink her or his assumptions. Sigel has studied and promoted the use of distancing education in elementary and early childhood education (e.g., Sigel, 1981, 1984, 1987) and in parent-child interaction (Sigel & McGillicuddy-Delisi, 1984). Sigel and Fosnot share a common epistemological perspective that is quite faithful to the universalist assumptions underlying Piaget’s theory, and both apparently view the goal of pedagogy

* Sigel’s use of the term “distancing education” is not to be confused with the concept of distance education, which refers to the dissemination of education from remote locations, as practiced, for example, by England’s Open University.

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as facilitating the kind of intellectual growth that leads to scientific reasoning, abstract thought, and formal operations as delineated by Piaget.

A version of constructivism that may be more familiar to science educators is to be found in the books by Donaldson (1978) and Duckworth (1987). Rather than beginning with specific Piagetian structures and working to develop a pedagogy that might be faithful to these, Donaldson and Duckworth both begin by looking at the process of schooling from the learner’s perspective, and they use their knowledge of Piagetian theory and methodology in a reflexive manner as a framework within which to make sense of what they see. Although Donaldson’s book is quite critical of aspects of Piaget’s theory-particularly the emphasis on egocentrism in young children- both authors generally accept the Piagetian framework and they have devoted their energies to articulating how an active-learning cumculum can be developed to enhance the intellectual development of children. A primary concern for both Donaldson and Duckworth is with the issue of meaning making and the need for teachers to understand how learners make sense of the world. As Duckworth notes:

Meaning is not given to us in our encounters with the environment, but it is given by us-constructed by each of us in our own way, according to how our understanding is currently organized. As teachers we need to respect the meaning our students are giving to the events that we share. In the interests of making connections between their understanding and ours, we must adopt an insider’s view: seek to understand their sense as well as help them to understand ours. (1987, p. 112)

Both authors express concern about the fact that so many students turn away from the intellectual possibilities of schooling so early in life. Both share a deep commitment to the promotion of sense making and thoughtfulness in classrooms, and both are clear that this can only occur when students feel comfortable enough to talk in their own tentative voices in order to reach for their own tentative understandings. Both emphasize the importance of perplexity and confusion in the process of coming to new understandings, and both emphasize the slow and messy path to the construction of personal meaning. Both are clear, too, that although the teacher’s role is to try to promote the kind of intellectualism that will enable students to move toward what Piaget might call abstract thinking, and what Donaldson refers to as “disembedded thought” (p. 75), this can only be done by acknowledging individual learners’ frames of reference and by raising questions that cause learners to become reflective about their points of view:

To the extent that one carries on a conversation with a child, as a way of trying to understand a child’s understanding, the child’s understanding increases “in the very process.” The questions the interlocutor asks, in an attempt to clarify for herself what the child is thinking oblige the child to think a little further also . . . [for example] What do you mean? How did you do that? Why do you say that? How does that fit in with what she just said? Could you give me an example? How did you figure that? In every case these questions are primarily a way for the interlocutor to try to understand what the other is understanding. Yet, in every case, also, they engage the other’s thoughts and take them a step further. (Duckworth, 1987, pp. 96-97)

Implicit in both authors’ perspectives is a clear sense of the teacher as an inquirer into students’ understandings. The idea is a Piagetian one, but it owes much greater

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allegiance to the fluid, open-ended clinical interview method pioneered by Piaget in his early research on children than to the kind of structured questions a teacher might ask while attempting to replicate a Piagetian conservation experiment or while attempting to promote the specific kind of cognitive growth advocated, for example, by Sigel. Furthermore, both Donaldson and Duckworth are sensitive to how affective issues such as risk taking, fear of failure, and so on impact on student learning.

I frequently use both of these texts in my child development classes for teachers because they are effective in enabling teachers to confront in a constructive way the necessity for students to be actively engaged in the construction of their own understanding in the classroom. Both texts provide a persuasive rationale for a student-centered, active-leaming pedagogy in schools. Donaldson’s book is particularly thought provoking for early childhood educators, and Duckworth’s book is useful for helping students think about the need to promote conceptual development among elementary students, particularly in the area of science education. In a sense, these books represent the best-case scenario for constructivism. Yet, because of their dependence on the epis- temological assumptions of Piagetian structuralism and because of their exclusive emphasis on personal construction of knowledge, approaches such as these are of limited value in providing the foundation for a radically reformed science education as Driver (1988, 1989) notes in a related context.

Critique of Constructivism

What does it mean to come to know, and what role does the individual have to play in the construction of understanding? As we have seen, the view Piaget preferred was of the child as scientist busily engaged in the construction of abstract representations of the world through a conscious process of interrogating reality and comparing it with current understanding. Coming to know, for Piaget, is embodied in a progressive decentration, in which the person successively detaches from his or her own subjective perceptions so that an abstract representation of reality may be constructed. Construction, therefore, refers to the process of constructing abstract, decentered representations within the mind. As noted earlier, the telos of development, as embodied in formal operations, consists of the construction of ahistorical, content-free, representations that are universal enough to be modeled by mathematical formalisms.

Critics of Piaget ’s theory have taken serious exception to this notion of progressive decentration as the model of intellectual development. They argue that knowledge is socially constructed, and that we cannot talk of knowing without considering the historically and socially constituted self that engages in the process of knowing. Fur- thermore, they argue that knowing is a dialectical process that takes place in specific economic, social, cultural, and historical contexts. Knowing is viewed as a process of examining current reality critically and constructing critical visions of present reality and of other possible realities so that one may become empowered to envisage and enact social transformation. Piaget’s model, in contrast, is conservative, presenting the central problem of epistemology as coming to know reality as it is in order to adapt successfully to it.

A considerable critical literature has emerged surrounding Piaget ’s theory, and much of this is reviewed in the five critical essays by Broughton (1981a, 1981b, 1981c, 1981d, 1981e) that were published in Human development. The review presented here is more selective. My goal is to explore the problematic assumptions underlying

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constructivism and student-centered pedagogy so as to illustrate the inherent limitations of using this framework as the foundation for radical educational change.

A major weakness in Piaget’s theory, his critics agree, is the absence of any considemtion of human subjectivity in the process of construction. Venn and Walkedine summarize the problem this way:

Crucially, however, Piaget misses out the basis of the unity in human self-trans- formation and self-constitution in and through the material and social world, that is to say, in historical materialism. This is an essential focus of the difference between our approach and the Piagetian one which will be further explored later. For the moment it is sufficient to explain that while the human being is a natural and social being, we regard the development of scientific knowledge and of cognition generally to be conditioned by hidher existence as a social being. Within this perspective, the history of thought is inseparable from the history of human (social) development, and cannot refer to either the individual subject alone, or the abstract epistemic subject, or, in the last instance, the biologically normed, natural subject. (1977, p. 86)

The problem, as Buck-Morss (1975) and Sampson (1981) note, is that Piaget’s structural model follows Kantian idealism in giving primacy to abstract mental structures and rational thought processes at the expense of the historically and socially constituted subjectivity that each person brings to the reasoning process. Sampson notes that a legacy of Kantianism is that most cognitive models, including Piaget’s, have tended to be subjecrivisr and individualist. Subjectivism refers to the idea that in models such as Piaget’s primary attention is given to the mental constructions within the individual’s head. Little attention is paid to the “material interests, social practices or objective properties of the stimulus situation” (Sampson, 1981, p. 731). Although Piagetians may argue that provision is made for dialectical interaction between reality and mental construction in the self-regulatory relationship between assimilation and accommodation, Broughton (1981a) disagrees. He cites arguments by Wozniak (1974) and others that although the relationship between assimilation and accommodation is dialectical during the sensorimotor period, “the balance of the two tendencies breaks down in Piaget’s accounts of post-infant development, leading to an involuntary eclipse of the accom- modation pole” (Broughton, 1981a, p. 273) as the focus shifts from the dialectic of assimilation-accommodation to looking only at the effect of the environment on the mental activity of the child. Broughton concludes that “Piaget has promoted the ‘active subject’ at the expense of the action environment” (p. 273). As Buck-Morss notes, this bias toward assimilation over accommodation serves Piaget ’s purpose of studying the progressive decentration of the individual from the world of objects: “Although some of Piaget’s most interesting work has been done in the early stage when cognition is still tied to content, he presupposes that the most important thing is not so much what the child can do with the concrete world, as how quickly he can do without it” (1975, p. 40). As we saw earlier, constructivists such as Donaldson and Sigel accept that the task of education is to promote “disembedded thought” (Donaldson) and to “distance” (Sigel) the child from the world of everyday experience and concrete reality, and this, of course, raises the question of how active learners can ever be in constructivist learning environments in which the goal is to detach them from their own personal experiences.

Sampson’s second concern is with the individualism that necessarily accompanies the kind of abstract formalisms advanced in Piaget’s theory. According to Sampson,

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“the individualist approach reduces reality to the acts of the individual’s constitution; objects of reality are seen as products of individual cognitive operations rather than as products of social and historical constitution” (p. 73 1). Venn and Wakderdine note that the absence of recognition of the socially, culturally, and historically constituted nature of knowledge is no accident in Piaget’s theory, but is rather a necessary outcome of a theory that posits the individual as an epistemic subject, functioning almost like a biological organism in a deterministic biological system, The issue under discussion here is not an academic one, but is in fact an issue of profound importance for teachers: Whose interest do we serve by defining cognitive development as the ability to think about problems intellectually and rationally, “cut off from their roots in social and historical practice”? (Sampson, 1981, p. 733). Likewise, who benefits when thinking is viewed purely as an individual mental exercise? Is Fosnot correct in her assertion that the kind of active learning that derives from this theory forms the essence of empowerment? Sampson thinks not:

It is my contention that the cognitive perspective offers a portrait of people who are free to engage in internal mental activity-to plan, decide, wish, think, organize, reconcile, and transform conflicts and contradictions within their heads-and yet who remain relatively impotent or apparently unconcerned (in psychology’s world view) about producing actual changes in their objective social world. In substituting thought for action, mental transformations for real-world transformations, cognitivism veils the objective sources and bases of social life and relegates individual potency to the inner world of mental gymnastics. (p. 735)

This argument is made even more forcefully by Buck-Morss. Referring to the Piagetian process of decentration and the child’s supposed increasing ability to bracket out real objects and deal only in mental images, she says this process acts to reify cognition because “now the object appears to be an object of thought rather than socially produced” (1975, p. 41). She argues that the effect of mental bracketing is to create a split between thinking and doing:

With the attainment of object permanence, the idea of an object . . . becomes a substitute for the thing itself, indeed . . . [it] is granted greater cognitive value than the material object, and the child is capable through symbolic play of leaving reality unchanged. This is the same idealist propensity which neo-Marxists criticize in all bourgeois philosophy: placing more value on the idea than on reality, while it has been progressive in enabling the individual to imagine the totality of a complex society (as well as a society different from and better than the existing one), encourages a split between thinking and doing. The mind mistakes social contradictions for logical ones, labors over the latter, while leaving reality unchanged. F w Piaget the culmination is when the child can “do” everything in his head, that is, when he can divorce theory from practice. (1975, pp. 40-41)

Thus, contrary to Fosnot’s claim, Buck-Morss and the others are arguing that the decontextualized notion of active learner derived from Piaget’s theory is actually likely to be disempowering: “Abstract, formal cognitive skills may indeed increase the child’s ability to adapt to present society rather than to criticize or change it” (Buck-Morss, 1975, p. 41). A crucial distinction between constructivists and critical educators such as Freire (197011989) is that the latter argues that abstraction is a source of mystification and oppression. Freire argues that curriculum must emerge from the generative themes

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of people’s lives and that if education is to be empowering it must culminate in praxis. The focus on abstraction and ensuing alienation from subjective experience that is characteristic of constructivist pedagogy would appear to be the antithesis of what we expect from an empowering and emancipatory approach to pedagogy.

There are other concerns too about the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Piaget’s theory. Sampson and Buck-Morss argue, for instance, that the emphasis on logico-mathematical problem solving and abstract reasoning in Piaget ’s theory sanctions only one kind of knowledge, namely, the technical-rational type of knowledge that serves the interests of industrialized and technological societies. By valuing only this kind of instrumental thought, and by failing to raise questions that would allow people to view these assumptions as problematic, we implicitly affirm these values. The result, Buck-Morss says, is that rather than becoming a tool to serve people’s ends, this kind of instrumental reasoning can “cause men and women to become a tool of technology” (p. 41), working to maintain reality as it is rather than exploring possibilities that might lead to enhanced opportunities for freedom. This issue has a particular bearing on science education, as Shymansky and Kyle noted earlier in this issue, because science teachers are faced with a choice between educating people into unquestioning acceptance of the instrumental benefits of science to society or equipping people with a critical perspective on the relationship between science, technology, and society.

Finally, Buck-Morss (1975), Lawler (1975), and Riegel (1979) argue that the subjectivism and individualism of Piaget’s theory and the primacy of assimilation over accommodation point to the essentially nodialectical nature of thinking in Piaget’s scheme:

For all these reasons, Piaget’s theory describes thought in alienation from its creative, dialectical basis. It represents a prototype reflecting the goals of our higher educational system that, in turn, are reflecting the nonartistic and noncreative aspects in the intellectual history of western man . . . Although Piaget’s theory is founded on a dialectical basis, it fails to make the transition from the formal intellectualism of Kant to the concrete dialecticism of Hegel. Thus, his theory is not only incapable of interpreting mature thinking but also fails to give sufficient emphasis to their dialectical character and the creative features of children’s cognitions. (Riegel, 1979, p. 50)

This lack of dialectical interchange between the individual and the world belies the constructivist image of an active learner firmly in control of her or his destiny. Instead, the suggestion is that because of its emphasis on decontextualized intellectualism and decentration from experience, constructivism detaches people from their reality and teaches them to intellectualize and rationalize their relationship with the world rather than to come to grips with the possibilities for personal and social transformation.

Critique of Student-Centered Pedagogy

Other problematic features of the epistemology underlying constructivism emerge once the focus shifts to examining constructivist practice in school settings. The specific issues to be addressed here pertain to the unexamined role of developmental psychology as the foundation for constructivist practice, the untheorized nature of the communication

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processes involved in active learning, and the unexamined nature of the power relations between teacher and students in a constructivist classroom with particular reference to the effect of this kind of classroom environment on the learning patterns of students of color and students from worlung-class backgrounds.

A useful way to engage this issue is to consider the Position statement on developmentally appropriate practice in the primary grades promulgated by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC, 1988). This position statement is notable because it represents the policy of a major educational organization in an area of education that has long been identified as progressive. NAEYC is recognized for its advocacy of active, experiential, meaningful, and student-centered learning experiences for children in public schools. The NAEYC’s educational philosophy is explicitly constructivist:

The ideology of developmental psychology.

Young children construct their own knowledge from experience. In schools employing appropriate practices, young children are provided with many challenging opportunities to use and develop the thinking skills they bring with them and to identify and solve problems that interest them. (p. 66)

As the title suggests, the position statement leans heavily on research and theory in developmental psychology for the legitimation of its pedagogical recommendations. The authors of the statement assert that “universal and predictable sequences of human development appear to exist” (p. 67) and the statement is supported by 235 bibliographic citations, a great majority of which refer to research in developmental psychology. From the NAEYC’s perspective, therefore, constructivism is not simply a belief that children actively construct their understanding, but rather, the assumption is that children construct their understanding within the parameters and constraints provided by developmental theory. Anybody famihar with developmental psychology will recognize that this means acceptance of a universalist, hierarchical stage theory, because mainstream developmental psychology has patterned itself on Piaget ’s theory in attempting to articulate universal stages of development in various domains (e.g., moral development, social development, emotional development, identity development). With respect to cognitive development, for example, the instructional recommendations follow directly from research on Piagetian stage theory:

Between 6 and 9 years of age, children begin to acquire the mental ability to think about and solve problems in their heads because they can then manipulate objects symbolically-no longer always having to touch or move them. This is a major cognitive achievement for children that extends their ability to solve problems. While they can symbolically or mentally manipulate, it will be some time before they can mentally manipulate symbols to, for example, solve mathematical problems such as missing addends or to grasp algebra. For this reason, primary age children still need real things to think about . . . In addition, appropriate schools recognize that some thinking skills, such as understanding mathematical place value and “borrowing” in subtraction, are beyond the cognitive capacity of children who are developing concrete operational thinking and so do not introduce these skills to most children until they are 8 or 9 years of age. (pp. 65-66)

From an epistemological perspective two things are worthy of note. First, it speaks to the positivist metatheory underlying the thinking of the authors of the position

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statement that validation by research is viewed as the primary indicator of the validity of the educational prescriptions on offer. At no point in the statement is the purpose of education addressed, nor is it made clear that because knowledge is socially constructed we must necessarily make educational choices based on our values and purposes. Ironically, while a constructivist pedagogy is advocated, it is justified by objectivist arguments based on empirical research. Second, the lack of reflexivity regarding the epistemological assumptions of the underlying developmental psychology metatheory is telling. Just as the critique of Piagetian theory presented earlier showed, we are necessarily bound by the epistemological and valuational properties of the metatheories that guide our practice. Because constructivist pedagogies are often premised on as- sumptions from developmental psychology, it would seem essential to become reflexive about the implications of those assumptions. Unfortunately, as yet little critical research has been conducted into the relationship between developmental psychology and con- structivist educational pedagogies in this ~ o u n t r y , ~ but lessons can be drawn from analogous research conducted by Walkerdine on the history of the child-centered education movement in the 1960s in England.

In her critical historical analysis of the development of that movement in Britain, Walkerdine (1984) points out that its growth was intimately related to the growth of developmental psychology as a science. Developmental psychology legitmized learning and teaching “in the terms of individual cognitive development” (p. 160). Not only did the individual child become the object of study, but, as Walkerdine notes, much of the focus shifted to the study of mind, independent of larger patterns of individual development. Piaget’s work was not the impetus for the child study movement, Walkerdine notes, but, arriving at an opportune moment, it provided a legitimizing rationale and through stage theory and clinical observation it provided apparatuses that helped advance the agenda of scientifically based child-centered pedagogy:

The new notion of an individual pedagogy depended absolutely on the possibility of observation and classification of normal development and the idea of spontaneous learning. It was the science of developmental psychology which provided the tools and in which the work of Piaget is particularly implicated. As I mentioned earlier his post in the movement towards naturalization of mathematical and scientific knowledges as individual capacities, developing in a quasi-spontaneous fashion given the correct environment, was a central part of that movement which permitted the curriculum to be understood as spontaneous and permitted the teaching of facts to disappear in favor of the monitoring of learning concepts. (pp. 178-179)

The emphasis on stages of development in the NAEYC statement, the repeated stress on play and spontaneous activity as sources of learning, the focus on engineering appropriate educational environments for natural learning, the delimitation of stages within which certain things ought to be taught or not taught, and the focus on systematic observation and recording of children’s behavior all reveal the degree to which conceptions of child-centend pedagogy continue to be framed in terms of universalist and individualist

For critical and self-reflexive perspectives on American psychology, in addition to the works cited earlier see Broughton (1987), Gergen (1982). Gilligan (1982). and Sullivan (1984), as well as the works by Lave (1988) and Wertsch (1991). which are discussed in the following. Critical historical scholarship on the relationship between developmental psychology and educational practice in the United States is sorely needed.

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concepts from developmental psychology. As surely as constructivism needs to be treated as problematic, the assumptions of mainstream developmental psychology are in need of critical interrogation. Contrary to the liberal image associated with the notion of autonomous, active learning, Walkerdine argues that mainstream developmental psychology, with its classificatory stage theories and its assumption of normal devel- opment, actually serves to restrict and limit the possibilities for individual freedom:

It is perhaps the supreme irony that the concern for individual freedom and the hope of naturalized rationality that could save mankind should have provided the conditions for the production of a set of apparatuses which would aid in the production of the normalized child. It is the empirical apparatus of the stages of development which of all Piaget’s work has been most utilized in education. It is precisely this, and its insertion into a framework of biologized capacities, which ensures that the child is produced as an object of the scientific and pedagogical gaze by means of the very mechanisms which were intended to produce its liberation. (1984, p. 190)

The alternative, Walkerdine argues, is to theorize pedagogy in ways that take account of human subjectivity embedded in the social and historical contexts of people’s lives:

Neither the child nor the individual can be liberated by a radical stripping away of the layers of the social. Such a model assumes a psychological subject laid bare to be re-formed in the new order. This was the aim of the liberatory pedagogy- to lay bare the psychological bones. But if social practices are central to the very formation of subjectivity the laying-bare is an impossibility. In this analysis there is no pre-existent subject to liberate. (1984, p. 195)

Active learning and issues of culture and power. One of the key concepts in the NAEYC statement-and a key element of all constructivist pedagogies-is the notion that learners must be actively engaged in order to construct their own understanding. Here is how NAEYC conceptualizes active learning for young children:

When presented with an abstract concept, children need physical actions to help them grasp the concept in much the same way that adults need vivid examples and illustrations to grasp unfamiliar concepts. But, unlike adults, primary-age children are almost totally dependent on first-hand experiences. Therefore, an important principle of practice for primary-age children is that they should be engaged in active, rather than passive, activities . . . For example, children should manipulate real objects and learn through hands-on, direct experiences, rather than be expected to sit and listen for extended periods of time. (1988, p. 65, emphasis in original)

The pedagogical model which follows from this position is anchored around the notion of a curriculum that is integrated “so that learning occurs primarily through projects, learning centers and playful activities that reflect current interests of children” (p. 70). Although the notion that students learn through active experience, group discussion, and projects is intuitively plausible and often taken for granted, it is not unproblematic. Once again the purpose of active learning needs to be explored: Are students being engaged in the collaborative construction of meaning so that they develop shared understanding that is h e d by the unique autobiographical and cultural resources that each one of them brings to school? Or is it the case that active learning has a

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predetermined purpose, namely, for students to get the point of the exercise, that is, to acquire the meanings that have been predetermined for them by teachers and texts? These questions bear on issues of authority, culture, and power in the classroom: Who decides on the pedagogy and curriculum of the constructivist classroom and in whose interest? Are the voices and interests of some groups privileged at the expense of others or is there a genuinely emancipatory communicative environment in which students begin to construct meaning together on their own terms and in their own interests?

Provocative answers to some of these questions emerge from a recent set of studies of classroom discourse processes reported by Edwards and Mercer (1987) and from commentaries by Delpit (1986, 1988). The Edwards and Mercer studies were designed to investigate the extent to which there was a relationship “between practical activity and principled understanding” (p. 94) in a series of explicitly child-centered upper elementary classrooms in England. The authors were surprised at the degree to which learning outcomes were controlled and directed by apparently well-intentioned teachers who wanted to engage students in specific activities in order that they might derive certain predetermined conclusions. Just as an earlier field study by Barnes (1976) had shown, this research revealed that despite the apparently collaborative and active nature of the learning activities that were occurring, teachers played a very active role in defining and controlling the kinds of discourse that were permissible during the lessons. Strategies employed by teachers to accomplish this included privileging certain student interpretations while marginalizing others, asking specific questions to cue students into deriving the expected insights, and introducing rules of thumb to gloss over discrepancies and enable students to make choices that would ensure that they derived the necessary insights within the time frame allocated for teaching the subject. As Edwards and Mercer note, the teachers were attempting to adhere “both to the pedagogic principle of e-ducure, and also to the not altogether compatible procedure of planning the activities and ideas of the lesson in advance, so that the ideas that the pupils must arrive at from their own thought and experience are actually preordained” (p. 110). Edwards and Mercer present numerous examples from their response protocols indicating that many of the students seemed to have gained a very limited grasp of the underlying principles that the activities were intended to establish. Instead, many of the students treated the activities as rituals to be followed in order to please the teacher and play the game of school. Instead of striving for genuine understanding students typically made judgments and offered opinions that were in accord with what they perceived to be the teacher’s expectations. The authors conclude:

The analysis called into question the notion that the pupils were engaged in any simple process of learning by experience, finding things out for themselves, forming their own concepts through practical activity and observation. In fact, their conceptions of the nature and meaning of their discoveries were strongly governed by interpxetations offered them by their teacher through a variety of communicative devices ranging from gestures and silences to the use of implication and verbal description which imposed particular interpretations on their experience. (p. 125)

Can we conclude that students are actively constructing their understanding when it is “the teacher, who knows the answers, asks most of the questions, asks questions to which she already knows the answers, and, additionally, it appears may ask questions while simultaneously doing her best to provide the answers via an alternative channel?’

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(Edwards & Mercer, 1987, p. 143). The authors think not: “The freedom of pupils to introduce their own ideas was largely illusory; the teacher retained a strict control over what was said and done, what decisions were reached, and what interpretations were put upon experience” (p. 156).

The conclusion is inescapable that to the degree that constructivist teaching does not problematize the voice of authority inherent in classroom pedagogy and texts, students will learn that their voices and cultures are not valued, and that school is not a place in which genuine construction and coconstruction of meaning is valued. They will also learn that the voice of authority, whether teacher or text, is privileged and authoritative. Are students better off in the apparently more amenable social and intellectual milieu of a constructivist, student-centered classroom if the epistemological messages they receive about themselves and their world are identical to the messages they would have received in a traditional didactic classroom? Lisa Delpit thinks not, and argues to the contrary that this kind of environment may have particularly deleterious effects on the learning potential of students from cultural groups other than the white middle class (1986, 1988).

Delpit, a Black educator who considers herself progressive, has taken serious issue with the suggestion that child-centered pedagogy is the one right way to educate all children. Echoing an earlier critique of Piaget’s theory (Buck-Morss, 1975), Delpit argues that child-centered pedagogy reflects middle-class values and aspirations, and serves to perpetuate opportunity for middle-class children while serving to exclude children of color and poor children. Delpit bases her argument on an analysis of power relations in schools. She is concerned with the “culture of power” (1988, p. 282) that exists in schools, with the kinds of codes that are needed to access power, and with how the power relations of the school are either made explicit or concealed from students. She argues that middle-class children already have access to the codes of power prior to entering school, and thus “they tend to do better in school than those from non-middle-class homes because the culture of the school is based on the culture of the upper and middle classes-of those in power” (1988, p. 283). Delpit argues that, in keeping with their liberal leanings, progressive educators strive to set up democratic and egalitarian environments in their classrooms. Delpit suggests that this can actually serve to disenfranchise poor students and students of color because it serves to musk power relations, making it even more difficult for these students to figure out how to gain access to the culture of power:

And so does not the power still exist? Its veiled nature makes it more difficult for some children to respond appropriately, but that in no way mitigates its existence. (1988, p. 289)

The studies by Edwards and Mercer (1987), discussed earlier, make it abundantly clear that despite the changed social arrangements in their classrooms, child-centered teachers possess and use an abundance of power. Delpit argues that “to act as if power does not exist is to ensure that the power status quo remains the same” (1988, p. 292). Rather than being excluded from power, Delpit would prefer to see all students taught how to participate in the culture of power, while simultaneously learning how to reflect criticully on the power relations of which they are a part:

To summarize, I suggest that students must be taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstream of American life, not by being forced to attend to hollow,

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inane, decontextualized subskills but rather within the context of meaningful com- municative endeavors; that they must be allowed the resources of the teacher’s expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own “expertness” as well; and that even while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and about the power relationships they represent. (1988, p. 296)

Delpit’s vision of pedagogy is more complex than the either-or choice so often presented by constructivist groups (e.g., NAEYC, 1988) to demonstrate the superiority of their view over traditional didactic education. Her vision is of teachers who are conscious of the delicate balance between the inculcation of the means of survival in society, on the one hand, and the problematization of the power relations of that society, on the other, so that each student might realize her or his full potential. Delpit argues that reducing educational alternatives to an either-or choice between skill-based and process-based pedagogy is an artifice created by academics “whose world view demands the creation of categorical divisions-not for the purpose of better teaching but for the goal of easier analysis” (1988, p. 296).

A major contribution of Delpit’s work is that it poses in uncompromising terms the dilemma of power for progressive educators. It is all too easy for all of us, as teachers, to adopt democratic and egalitarian postures, while concealing the true nature of the extant power relations from our students, and perhaps even from ourselves (e.g., see O’Loughlin, 1990b). However, it is only when we become self-reflexive about power that we can hope to address the imbalances that are present. The challenge, therefore, is to theorize how to define a pedagogy that is truly empowering rather than one that merely gives the illusion of power to disenfranchised groups while actually excluding them from power.

II. Toward a Sociocultural Model of Teaching and Learning

In this section, drawing upon theoretical work by Lave (1988) and Wertsch (1991), I present a preliminary explication of the notion of teaching and leaming as socioculturally situated a~tivities.~ My goal in doing so is to acquaint the reader with this alternative interpretive framework and to illustrate how thinking about teaching and learning in these terms has the potential to provide for a radical reconceptualization of the theory and practice of pedagogy.

As the title of her book, Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life, suggests, Lave approaches the issues from the perspective of a researcher intent on understanding how people construct mathematical understanding in everyday settings. A key concern for Lave is that everyday thinking is regarded as inferior by conventional anthropologists and psychologists compared to “the ostensibly superior canons of scientific thought” (p. 76). Lave points out that conventional cognitive researchers who study rationality construct tasks “to reflect norms of ‘scientific thought’ rather than scientific (or any other) practice” (p. 79). People’s performance

The discussion here is necessarily simplified, because my own understanding of socioculturally situated pedagogy is in the early stages of construction. The interested reader is therefore advised to consult the original works by Lave (1988) and Wertsch (1991). and their sources, when clarification and elaboration of the ideas mentioned here is required.

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is then assessed to see how well it measures up to this ideal and this “makes it impossible, by definition, for subjects to respond adequately, and rejects the value of their responses . . . on a priori grounds” (pp. 79-80). Lave argues that such studies-and this includes much of the research in scientific reasoning, including my own early work-“are of a piece with colonialist anthropology” (p. 80) in that the constructive efforts of people to make sense of their world is negated because they do not measure up to the canons of rational tho~ght .~ Lave goes on to argue that universalist, decontextualized, rational models of thinking are, themselves, culrural consrrucrions, which only seem natural to us because they have long been presented to us as “the way things are”:

If rationality is a key cultural conception of meaning and value, it calls into question the idea that rationality represents a model of human thought, an unchallengable canon of mental processing whose application is sufficient to establish the superiority of the product. More important, if these scholars are correct about its historically and culturally tautological implications, we must finally realize that the concept of rationality has no general scientific power (being ideological) to account for more and less powerful forms of cognition, the efficacy of schooling or anything else . . . Under these circumstances it is difficult to defend claims for the universality of “rational” models of good thinking as a scientific yardstick with which to evaluate situated cognitive activities. (pp. 173- 174)

My claim is that the universalist, rational, disembedded thought valued by Piagetian constructivists is similarly ideologically bound and must be rejected in favor of a more suitable ideology that acknowledges the highly contextualized nature of the kind of learning that leads to genuine ownership of ideas and possibilities for transformation.

Lave argues that the complexity of everyday thinking can only be captured by a model that takes account of the subjectivity of the individual, the sociocultural context in which the individual is functioning, and the dialectical nature of the interaction between the individual and the setting. It is not possible to do justice to Lave’s comprehensive formulation here, but some brief discussion follows and these ideas will be expanded when Wertsch’s complementary perspective is explored in the following. Addressing the issue of subjectivity, Lave rejects the image of the disembodied individual who internalizes aspects of objective reality, and argues instead for “an embodied self” actively engaged with the world:

The claim that the person is socially constituted conflicts with the conventional view in its most fundamental form, with the venerable division of mind from body. For to view mind as easily and appropriately excised from its social milieu for purposes of study denies the fundamental priority of relatedness among person and setting and activity. (p. 180)

In my dissertation research and related work reported in The development ofscienrijc thinking skills (D. Kuhn, Amsel, & O’hughlin, 1988), for example, subjects’ use of their own personal experience in making judgments is coded as naive or developmentally inferior reasoning, whereas the accomplished use of scientific reasoning skills such as appropriate inclusion and exclusion of variables and an ability not to be fooled by seductive but misleading contextual clues merits coding at higher levels on the various hierarchical coding schemes employed to classify the data.

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Lave argues that the unit of analysis ought to be the person-acting-in-setting, a notion that conveys the idea that although the activity and the setting are important factors, they are bound together by the acting person, a self that is historically and socially constituted and that is engaged in relational activities with others and that becomes a self precisely through action in and on the world. Furthermore, this is not a disembodied self, but a whole self in which mind and body, thought and action are integrated through the embodied notion of person-acting-in-the-setting.

Second, Lave argues that practice must be studied within the context of the larger constitutive order provided by the larger social, historical, political, and economic order:

If the context of activity, however defined, is included in the analysis of activity, then questions about irs context are also relevant. In the present case, for instance, it is difficult to understand the context of arithmetic practice in the supermarket without considering the constitutive order which shapes both the experienced dilemmas of the shopper and the supermarket as an arena in relation with which setting and further activity are constituted. (p. 171)

If we are to have a theory of culture and thought that is neither purely deterministic nor purely mentalistic, how is the relationship between the subjectivity of the person- acting-in-setting and the overarching influence of the socioculturally constituted order to be characterized? For sociocultural theorists the answer lies in the notion of dialectical interaction. As the earlier critique suggested, an explicit commitment to dialectic processes is what distinguishes sociocultural approaches from approaches based on Piaget’s theory. Citing a number of theorists who support this position, Lave says that they “are notably concerned with dialectical synthesis, and assume the partially de- termining, partially determined character of human agency, thus emphasizing the impact of practice on structure as well as the reverse” (p. 16). Lave says that “knowledge takes on the character of a process of knowing” (p. 175), and quoting from Warren, she defines coming to know in dialectic terms:

It is “the active engagement of consciousness in a reciprocal relation with the world and thus is constantly caught up in a simultaneous knowing and changing of the world” (Warren, 1984, p. 67, cited in Lave, 1988, p. 175).

Lave is arguing therefore that meaning making is neither exclusively a product of the person acting, nor of the activity, nor of the setting, but of the dialectical interaction between all three in a given context. This too is a form of constructivism, but it is one that emphasizes the subjectivity, the sociocultural situatedness, and the intrinsically dialectical nature of the process of coming to know. As such this theory has the power to address issues such as cultural diversity, power, context, subjectivity, and social transformation, all of which are beyond the reach of Piagetian constructivism. Its potential will be more evident after Wertsch’s sociocultural theory of the relation between culture and thought has been presented.

In his book, Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action, Wertsch, argues that conventional psychological models examine human mental func- tioning “as if it exists in a cultural, institutional and historical vacuum” (1991, p. 2), and he offers as an alternative a sociocultural approach:

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The basic goal of a sociocultural approach to mind is to create an account of human mental processes that recognizes the essential relationship between these processes and their cultural, historical, and institutional settings (p. 6).

Wertsch, drawing on the writings of Soviet theorists-most notably Vygotsky and Bakhtin-argues that the central link between the thinking of the person and the influence of the social, cultural, historical, and institutional setting in which the person lives is the mediational means the person uses to engage in the construction of meaning. Although many mediational means are available, Wertsch focuses particularly on the uses of language as a crucial component in the meaning-making process. Drawing particularly on Bakhtin’s writing, Wertsch argues that the means that we bring to bear in communicating and interpreting our experiences are necessarily culturally constituted because they are based on language forms that are social in origin. For Wertsch, as for Lave, the person is not seen as a decontextualized individual, contemplating the objective world in isolation and arriving at rational decisions. Instead, reasoning is conceived to be an inherently social and cultural process of meaning making. It is social, Wertsch argues, because the development of understanding is necessarily dialogical, and requires interchange of ideas. It is culturally framed because any frames of reference we bring to bear, and any language forms we choose to use, are sociocultural in origin, and come to us burdened with their share of culturally laden significances. Meaning making, therefore, is not viewed as an isolated mental activity but as a joint product of the person and the mediational means, operating in a particular setting:

The most central claim I wish to pursue is that human action typically employs “mediational means” such as tools and language, and that these mediational means shape the action in essential ways . . . the relationship between action and mediational means is so fundamental that it is more appropriate, when referring to the agent involved, to speak of “individual(s)-acting with mediational means” than to speak simply of “individual(s).” (p. 12)

The emphasis on the critical role of language in the relationship between culture and thought is what makes Wertsch’s-and Bakhtin’s-theory so relevant to education. The theoretical framework that arises from this approach is sufficiently comprehensive to accommodate the subjectivity of the person; the multivoiced and dialogical nature of meaning making; the sociocultural context of schooling; the patterns of authority, power, and privilege associated with various modes of discourse; and the link between the epistemological assumptions of the speech patterns used in schools and the messages we communicate to our students about their own sense of agency and their belief- or lack of belief-in the changeability of their world.

Wertsch points out, as did Lave, that this notion of the socioculturally constructed nature of meaning making is liable to be difficult for western scholars to accept, because both our everyday understanding and our intellectual concept of the role of the person in the world are bound up with notions of the individual as an autonomous, rational being. Because these notions are culturally constructed and are part of our way of seeing, the greatest challenge we face in reconstituting our pedagogy is to find a way to step outside our own cultural blinders to think of coming to know as a sociohistorically and culturally constituted dialogical process of meaning making.

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Bakhtin’s Sociocultural Theory of Meaning Making

Reading Wertsch’s account of Bakhtin’s theory6 from an educator’s perspective, the essential insight to be gained is that there is a profound link between the language environment that is created in a school and the kind of epistemological messages that students receive about their meaning-making capacities and their sense of personal and social agency. Wertsch argues, for example, that true understanding can only occur when communication is multivoiced and dialogical. To the extent that only one au- thoritative voice is heard in the classroom, and to the extent that no opportunities are provided to interrogate that voice, students receive messages not only about the power of objective, authoritative knowledge, but also about the lack of power they themselves hold to interpret events or construct critical understanding. Likewise, critical attention needs to be paid to the forms of discourse in use in the classroom. Again, Wertsch argues, if the school privileges certain forms of technical-rational discourse and if the socioculturally situated speech forms that students bring to school are silenced or negated, then students will receive the message that their ability to come to know and act for themselves is unimportant, and that their purpose in school is to come to terms with the discourse of school and society on its terms rather than on their own. Bakhtin’s sociocultural approach promises, therefore, to provide an important framework for examining the epistemological and power dimensions of schooling and for suggesting ways in which the relations between individual and society, between culture and thought, and between knowledge and power might be redefined.

There are two key concepts necessary to understanding the power of Bakhtin’s approach. The first of these refers to the role of dialogicality in the construction of understanding, and the second pertains to the implications of the sociocultural situatedness of speech types for the forms of meaning making that can occur.

For Bakhtin these three concepts are interdependent. The term voice, in Bakhtin’s usage, refers to “the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness” (Holquist & Emerson, 1981, cited in Wertsch, 1991, p. 51). At any given time, Bakhtin argues, a spoken utterance contains at least two voices, namely, the voice of the speaker, and the consideration of the listener inherent in the speaker’s communicative intention. Bakhtin referred to this implicit awareness of audience as “addressivity” and said that in its absence “the utterance does not and cannot exist” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 99, cited in Wertsch, 1991, p. 52). Thus, even in its purest form, speech can never be reduced to simply the pure expression of inner thoughts, because “utterances are inherently associated with at least two voices” (p. 53). Likewise, true understanding of another’s speech can never be reduced to absorption of their words. It is necessarily dialogical because the purpose of speech is to challenge the other to produce counterimages and words:

Voice, multivoicedness, and dialogicality .

For each word of the utterance we are in the process of understanding, we, as it were, lay down a set of our own answering words. The greater their number and weight, the deeper our understanding will be. Any true Understanding is dialogic in nuture. Understanding is to utterance as one line of dialogue is to the next. (Voloshinov, 1973, p. 102, cited in Wertsch, 1991, p. 54)

Even though many of the concepts discussed here originate in Bakhtin’s work, the interpretation presented is based only on Wertsch’s account and no attempt is made to locate the ideas within Bakhtin’s much more extensive original theoretical framework.

RETHINKING SCIENCE EDUCATION 813

Bakhtin argues that this analysis applies not only to face-to-face conversations but also to text. Wertsch argues that in the traditional transmission model, text is regarded as univocal. It is regarded as having one authoritative, literal meaning, and the purpose of studying is to master that meaning. An alternative is to conceive a text as multivoiced, and therefore to see a text as providing a “semiotic space” that the student can use to generate a multiplicity of meanings:

In its second function a text is not a passive receptacle or bearer of some content placed in it from without, but a generator . . . A text is a semiotic space in which languages interact, interfere and organize themselves hierarchically (Lotman, 1988, p. 37, cited in Wertsch, 1991, pp. 75-76).

The notion here that text-and classroom talk-be treated as dialogic text or as a “thinking device” (p. 77), is analogous to Freire’s (1985) notion, in a chapter entitled “The act of study,” that the reading of text be treated as an interactive and dialogic process of engaging the author in conversation in order to develop one’s critical understanding.

Creating this kind of dialogical classroom environment is often an elusive goal, as the studies by Edwards and Mercer (1987) reveal. The reason, as Bakhtin recognized, is that text-and teacher talk-varies not only on dimensions of univocality versus dialogicality, but there is also an issue of power as to whose voice has the authority to challenge the other’s interpretation:

“The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority fused to it.” Instead of functioning as a generator of meaning or as a thinking device, an authoritative text “demands our unconditional allegiance,” and it allows “no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no creative stylizing variants on it” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 78, quoting from Bakhtin, 1981 [no page number cited]).

The alternative to authoritative discourse, Wertsch says, again quoting Bakhtin, is the “internally persuasive word” which is “half-ours and half-someone else’s” (p. 79). That is to say, dialogical meaning making occurs when the learner is influenced by the text, but is also allowed the space to play an active role in developing a personally constructed understanding of the author’s or teacher’s message through a process of dialogic interchange. As Bakhtin notes: “The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not jinite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean” (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 345-346, cited in Wertsch, 1991, p. 79). Again, the kind of dialogical interchange under discussion here is very similar to the dialogical model underlying Freire’s model of critical pedagogy, as described in Pedagogy of the oppressed (1970/1989). Finally, it must be noted that the power relations of teacher discourse or text are not necessarily explicit. Children internalize the power relations of schooling early on and can easily be trained to assume that all textual interpretations-and teachers’ words-are authoritative, and to be accepted. Likewise, as Wertsch notes, children can internalize dialogical forms of discourse so that they engage in hidden dialogical thinking even if left to solve a problem on their own.

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The sociocultural situatedness of speech types. Another important contribution of Bakhtin’s theory is the idea that the language we use in daily communication is not monolithic. Bakhtin argues that we communicate not only in one or more national languages, but we also communicate regularly in social languages (e.g., the jargon of specific professional groups), and we use a variety of speech genres that embody the modes of expression of the cultural and subcultural groups we engage with in our society. Examples of speech genres include “military commands; everyday genres of greeting, farewell, and congratulation; salon conversations about everyday, social, aesthetic and other subjects; genres of table conversation; intimate conversations among friends; and everyday narration” (p. 60). Speech genres are not formalized languages but they are distinctive in that utterances have very specific socially agreed upon meanings. Because we all necessarily use speech that is embedded in social languages and speech genres, we necessarily appropriate the meaning and authority that accompanies the languages in which we speak. As Wertsch notes, “In Bakhtin’s view, users of language ‘rent’ meaning” (Holquist, 1981, p. 164, cited in Wertsch, 1991, p. 69). The implication is that we can never truly articulate a meaning that is conveyed only in our own voices-speech is inherently socioculturally constituted and multivoiced:

The major point I want to make is that Bakhtin’s approach to semiotic phenomena continually emphasized the notion that utterances and utterance meanings are inherently situated in sociocultural context. Because the production of any utterance involves the appropriation of at least one social language and speech genre, and because these social speech types are socioculturally situated, the ensuing account assumes that meaning is inextricably linked with historical, cultural, and institutional setting. (Wertsch, 1991, p. 66)

The fact that all speech genres are accompanied by specific socioculturally constituted ways of seeing the world argues for the need for instruction to be more sensitive to the diverse perspectives and historically constituted voices and autobiographies our students bring to school, as the earlier discussion of Walkerdine’s and Lave’s work has emphasized. A truly emergent curriculum would validate the ways of knowing students bring to school by grounding the curriculum in their voices and lives. Then, as Freire (1970/1989) notes, through dialogue and the sharing of perspectives, students would gradually come to see their own perspective as one of many socially, culturally, and historically constituted ways of knowing, and through exposure to multiple voices in text and in classroom discussion they could begin to engage other perspectives and other ways of knowing, thus enlarging their epistemological perspectives. In practice it is not this easy. Bakhtin indicates that different speech genres contain not only different sociocultural perspectives on meaning, they also vary in the degree of authority they bear. In a given situation one form of discourse may be regarded as authoritative and socially sanctioned, whereas other forms of discourse may be regarded as inferior or inappropriate. This power imbalance can lead to communication that privileges certain interpretations and ways of talking while marginalizing or excluding other speech genres. That is why any discussion of communication must necessarily address the issue of power relations between those who are speaking. The discourse of schooling provides a case in point.

The key question to be asked about schooling, as Wertsch notes, is “Who is doing the talking” (p. 127). Wertsch argues that in schools the “speech genre of formal

RETHINKING SCIENCE EDUCATION 815

instruction” takes precedence. Although students come to school with a diversity of voices and socioculturally constituted perspectives, teachers, on the other hand, “have mastered a fairly uniform speech genre of formal instruction” (p. 11 1) and the power imbalance between teachers and students is such that teachers have authority to privilege their preferred speech genre at the expense of their students’ voices. Wertsch argues that when teachers ask instructional questions rarely is it their intention to seek information or to provoke dialogue, more likely the question is “a directive designed to get the student to participate in formulating the problem in the ‘right way.’ By responding to the directive, the student engages in a process sanctioned and regulated by the teacher” (p. 112). Wertsch provides examples analogous to those reported in Edwards and Mercer (1987), to illustrate how teachers, when they engage students in conversation, constantly structure the dialogue so as to shift students away from their own experiential frames of reference toward thinking about issues and events in the abstract, decon- textualized, technical-rational discourse that is the usual speech genre of middle-class teachers. As Wertsch notes, although conversational exchanges occur, it is not true dialogue, because the teacher’s authoritative voice is privileged at the expense of the student’s voice:

The negotiation of referential perspective in this case required more change on the part of the children than on the part of the teacher, something that correlates with the difference in power between the two interlocutors. The movement over the course of this segment of interaction has been one of children giving way to the teacher: they have capitulated to her use of scientific concepts as an appropriate grounding for describing objects. (p. 117)

Describing the results of a survey of the frequency with which elementary school students were allowed opportunities to make observations or draw conclusions based on personal experience, Wertsch reports that such personal statements occurred with extreme infrequency. He concludes:

In terms of the Bakhtinian question, “Who is doing the talking?’ it is obvious that the first graders in the two classrooms examined by Hagstrom and Wertsch had already been extensively socialized into ventriloquating through a speech genre appropriate for that particular sociocultural setting. (p. 130)

Although the dominance of the teacher’s voice at the expense of students’ own meaning-making voices is of concern with respect to its effects on the epistemological development of all students (e.g., Bames, 1976; Edwards & Mercer, 1987), of particular concern are the effects on students who come from other than white middle-class backgrounds. As research by Heath (1983) and the commentaries by Delpit that were discussed earlier reveal, the speech genres that working-class children and children of color bring to school as their only interpretive frameworks are often negated. These students can experience success only if they can abandon their own sociocultural and experiential frames of reference and begin to function effectively in the abstract, decontextualized canon that is usually the only speech genre available in schools. Succeeding within the formal instructional speech genre is extremely difficult, as Wertsch and Delpit both point out, because a characteristic of speech genres-as opposed to formal languages-is that they do not have clear and explicit surface

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markers to enable a novice to learn the rules. As we saw above, Delpit argues that the ambiguity of the communication rules veils the power relations of schooling and often leaves children who are not middle class feeling mystified and powerless. Wertsch concludes: “Given this difficulty, it is perhaps surprising that students are ever able to recognize, let alone master, the formal instructional speech genres grounded in decontextualii word meanings” (p. 135). Because middle-class children have exposure to similar genres of decontextualized speech in their homes, they do not experience as much difficulty in negotiating the abstract speech genres of schooling. To the extent that schooling negates the subjective, socioculturally constituted voices that students develop from their lived experience, therefore, and to the extent that teachers insist that dialogue can only occur on their terms, schooling becomes an instrument of power that serves to perpetuate the social class and racial inequities that are already inherent in society.

Finally, Wertsch makes the point that even when students dialogue among themselves as equals, the possibility of privileging still exists, because those students who have access to and make use of sophisticated technical rational vocabularies and scientific- sounding explanations implicitly carry with them the authority of the speech genres they invoke. Wertsch cites examples of student discussions in science classes in which the students who could couch their explanations-however erroneous-in plausible technical vocabulary, were respected for their judgments by their peers. Referring to one such student, Ian, Wertsch summarized the effect this way:

In appropriating certain aspects of the meaning system of this speech genre, Ian appropriated certain aspects of its power. Inherent in this view of the issue is the assumption that power and status apply neither to the individual nor the speech genre in isolation . . . Returning to the process of privileging, it is important to note that many of the children were persuaded by Ian’s comments even though they were, in actuality, misguided and largely irrelevant to the physical phenomenon at hand. Ian’s classmates had begun to believe that in formal instructional settings the speech genres of official science have some kind of explanatory power superior to their own ideas (p. 138).

Science teachers, therefore, face the simultaneous challenges of validating their students’ personal ways of knowing, introducing them to the powerful speech genres of conventional science, and equipping them with an understanding of the fundamentally socioculturally constituted ways of knowing that underlie science so that the process of doing science is demystified and they do not feel compelled to defer to the intrinsically authoritative power of the received view.

Postscript

Because the purpose of this essay was to act as a thinking device to generate dialogue, it would be contradictory to my purpose to conclude with some definitive remarks that tied the issues up neatly and left no room for further dialogue. As I write this last paragraph, Bakhtin’s question, “Who is doing the talking?’ reverberates as the most essential question to be addressed by educators. Too often the voices of those most intrinsic to the education process are silenced when those of us with access to privileged and authoritative modes of discourse presume to speak for rather than wirh those we wish to educate. Lisa Delpit best expresses the kind of invitation to dialogue

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that I would like to see academic researchers extend to science teachers, and that I would like to see science teachers, in turn, extend to their students:

But both sides do need to be able to listen, and I contend that it is those with the most power, those in the majority, who must take the greater responsibility for initiating the process . . . to do so takes a very special kind of listening that requires not only open eyes and open ears, but open hearts and open minds. We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment-and that is not easy. It is painful as well, because it means turning yourself inside out, giving up your own sense of who you are, and being willing to see yourself in the unflattering light of another’s angry gaze, It is not easy, but it is the only way to learn what it might feel like to be someone else and the only way to start dialogue . . . We must keep the perspective that people are expert on their own lives. There are certainly aspects of the outside world of which they may not be aware, but they can be the only authentic chroniclers of their own experience. We must not be too quick to deny their interpretations, or accuse them of “false consciousness.” . . .And finally, we must learn to be vulnerable enough to allow our world to turn upside down in order to allow the realities of others to edge themselves on our consciousness. (1988, p. 297)

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Manuscript accepted February 1 1, 1992.