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Constructivist Pedagogy


VIRGINIA RICHARDSON
University of Michigan



This article constitutes a critique from the inside of constructivist pedagogy. It begins with a short history of constructivist pedagogy and its relationship to constructivist learning theory. It then addresses four issues in the ways in which constructivist pedagogy are being approached inresearch and practice. The first issue recommends more of a research focus on student learning in classrooms that engage in construc- tivist pedagogy. The second leads to the suggestion of theory development that provides an understanding and descriptions of more and less effective constructivist teaching. The third centers on the necessarily deep subject matter knowledge required of teachers who adoptconstructivist pedagogy; and the difficulty this requirement imposes on elementary teachers who must deal with many subject matter areas. And the fourth issue raises the possibility that the vision of constructivist pedagogy, as presently recommended, if not mandated, locally and nationally, is strongly ideological and may impose, inappropriately, a dominant view of pedagogy on those who wishto operate differently.

Constructivism as a learning theory goes back a number of decades (see Phillips, 2000). Constructivist teaching as a theory or practice, however, has only received attention for approximately one decade.1 Current interest and writing in constructivist teaching leave many issues unresolved. These issues relate, in part, to the difficulty in translating a theoryof learning into a theory or practice of teaching, a conversion that has always been diffi- cult and less than satisfactory. However, the nature of constructivism as an individual or group meaning-making process renders this conversion remarkably demanding. But there are additional aspects of constructivist pedagogy, some that are relatively pragmatic, such as thoserelated to our expectations for teacher knowledge, that have lead to issues that are as yet unexamined or certainly not solved. This article provides a description of the short history of constructivist teaching and teacher education, and describes and analyzes some of these issues.


CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORY

The general sense of constructivism is that itis a theory of learning or meaning making, that individuals create their own new understandings on

Teachers College Record Volume 105, Number 9, December 2003, pp. 1623–1640
Copyright r by Teachers College, Columbia University
0161-4681


the basis of an interaction between what they already know and believe and ideas and knowledge with which they come intocontact (Resnick,
1989). Thompson (2000), however, suggests that constructivism is not a theory of learning but a model of knowing, and constructivism may be used to build a theory of learning. Nonetheless, the view of constructivism as a learning theory has guided most of the development of constructivist pedagogy.
More recently, Phillips (2000) edited an NSSE Yearbook,Constructivism in Education, with many chapters that take the reader back into philosophical and social theory literature that was not, at the time it was written, called constructivism but certainly contained foundational elements in consider- able agreement with what is meant by constructivist learning theory today. The chapter authors identified and explicated elements of what theyconsider to be the basic foundations of the construct. In so doing, however, they represented constructivism as a construct and movement that has become massively complex, with different founders and advocates, schools, focii, and disciplinary approaches. For example, Matthews (2000) identi- fied 18 different forms of educational constructivism that are named and described in the...