PHILOSOPHICAL-PERSPECTIVES ON CONSTRUCTIVIST VIEWS OF LEARNING

At present, social constructivists agree on little more than the important assumption that knowledge is a social product. Beyond this, there is little agreement about process. Different viewpoints about what it means to negotiate meaning and what the object of that negotiation ought to be (i.e., strategies/skills versus big ideas) reflect different assumptions about learning and the nature of truth. We examine these assumptions by contrasting three underlying world views: mechanistic-information processing, organismic-radical constructivism, and Deweyan contextualism or transactional realism. This third world view, we argue, is most consistent with idea-based social constructivism.