The Theory of Constructivism

When I became reading Henriques’ article about Constructivism, the words assimilation, and accommodation, for some reason rubbed me the wrong way. Throughout history, different groups have been forced to assimilate and make accommodations for conquering groups. Even the word disequilibrium made me feel a little uncomfortable in spite of the fact that I realize in order for students’ misconceptions to be truly challenged, their minds must be continually brought to different levels of disequilibrium in order to better facilitate change. However, I am still not sure how a feel about using assimilation and accommodation in order to get my students to learn, since in my mind, assimilation and accommodation are analogous with creating students who do not truly know how to think for themselves, and, therefore, do not regularly question the status quo even when they know it is wrong or is faulty in nature.

Even though I have great reservations about designing lesson plans that are designed to cause students to think and act in a particular way, I nevertheless, like the Interactive-Constructivist approach to learning over Information Processing, Social Constructivist and Radical Constructivist. The main reason why I prefer Interactive approach over the other types of constructivist approaches is because it incorporates both public and private components that are designed to allow students to interact and reflect on what they learned need rather than having them come to the same type of understanding in spite of the fact that many of them come from diversely different backgrounds within our society. Plus I prefer Interactive-Constructivist because it does not rule out direct instruction embedded in a natural context which in turn allows students to reconcile their previous ideas with their new experiences thus creating conceptual changes. Just as importantly, I do not think that all ideas carry equal values as put forth in the Radical Constructivist interpretation.