Exploring Constructionism Part 3: Constructionism in 2020 and Beyond
This is the third part in a three-part article in my journey to discovering what constructionism is, it’s history, key architects and its social significance in today’s learning landscape. The purpose of this writing is to kick-off my own learning journey in my first semester as a PhD student at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. As my understanding of constructionism expands, I would like to further develop these ideas into a submitted journal article.
Part 2: Beyond Mindstorms, Social Implications of Constructionism
Part 3: Constructionism in 2020 and Beyond
Criticisms of Constructionism
One of the most recent criticisms of constructionism comes from a book called The Charisma Machine, written by Morgan Ames which mostly speaks about the rise and fall of the OLPC project, however she does offer specific criticism of constructionism and Papert. Ames attempts to draw parallels between Constructionism and hacker culture by saying “that both the hacker community and constructionism presuppose the social imaginary of the technically precocious boy.” She also goes on to say that this is rooted in a childhood sense of rebellion. Arguing that constructionism was born among the early hacker culture (rebellious boys) that was prevalent among the students and faculty in the AI lab at MIT, Ames assumes that constructionism must also be connected, being steeped from the same tea kettle. In my knowledge of the development of constructionism, I can’t make the same parallels; for me, I see that Piaget’s constructivism has much more of an influence than hacker culture. Though I can see why Ames makes these observations about some Logo implementations and about the OLPC computer.
Ames further attributes that “the deep distrust of school apparent in descriptions of constructionism reflects the hacker community’s distrust of authority figures.” Papert, on many occasions spoke against the current “school as a factory model” and believed that “teachers will no longer be “preachers” but become facilitators” in his paper, Change and the Resistance to Change in Education. In this same paper, Papert further elaborates on the use of computers in school to illustrate his point, “the split between the informational and the constructional sides of digital technology happens to run parallel with a split between two sides of learning which could be called informational learning (or learning by being told) and constructional learning (or learning by doing and making.) This parallelism has a mischievous consequence: School traditionally emphasizes the informational side of learning and this biases it to focus on the informational side of digital technologies which further reinforces the informational view of learning. And all this would be fine except that it is the constructional side of digital technology that has the more revolutionary and hard to accept consequences for Education.”
As a former educator in a public school system where traditional instructional methods were employed and as a makerspace facilitator where constructionism methods were employed, I agree with Papert’s stance on the subject and disagree with Ames’ parallels to hacker cultures that distrust authority figures.
Other criticisms of constructionism include efforts to debunk the idea that students “learn best in an unguided or minimally guided environment, generally defined as one in which learners, rather than being presented with essential information, must discover or construct essential information for themselves” an idea that is supported by Papert. In a research paper titled Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work, the researchers propose that “novice learners should be provided with direct instructional guidance on the concepts and procedures required by a particular discipline and should not be left to discover those procedures by themselves.” In this paper, the researches point out the problems with cognitive load while trying to learn new concepts and the lack of sustained long term memory when working on minimally guided projects.
With my years of experience in the classroom and with training other teachers along the way, I think that the sweet-spot for learning is somewhere in between the above mentioned ideas, where a facilitator provides contextual examples to learning and leaves a few breadcrumbs to inspire learning. Then, as children encounter difficulties, the goal of the educator is to lead students toward understanding instead of providing pre-baked methods of instruction. This sometimes even means that the educator and the student will join together in a learning journey to uncover what neither of them fully understood before.
What did I learn?
Through my current research and through my years of experience in projects that revolve around constructionism, I have come to understand that constructionism can be thought of as 1. a learning theory that stems from constructivism, 2. a way to describe a technology, 3. a way to describe a learning environment and in my conclusion, constructionism can also be thought of as 4. A social movement.
- Constructionism as a learning theory
Thinking about constructionism as a learning theory is probably the most cited use of the term. Edith Ackerman’s paper Piaget’s Constructivism, Papert’s Constructionism: What’s the difference? highlights how constructionism grew directly from Piaget’s theory by saying that “because of its greater focus on learning through making rather than overall cognitive potentials, Papert’s approach helps us understand how ideas get formed and transformed when expressed through different media, when actualized in particular contexts, when worked out by individual minds.” A similar explanation of what constructionism is as a learning theory comes from a book called Constructionism in Practice, and states that constructionism asserts “that knowledge is not simply transmitted from teacher to student, but actively constructed by the mind of the learner. Children don’t get ideas; they make ideas. Moreover, constructivism suggests that learners are particularly likely to make new ideas when they are actively engaged in making some type of external artifact, … which they can reflect upon and share with others”.
2. Constructionism as a way to describe a technology
I have certainly heard of Logo, Scratch and LEGO robotics being described as a constructionist learning tool and I may have even used the term myself to directly describe them. In an article called ScratchEd: Developing support for educators as designers, Karen Brennan a PhD student from the Media Lab and team member on the Scratch project, says that Scratch is a constructionist learning tool because it “follows in the constructionist tradition — an approach to learning that emphasizes the importance of constructing, building, making and designing as ways of knowing.” Based on this explanation of a constructionist learning tool, I would describe several other technologies that align such as: Makey Makey, Micro:bit, GoGo Board, Minecraft, littleBits, Erectors sets and LEGO EV3.
3. Constructionism as a learning environment
In a paper called Constructionism: Tools to Think and Build With, one of Papert’s students Aaron Falbel wrote that “good building materials certainly aid constructionist learning. But they are not the whole story. Equally important is the learning environment or social context within which construction of knowledge (i.e. learning) takes place. Good learning environments try to maximize three things: choice, diversity, and congeniality.” These sentiments of developing a conducive learning environment are also echoed in Papert’s Eight Big Ideas Behind the Constructionist Learning Lab (1999) that I spoke about in Part 2.
4. Constructionism as a social movement
What properly constitutes a social movement is widely argued among sociologists and anthropologists, though in the paper, The Concept of Social Movement, author, Mario Diani “argues that nearly all definitions share three criteria: a network of informal interactions between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organizations, engaged in a political or cultural conflict, on the basis of a shared collective identity” Based on this understand of what defines a social movement, I have come to conclude that constructionism, among its many definitions is also a social movement. I also think that perhaps, this could be constructionism’s biggest achievement thus far, and one that isn’t celebrated nearly enough.
Where is Constructionism heading?
In 2020 there is still evidence of the effects of the long history of constructionism that have led to inspire makerpaces and fablabs in education, the widespread use of tools like micro:bit and Raspberry Pi as well as the push to include computing in the standard curriculum along with mathematics and language. In my interview with Cynthia Solomon, I asked “what is missing from the current generation of constructionism?” She replied by saying that many of the above mentioned current progressions like micro:bit “leave out one of the most essential parts of constructionism; self reflection, debugging and thinking about thinking.” Walter Bander and Paulo Blikstein also agreed with Solomon’s statement. For me, this essential element of constructionism is something that we can’t let slip.
When I asked Bender, Blikstein, Cavallo, Sipitakiat and Solomon about the future of constructionism, we all agreed that there was promising research being done in the field of AI because of the advances in computing power and newly developed AI tools. Students like Stefania Druga (a LEGO Papert Fellow) have already paved the way for constructionism to continue down this path. Solomon remarked that “AI is where Seymour started at MIT and I am sure he would be exploring it now.” I myself have even started to piece together my PhD research thesis topic around the idea of using AI tools to develop a better understanding of how children think about their own learning by exposing how a machine learning tool can train a neural network to discriminate and categorize items.
The last bit of inspiration that I want to leave you with comes from Papert’s 1971 paper called Teaching Children Thinking where it is plainly evident that his theory of constructionism was well thought out before Logo’s fruition, before the Media Lab and well before OLPC. (remember to read in a Dumbledore voice) Papert said that he intended to “present a grander vision of an educational system in which technology is used not in the form of machines for processing children, but as something the child himself will learn to manipulate, to extend, to apply to projects, thereby gaining a greater and more articulate mastery of the world, a sense of power of applied knowledge and self-confidently realistic image of himself as an intellectual agent. Stated more simply, I believe, with Dewey, Montessori and Piaget that children learn by doing and by thinking about what they do. And so the fundamental ingredients of educational innovation must be better things to do and better ways to think about oneself doing these things”
