Critical Constructivism

Origins in Education

The critical constructivist school in education was built around the tradition known as critical thinking, which emerged from the application in education of informal logic approaches, such as those of the British logician Stephen Toulmin, who became disillusioned with the power of formal logic as a tool for understanding commonsense communication. He developed a method for analyzing arguments based on constructs analogous to those found in legal procedures and tribunals, and this method led to the development of the informal logic school in the United States in the early 1960s.

[Page 217]The general idea of the critical constructivists in education was to integrate these contributions regarding informal logic to notions of cognitive development, originally based on traditional Piagetian theory and/or contemporary cognitive theories. According to this view, critical-thinking abilities can scaffold the development of more and more complex cognitive abilities through well-designed pedagogical activities based on argumentation. Certain educational strategies would “wake up” children's awareness of the underlying logical structures of their own reasoning through critical inquiry. It was believed that good teaching designed to enhance critical thinking could speed up cognitive development, that pedagogical activities developed on this basis would enhance learning.

Strategies of this kind were further developed by the introduction of sociocognitive approaches in North America, adapted largely from the learning theory by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Some cognitive psychologists and educators, who came to believe in the integration of Vygotsky's psychology with cognitive theories issued from cybernetics (such as the information processing theory), found ways to assess argumentation as a critical process of construction.

Thus, the critical component of this educational tradition refers not to power structures in society but to critical-thinking processes within the individual's discourse. Although these educational applications introduced the term critical constructivism, the term took an entirely different turn in communication, as reflected in the critiques of technology offered by Feen berg and Bakardjieva.

Feenberg's and Bakardjieva's Critique of Technology

The term critical constructivism—which could also be called critical constructionism—was first published in communication studies in 1999 in the foundational book Questioning Technology, by the American philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg. Later, and very curiously, Maria Bakardjieva proposed the term independently in her 2002 dissertation for a doctorate in communication (she also has a PhD in sociology), which led to the world-renowned book The Internet in Everyday Life, published in 2005. Today, Feen berg and Bakardjieva are the most important scholars of this tradition.

...