Constructivism, Social

Moderate Psychological Constructivism

There are two major approaches to constructivist thinking, psychological and social constructivism. The former referred to viewpoints about how persons learned, constructing their own sets of meanings. Social constructivism relates to the construction of fields of knowledge. Such fields are not “objective” reflections of some “external world.”

Moderate social constructivism holds that the social world is socially constructed, a generalization supported by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality. Obviously, we construct the entire social world, including daily norms, concepts, cultures, and subcultures. For example, English is read left to right; Hebrew is read right to left. Chinese is read up and down. Hieroglyphics is read in the direction to which a foot points. English starts every sentence with a capital letter, but Hebrew capitalizes selected letters at the sentence's end. Children's worlds are significantly different than many adults over 40 realize. They hop onto the Internet before they can read, are adept at video and electronic games at [Page 200]3 or 4, and are heavily impacted by television. Thus, the social worlds of these children are significantly different from ours. Some basic concepts that we believe have existed for centuries are recent. For example, Paul Revere crammed 14 into a tiny home. Obviously, colonialists had little sense of privacy, which presently has become a constitutional right.

Other fundamental ideas and concepts we take for granted have been integrated into Western culture recently, such as discovery learning (credit Piaget) or multiple intelligences. IQ was formulated early in the last century, yet these constructs are treated as eternal. Potential (the construct underlying IQ and capacities), now entering leadership literature, stems from Aristotle. Even the atom was constructed by the Greeks, as were science, philosophy, theater (including drama and comedy), logic, democracy, and art.

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