Constructivism

Constructivism has been defined as a theory of learning, as a theory of knowing and, more recently, as a paradigm guiding contemporary social science research. As a social science paradigm, constructivism reflects a set of beliefs about the world and how it can be understood and suggests various approaches to the study of human phenomena based on these beliefs. In the social science literature on constructivism that is most relevant to action research, this paradigm is defined as a view of human beings as actively constructing knowledge, in their own subjective and intersubjective realities and in contextually specific ways. This world view evolved from constructivist thought and scholarship predominantly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, spanning the fields of philosophy, science and psychology. Outside the social sciences, definitions and applications of constructivism vary, as they have throughout history. Despite this variation, definitions across disciplines often include references to knowledge production and/or social processes. This is because these discussions of constructivism are part of what the social psychologists Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen identify as a social movement of constructivism. This is arguably the most encompassing movement in the history of constructivism. Other movements, according to Gergen and Gergen, include critical constructivism and literary/rhetorical constructivism.

Though not entirely distinct from the social movement, critical constructivism focuses on challenging authoritative accounts of the world and interrogating the power structures that influence these accounts. Similarly, literary/rhetorical constructivism has been identified as an area of constructivism that challenges scientific theories and their assumptions of universality, utilizing literary theory, rhetorical study and discursive arguments to do so.

As Gergen and Gergen have also argued, these overlapping movements of constructivism, and the various definitions and conceptualizations of constructivism offered in other disciplines, are not necessarily in opposition to one another. It is more fitting to view them as together contributing to contemporary understandings of a relational self, a core tenet of action research. They also reflect how the concept of constructivism evolved into a research paradigm through several important instantiations of scholarship and thought on constructivism. For ease of understanding, this entry focuses on the instantiations that are most relevant to understanding action research processes and constructivism as a paradigm of social science research—scholarship that could be classified as related to the social movement. Even when limiting discussions of constructivism to the social realm, vast scholarly terrain must be traversed to do justice to the various minds that have contributed to this form of constructivism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The scholarship reviewed below provides glimpses into several of the many important topics that are part of this social movement, including considerations of constructivism as (a) an orientation to learning and development, (b) a meta-theory about the nature of knowledge and/or (c) a paradigm influencing contemporary social science research.