Social Constructivism

Social Constructivism is an interesting topic for me, for a few reasons. The first is its freedom in comparison to the traditional ‘sit down, shut up, listen’ teaching style I had for some of my classes throughout my schooling experience. Social Constructivism is comprised of three main aspects – student interaction, a more knowledgeable individual (usually a teacher) and for learning to occur in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) (Howell, 2012). The ZPD can be defined as "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygotsky, 1978, p86, referenced in Mcleod, 2012). For students to be kept in the ZPD, the tasks assigned to them should be very difficult to complete when attempted individually, but much simpler when performed with an appropriately minimal amount of guidance. The theory (as developed by Lev Vygotsky) then goes to say that once the previously difficult task has been completed with an appropriately trivial amount of guidance, it will be quite easy to complete in the future. I find this concept very interesting, as it is essentially how I learned senior mathematics – my teacher which would provide very subtle hints to difficult maths problems which allowed me and my classmates to quickly complete to given task while we interacted with each other allowing steps we may not have been able to complete individually to be worked through and better understood. All this occurred without a teacher handing out detentions for communicating with friends, which made the lessons more interesting as we were still socialising and interacting as we would have outside the classroom (even if were talking about math rather than sports). The fantastic thing about social construction is its ability to be applied to a wide variety of content, and the fact it can be utilised in many ways; McLeod (2010) provides a fantastic example of social constructivism in learning to play tennis, I learnt basic calculus through social constructivism and tasks such as learning computer skills or producing digital stories (Howell, 2012) can also be exploited by social constructivism. In previous posts I talked about the increasing use of technology in everyday life and the necessity to introduce such technology into the classroom. Howell lists many aspects of the digital world as being easily taught through the use of social constructivism. Social constructivism doesn’t even have to occur in the classroom – with the integration of modern, everyday technology, students can access their ‘more knowledgeable other’ via text message or a social networking site, allowing them to complete difficult tasks at home, in their own time. Students experiencing trouble embedding a Youtube link in their blog about cell division? They can simply contact a friend or teacher for that extra bit of assistance to help them embed the video and finish the task, without having been babied the whole way.

References:
Teaching With ICT -  Jennifer Howell, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, Victoria, 2012

Zone of Proximal Development – Saul McLeod, 2012


Image; http://sabb46.edublogs.org/files/2011/01/contructivistcartoon-2d5vhhy.png