How do we construct our knowledge?
A brief look into Jean Piaget’s Constructivist Theory of Learning
In the words of Jean Piaget himself, “The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.” These words can be applied to the students of today to understand our histories and cultures in a meaningful way.
We have all played the game where you blurt out the first thing you think about when you are told a word. For example, when prompted with ‘chair’, the images popping up in your mind may be of a comfortable dining chair, they could have been of a velvety lounge chair or maybe even a simple footstool. The images themselves will vary for each person, from colours, textures, wood, plastic, or structure.
This game highlights one of the processes of how we learn, namely, the Constructivist Theory. One of the key proponents of this type of learning was a swiss-french psychologist and biologist Jean Piaget. He developed this theory after he and his wife spent years observing their own children and other children at playschools. He would document every step of their cognitive growth leading him to establish his theory that children learn through constructing their own knowledge through their interactions and experiences with the world around them rather than by merely being told ‘what to know’.
Piaget’s theory tells us that all individuals have mental representations of the world around them. Individuals at the learning stages either assimilate or accommodate new information from interactions and experiences they have onto the pre-existing representations. Breaking down our earlier example, chairs, would be a mental representation that we all have. At the early stages of learning, children learn from experience that chairs are physical items meant for sitting. As the child grows and has more interactions and experiences with the world, they come across different kinds of chairs, in varied colours, textures, shapes and forms.
Mental representations are built from experiences, assimilation, accommodation
During this learning process, the child may come across new types of chairs with colours and shapes they have not encountered before. The child will therefore assimilate these new versions of chairs into their mental representations. On the other hand, when children interact with items such as a table, which can also be used for sitting, they undergo a process of accommodation. Through previous experiences, the child may consider a table to be a different kind of chair but has learnt that it is different and not meant for sitting. Through this experience, the child accommodates the table into a new schema which then develops alongside other pre-existing schemas. From this process, Piaget developed his theory of Constructivist Learning.
Active posture, interactions & sensorial experiences
In school settings, the application of this theory requires students to be engaged with their environment in an active posture, to have the opportunities to interact and experience with new material, ideas and themes. This results in children developing their own mental representation through connections -chairs are not tables- and through the process of assimilation and accommodation. For children, this points to learning through the five senses of touch, smell, sight, taste and hearing. For learning facilitators, this means creating and crafting sensorial and playful experiences that stimulate self-learning through a variety of activities and interactions.
Students learn ‘how to learn’ from first-hand experiences
With the Constructivist Theory, students learn ‘how to learn’ from first-hand experiences and grow into holistic individuals who can thrive in any situation because of skills and information they gather while still young. Starting from chairs and tables to the stars and beyond!
This article has been selected by the startup Playful Culture to highlight the benefits of proactive experiences for child development. Originally published on https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-do-we-construct-our-knowledge-indraneel-banerjee/?trackingId=wsn06jeccn2UaZpEOch58w%3D%3D
About the author: Indraneel Banerjee is an MBA in Art and Culture Management from IESA Arts & Culture, Paris. Having a foundation in Psychology, Communications and Culture, he is Trustee of Udayan and Founder of Cultur·Able, a platform on Accessibility and Inclusion in Culture.
Picture credits : Freepik.com, Playful Culture license
