Personal Constructivism

The term constructivism is used both in relation to how people in general come to knowledge, and to how knowledge is developed during research.

Constructivism as a theoretical perspective on teaching and learning

Constructivism is a label given to a range of theories about student learning and pedagogy. So constructivism may be central to a conceptual framework informing a study into teaching and /or learning, and could be adopted as a theoretical perspective in such a study.

Constructivisms as theoretical perspectives?

There are different flavours of constructivist thought.

Perhaps the most common is what might commonly be called personal constructivism, which focuses on the individual learner/knower.

However, so called social constructivism, which focuses on the social interactions in the construction of knowledge, is also very influential.

A further variation is called constructionism which also has a social focus, in particular considering collaboration between people working together.

Personal constructivism

As the name suggest personal constructivism tend to focus on the individual and how they come to construct their knowledge and beliefs about the world. Piaget is often considered to have worked within a personal constructivist frame although his research programme on genetic epistemology looked for structure of thought that were common to all normally developing people. For Piaget, the child being interviewed stood for his ‘epistemic subject’, the individual as an example representing the species. By contrast, a personal constructivist perspective tends to focus on the individual as an individual. Personal constructivist work is therefore often idiographic in nature.

An example of a specific personal constructivist perspective is Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory. Another ‘version’ of this flavour of constructivism is van Glasersfeld’s ‘radical constructivism’. Much in Vygotsky’s thinking also reflect personal constructivism (for example Vygotsky’s model of how spontaneous and academic concepts interact during conceptual development), although Vygotsky’s ideas also inform social constructivist thought

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