International Seminar on 

Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur

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The term constructivism in educational contexts has been used to refer to a diverse array of principles overlapping with – and often indistinguishable from ­– other pedagogical principles like active learning, interactive learning, collaborative learning, experiential learning, problem based learning, learning paradigm, and so on. Yet, one may discern two main streams underlying this diversity in constructivist pedagogy, namely: 

  A. Linguistic construction of knowledge as a “meaning making” enterprise, through personal experience and social interaction. In this view, stemming primarily from Vygotsky and Piaget, the socio-cognitive construction of knowledge takes the words and sentences of a text (textbook, article) as the input, and transforms them into meaningful knowledge through social interaction and experience of the learners.

  B. The construction of knowledge through individual inquiry. In this view, stemming primarily from Dewey, the construction of knowledge takes the learners’ experience as the starting point of inquiry, and constructs a body of knowledge through reflection and reasoning.

In my talk, I will propose a position that views the construction of knowledge as collective academic inquiry, as a natural extension of Dewey’s ideas:

  C. Construction of academic knowledge through collective academic inquiry. In this view, the learners form a community of inquirers, and adopting the modes of inquiry characteristic of academic research, construct a body of knowledge that approximates the knowledge documented in textbooks and other sources. 

   If we adopt (A), educators look up to linguists as the main guides for the design and implementation of curricula, syllabi, learning materials, classroom activities, and assessment.  If we adopt (B), they look up to psychologists and sociologists instead.  In contrast to both, (C) takes as its foundations a field that doesn’t yet exist, namely, the Comparative Academic Epistemology (CAE). Pedagogy requires a combination of (A), (B) and (C).

Unlike philosophical epistemology, CAE is an empirical discipline that describes the values, norms, and practices of academic inquiry, yielding an integrated perspective of inquiry in fields ranging from mathematics, theoretical science, and experimental science to philosophy, and literary studies, extendable to ethical inquiry and religious inquiry. The central questions it seeks to answer are:

·        What are the grounds of inquiry in academia?

·        What are the ways of arriving at conclusions from these grounds?

·        What are the ways of justifying such conclusions?

·        How do we critically evaluate the conclusions and the justification?

·        What are the assumptions, value systems, and criteria underlying all of the above?

·       How do the above compare with forms of knowledge outside academia, such as commonsense knowledge, folk knowledge, and traditional knowledge? 

·        What is the relation between all of the above and the way the human brain and the human mind construct knowledge?

   In my talk, I will present examples that illustrate the kinds of answers these questions lead to, and outline an approach to curricula, syllabi, learning materials, classroom activities, and assessment tasks stemming from them.