Educational Constructionisms

Education is not a discipline, but a phenomenon. We conceptualize education as a fuzzy set of processes that occur in events and institutions that involve both informal socialization and formal learning. Various objects are constructed in educational processes, like the identities of teachers and learners, the subject matter learned and the social structures produced and reproduced. These objects are constructed through mechanisms that involve various levels of organization, including psychological, interactional, cultural and social elements. Constructionist approaches to education are important because they can help educators understand and change the highly enabling and constraining outcomes that educational processes have. Constructionist inquiries illuminate how learners' identities and competence, distinctions between valued and devalued subject matter, and the social organization of schooling are constructed, and in so doing they may help education better achieve its transformative potential. Comments Postprint version. Handbook of Constructionist Research, edited by J. Holstein and J. Gubrium, pages 107-127. Reprinted with permission of The Guilford Press. Copyright © 2008 The Guilford Press. All rights reserved under International Copyright Convention. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or stored in or introduced into any information storage or retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the written permission of The Guilford Press. Guilford Publications 72 Spring Street New York, NY 10012 212-431-9800 800-365-7006 www.guilford.com This book chapter is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/164 Educational Constructionisms Stanton Wortham Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania 3700 Walnut St. Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216 [email protected] Kara Jackson Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania [email protected] Draft prepared for Handbook of Constructionist Research, James Holstein and Jaber Gubrium, Editors Manuscript submitted August, 2006 Revised and Resubmitted October, 2006 Education is not a discipline, but a phenomenon. We conceptualize education as a fuzzy set of processes that occur in events and institutions that involve both informal socialization and formal learning. Various objects are constructed in educational processes, like the identities of teachers and learners, the subject matter learned and the social structures produced and reproduced. These objects are constructed through mechanisms that involve various levels of organization, including psychological, interactional, cultural and social elements. Constructionist approaches to education are important because they can help educators understand and change the highly enabling and constraining outcomes that educational processes have. Constructionist inquiries illuminate how learners' identities and competence, distinctions between valued and devalued subject matter, and the social organization of schooling are constructed, and in so doing they may help education better achieve its transformative potential. We organize our account of educational constructionisms around the objects and mechanisms that various accounts take as basic. As Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969) argues in On Certainty, no matter how attuned we are to the ongoing construction of reality, we must take some things for granted. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became more fluid. (p. 96) In order to consider the indeterminacy that lurks within any apparent certainty, we must take other provisional certainties for granted. In Wittgenstein's metaphor, this means that we can never consider our experience as if all is fluid, without accepting some provisionally solid channels through which the fluid moves. Social constructionist accounts, then, must take some provisional certainties for granted as they analyze how other aspects of the social world are