Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
DC Phillips and the Continua of Constructivism
One of the readings this week in CTL 1608 is a comparative, simplified overview of the divergent, often internally contentious body of learning theories that make up constructivism. I read it about a day after articulating my theory of learning, which on reflection seems auspicious in its timing: if I’d read this article before talking about why I disagree with constructivism, I’d have seen how muddy these waters actually are and would probably have been paralysed, or at least enervated with intellectual timidity. The ideas with which I’d hoped to tangle, I would have seen, comprised such a mass of writhing complexity that no vector of approach could be readily expected to engage them with relevance. (I have also felt this way when accosted by self-proclaimed feminists on the charge of being hesitant to number myself among them.) Instead, after developing my ideas against a shadowy, straw-man adversary, I now have an articulated sense of where I stand and can locate myself within a carefully, systematically revealed landscape of thought (albeit one, I maintain, populated by a large proportion of crazies). This way feels like learning, like that sophistication of my ability to interact with stimuli, rather than frustration. I wonder if this is a failing—I feel like most of my peers can do this more elegantly the other way: that they can see the whole landscape, or build it easily as they read work by the theorists, and orient themselves progressively as they go.
Phillips’ article, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Many Faces of Constructivism” is immediately sympathetic to me because he makes clear pretty quickly his bias against constructivism’s cult-like incarnations and frequently unquestioned adoption, but also suggests coquettishly that he has some “critical and evaluative” points he’ll raise in a subsequent publication which I’m probably going to track down. For the time being, though, his approach is to define three dimensions of variability within constructivist thought, and then to place the major theorists within that space. Herewith, therein, shall I narcissistically place myself.
