Forty Years of Radical Constructivism in Educational Research

Radical constructivism (RC) has emerged as one of the most challenging influences on educational research and practice in the last forty years. In his seminal paper " Piaget and the radical constructivist epistemology, " Ernst von Glasersfeld (1974) introduced a new interpretation of Jean Piaget, which he called " radical constructivism. " In this paper, he defined cognition as " a constitutive activity which, alone, is responsible for every type or kind of structure an organism comes to know " – hence " radical. " Amalgamating various strands of philosophical thought, he pushed for a change in how the terms knowledge and communication should be understood – a change of " drastic nature " that " involves the demolition of our everyday conception of reality, " and that would, as von Gla-sersfeld claimed in various papers afterwards, affect the " fundamental presuppositions of the traditional theories of education. " Since in RC " knowledge is not a transferable commodity and communication not a conveyance, " the teacher's role is no longer " to dispense 'truth,' but rather to help and guide the student in the conceptual organization of certain areas of experience. " Furthermore, from the radical constructivist point of view, " it makes no sense to assume that any powerful cognitive satisfaction springs from simply being told that one has done something right " nor from " cookies, money, and social approval. " Rather, RC emphasizes self-generated reinforcement: " If students are to taste something of the mathematician's satisfaction in doing mathematics, they cannot be expected to find it in whatever rewards they might be given for their performance but only through becoming aware of the neatness of fit they have achieved in their own conceptual construction " (Glasersfeld 1983). Methodologically, RC calls for " a conceptual model of the formation of the structures and the operations " that constitute the student's competence (such as Leslie Steffe's " teaching experiment ") " because it, alone, could indicate the direction in which the student is to be guided. " The goal is to " throw light on how the students, at that point in their development, are organizing their experiential world, " in order to find ways and means of modifying the student's conceptual structures. Von Glasersfeld claimed that research in this area " could make advances that would immediately benefit educational practice. " Forty years later we want to …