The Social Construction of Learning

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses learning based on social construction. It illustrates functional psychology, behaviorism, cognitivism, situated learning, and their implications in detail. The polarization between behaviorist and cognitivist approaches to learning creates both theoretical and practical difficulties. Organism–environment transactions and functional psychology helped break down the barrier between thinking and acting as well as that between the individual and socio-cultural aspects of change, by focusing on activity. The behaviorists share a rejection of inner mental agents with the functionalists, who also think that positing egos or minds inside pulling the strings amounts to a metaphysical illusion. The behaviorist's external experiment is now simulated inside the mind and called problem solving. The cognitive revolution replaced outer reinforcement contingencies, and trial and error search behavior with inner problem representations and simulated search. Objects with certain properties and value in a situation are created by activity, not by reflective thought. The transactionalism of the functional psychologists and their emphasis on the social origin of mind is paralleled by the dialectical approach of the situated learning theorists and their emphasis on the social origins of symbolically mediated activity.