As an aspiring teacher, my idealistic side wants to take a constructivist view of knowledge gathering. However my realist side has doubts about how this can work in a real classroom. The article, Constructivist Cautions, points out many of my concerns. The metaphor used by the authors of "lighting the flame" versus "filling the bucket" resonated with me. I am beginning to think that you can not have one without the other. It seems that at least some direct instruction is needed to get the project of a constructivist based classroom off the ground.
Of my many concerns, the most pressing is; how do we evaluate the various constructions students will make? Clearly some will students will make "better" or more accurate constructions. But who is to say that it is in fact better? Constructivist epistemology that takes into account a students social and cultural backgrounds seems like a slippery slope to relativism where every students construction could be justified as correct.
This article also made clear that constructivism is more of an explanation of how we come to knowledge and not a set of steps that can be applied to a classroom. This clarification was helpful. However it raised the question; What is knowledge? Where is it? What kinds of knowledge are there?
These questions recalled to memory a podcast conversation I recently listened to on the subject of knowledge, between neuroscientist and author Sam Harris and his guest Professor of Physics at Oxford University David Deutsch found here https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/surviving-the-cosmos .
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