As one who has never been attracted to schools of thought that
provide a rationale and approach for everything, I've found
constructivism useful in parts of my various grammar and
linguistics courses and not in others. Discovery works
wonderfully as a learning tool when we are working in creative and
critical areas and tasks. However many such tasks also require a
sizable body of information that the student must have access to
before serious creative and critical work becomes possible. I can
use discovery models pretty efficiently to get students to think
critically about dialects, prescriptivism, some discourse
pragmatics, and a few other things because they can discover some
broad, general principles pretty readily and then learn to think
with them. However, and I realize this does not bear on K12
language arts particularly, discovery learning doesn't work for
acquiring the knowledge of phonetics that even undergraduates need
if they are to deal with much of the content of a History of
English course, That takes some pretty active and interactive
teaching. I haven't heard constructivists address this sort of
issue much, and I'd be interested in hearing how such domains of
knowledge are treated in constructivism.
Herb Stahlke
>>> [log in to unmask] 02/16/01 11:44AM >>>
David Mulroy writes:
In this connection, I am struck by the epigram on the Emails
of
>Nancy Patterson, who is outspoken in her skepticism about the
value
>of traditional school grammar, viz., "The text is a tissue of
quotations
>drawn from the innumerable centers of culture." It seems to me
that this
>is true only of texts created without a mastery of grammar.
Sorry to disappoint you, but the Barthes quote speaks to my
social
constructivist/hypertext theory quirks. It's that
intertextuality thing
that we hypertext people get all goose bumpy about. But now
that
constructivism has been brought up, it seems a wonderful topic to
explore
through the lens of teaching grammar. If you're allergic to
constructivist
theory, you might at least get a perspective about why large
segments of the
academy are connecting to constructivism and why teacher prep
programs are
trying to ground pre-service teachers in that approach to
learning.
In constructivist classrooms, focus shifts away from the
teacher as the
holder of knowledge to the students. A constructivist
teacher/expert no
longer pours knowledge into empty student vessels, or deposits
knowledge
into their heads as if it were money in a bank. Instead students
are urged
to be actively involved in their own learning processes and to
reflect or
engage in deliberate metacognitive thinking.
A constructivist language arts classroom would probably not
approach grammar
prescriptively but descriptively, challenging students to think
about the
rules of the grammars they use and reflect on how those rules
change when
audience or discursive form changes.
And, I dare to ask, how can one construct text without grammar?
And that
mastery word. Does anyone really "master" grammar? I use text
in far more
complex ways now than I did ten years ago, and I fully expect to
use it with
greater complexity as I continue to use language to convey and
construct
meaning.
Nancy
Nancy G. Patterson
Portland Middle School, English Dept. Chair
Portland, MI 48875
"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumberable
centers of
culture."
--Roland Barthes
[log in to unmask]
http://www.msu.edu/user/patter90/opening.htm
http://www.npatterson.net/mid.html
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