Pedagogy under Construction: Learning to Teach Collaboratively

Abstract

Usually a teacher's first step to prepare for class is to write a syllabus, and Professor M had copies ready on day one of Teaching Mass Communications in College. Instead of distributing them, however, he offered class members an option. They could follow a traditional route and use his detailed outline, or they could immediately put constructivist learning theory into practice by choosing to build their syllabus and chart their course. With this gauntlet dropped, he left them alone to decide. The class members opted to be constructivists, and this article reports the participants' observations during, and critique of, this quasi-experimental study. Contructivist learning theory posits that students learn best when they are active. Then, the participants reasoned, wouldn't the best way to study Teaching Mass Communications in College be to approach the class as active learners? Constructivists see as actively constructed by learners, not passively acquired from instructors. For this reason, students learn more effectively when they own the process and work collaboratively on tasks that seem real and authentic. Journalism educators often apply some of these constructivist notions in their classes but rarely to the degree used in this graduate-level pedagogy class. This article presents a case study of a constructivist pedagogy class and argues for the use of constructivist theory in mass communication higher education. defined The world changes as we employ different perspectives to make observations on our world (Kuhn, 1970). Old theories are discarded or changed when a new theory or idea displays superior power in explaining the world. One such paradigm shift in the teaching field comes with the emergence of constructivism. The term has at least two major senses: epistemological and educational. While at times these two senses are related, they are not identical. (Phillips, 2000; Howe & Berv, 2000). Constructivism used in a philosophical and epistemological sense describes a thesis that, disciplines (or public bodies of knowledge) are human constructs (Phillips, 2000, p. 6). This thesis sometimes is also called social constructivism or social constructionism. (Phillips, 2000). At other times, some philosophers do not use the term at all; instead, they label constructivist-type epistemology as Kantianism, post-Kantianism, pragmatism, or naturalism (Howe & Berv, 2000). The second sense of the term is psychological, educational, and pedagogical. In this sense, constructivism refers to a set of views about how individuals learn (and about how those who help them to learn ought to teach) (Phillips, 2000, p. 7). Even when constructivism is used in this educational sense, it is a very loose label, and careful distinctions might be required. For example, Howe and Berv warn that an individual instructor might adopt a constructivist learning theory but not a constructivist pedagogy, and vice versa (Howe & Berv, 2000). While the epistemological use of the term is not particularly new, the educational use of the term is only a decade or two old, at least in the U.S. learning theory literature. During the 1960s and 1970s, American instructional design theory and research went through a paradigm shift - from behaviorism (which focuses on a stimulus-response-reinforcement model) to cognitive psychology (which focuses on the mental processes of the learner) (Tennyson, 1997). [Because behaviorism was never as strong in Europe, cognitive psychology theory such as Jean Piaget's work influenced European instructional design theory throughout the twentieth century (Tennyson & Schott, 1997; Steiner, 1997)]. It wasn't until the 1980s or even the 1990s that constructivist theories started to influence American instructional design theory, and learning began to be seen as knowledge construction (Mayer, 1999, p. …