Teachers' expectations with regard to the activity of the fourth-grader in the process of constructing knowledge

Abstract

In the constructivist perspective, learning is the process of actively constructing knowledge during constant interactions with the environment. Such a definition of learning changes the understanding of the teaching process, influencing the division and scope of roles of both educational entities – the student and the teacher. Education in a constructivist vision is a process in which the student is active, and the teacher – activating, organizing the environment for the activity of his student, during which knowledge is not passed on in the final form, but constructed through the use of tools – methods. The article attempts to describe the tendencies in teachers' expectations regarding student activity during lesson. The answer to the question of what activity of fourth-graders teachers expect during lessons was related to an attempt to understand the teacher's perception of the role of a student and his own role in the process of constructing knowledge. Thanks to the adopted phenomenographic perspective, the statements cited in this article, focusing on selected categories, reveal a tendency to negatively evaluate experiences gained in early childhood education and a lack of understanding of the essence of the student's activity in constructing knowledge. The teachers' statements collected for the purposes of the article, related to the expectations regarding the student's activity, clearly indicate the still valid need to promote active methods of teaching, raising awareness to the essence of activity in constructing knowledge, but especially ‒ they show the need to diagnose the types, causes and effects of its mystification in the teaching process.