Through several collaborative inquiries with teachers in elementary and middle schools, we have noticed a troublesome trend: teachers have become familiar with many of the key terms and catchphrases of various constructivist discourses, yet they tend to be relatively unfamiliar with the developments in epistemology that have driven the rapid emergence of these vocabularies. In consequence, our efforts to invite teachers into current discussions of cognition have often been frustrated and frustrating. We argue that this situation is in large part due to two circumstances. First, the vocabularies chosen by constructivists are often too readily aligned with commonsense understandings of personal knowing and collective knowledge. Second, and closely related, educational theorists and researchers have not always been sufficiently attentive to the contexts of their work. As such, rather than prompting a break from deeply entrenched habits of thinking, constructivist discourses have often been co-opted to support renewed and regressive embraces of Platonic and Cartesian assumptions. Somewhat ironically, then, the work of many educational theorists and researchers appears to be carried out in ignorance of the tentative and participatory dynamics that are argued to be at the root of cognitive processes.

The constructivist pedagogies that are increasingly part of teacher education course work and expectations emerge from an intellectual world where knowledge is seen as created rather than received, mediated by discourse rather than transferred by teacher talk, explored and transformed rather than remembered as a uniform set of positivistic ideas. Increasingly, teacher educators ask new teachers to learn how to elicit and then use students’ existing ideas as a basis for helping them construct new, more reasoned, more accurate or more disciplined understandings. While the role a teacher plays in developing or shaping students’ thinking via constructivist pedagogies is obvious to teacher educators who advocate such strategies, the case of Taylor, a prospective English teacher, suggests that the role a teacher plays when using these strategies may not be at all clear to prospective teachers. Rather than understanding constructivist pedagogies as techniques for thinking with learners, for teaching them, Tayor saw these strategies as ends in themselves. Faced with models of constructivist pedagogies, Taylor concluded that the teacher’s role ends when she has activated learners, invited them to talk, successfully engaged their participation. This article describes how she reached this conclusion and explores the ways in which constructivist pedagogies can lead prospective teachers to project a thin vision of their role as a teacher.

Excerpt: I believe that input from a wide community of constructivist scholars and teachers will profoundly improve biology education by developing future biologists and biology teachers who have a much better understanding of scientific investigation through their own development and use of investigative software, laboratory, and field activities. This community of teachers and scholars should have biologists of many varieties, researchers in science education and educational technology, computer scientists, and philosophers of science. Based on my commitment to transforming the nature and quality of science education, I believe that exploratory environments on microcomputers will empower many co-learners (teachers and students) primarily by conflating these two previously polar roles. Computer exploratoriums are not a panacea (in particular, this approach alone can do little to change who per se it is that does science), but they can provide an environment in which students can have ample opportunity to develop their confidence and competence in problem posing, long-term inference making, and contextualized problem solving through experiential and collaborative learning. ||