Author W. E. Doll Jr.

Excerpt: Readers of Complicity are most fortunate to have Jerome Proulx’s paper distinguishing “Maturana and Varela’s Theory of Cognition.… from Constructivist Theories.” This paper sits as a fine companion piece to the Educational Theory paper by Brent Davis and Dennis Sumara (Fall, 2002), distinguishing various types of constructivism and situating complexity as an alternative to constructivism, one focusing neither exclusively nor heavily on the actions of the learner but rather on the interplay of factors or forces within a dynamic, learning situation. Proulx points out that “constructivist” (constructivism) – a word Davis and Sumara note is not part of Jean Piaget’s vocabulary1 (p. 411) – has become, in the hands of Ernst von Glasersfeld, a mantra for teachers dealing with children.