This paper offers a critique of, and an approach to, education that is heavily influenced by Heinz von Foerster, especially the idea that knowing takes place through our cognition organizing itself through cycles of perceiving and acting. Von Foerster’s approach was to make the manner of teaching embody the ideas which he wanted to teach. The author describes elements of constructivist second-order cybernetic thinking that can serve as tools for teaching and learning.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Cybernetic Approach to Contextual Teaching and Learning��� by Philip Baron. Upshot: I consider implications of Baron’s article on change in university education. In particular, I address the problem of why change happens with difficulty and how the principles and practices of second-order cybernetics that Baron discusses are applicable beyond South Africa to a wide range of situations.

Open peer commentary on the article “Heterarchical Reflexive Conversational Teaching and Learning as a Vehicle for Ethical Engineering Curriculum Design” by Philip Baron. Upshot: Philip Baron focuses on changing university curricula in South Africa to enable students to succeed who do not share the culture, expectations, and experience of their teachers. With increasing need and desire for more education worldwide, his article is relevant to university education in all countries, especially in those with underserved populations. This commentary focuses on the factors Baron describes which can be generalized to all university education.

Review of The Content of Science. A Constructivist Approach to its Teaching and Learning, edited by Peter Fensham, Richard Gunstone and Richard White, Farmer Press, London, 1994.

Open peer commentary on the article “Constructing Constructivism” by Hugh Gash. Upshot: Radical constructivism is explicitly discussed in Gash’s target article outlining “stages” or types of constructivism. The stages contextualize radical constructivism in a series of research phases involving a number of domains using a variety of approaches. The target article begs the query: “just how radical are many constructivist approaches in teaching and learning?”

Instructional research underlines the significance of cognitive activation and constructive support as features of the quality of teaching, with special emphasis on their conception as quality features of teaching-learning-processes. The focal point of recent debates has been the model of offer and use. Following this figure of offer and use, the task is to integrate not only offer-related stimuli (instruction, material, etc.), but also processes of the reconstruction of knowledge into the conception of teaching quality. The contribution therefore also takes into consideration argumentation-related approaches that allow for a reconstruction and an empirical recording of such processes of knowledge acquisition. Using the inferential theory of teaching and learning, a systematics is developed that forms the basis for the procedural conception of cognitive activation and constructive support. Finally, the operationalization and empirical recording of these constructs via video-graphic and video-analytical procedures is presented.

This article presents an investigation into the meaning of ‘learning’ It uses cybernetics as a framework to look at the fundamental questions of: What is learning and why do people learn? Why do they learn this (and not something else)? How does learning happen? The article first describes the origin of cybernetics and its central tenets of circularity, feedback and communication, which suggest that learning is fundamentally about living. The living system learns as it fits with the environment in an integrated brain/body/environment learning system. This leads to a discussion of teaching and learning as building relationships with self and others in communication, with self and others, with or without the intention of changing and being changed in the encounter. Teacher and learner inevitably change (learn) as they interact whatever the context. The article suggests that what is happening in the encounter between teacher and learner, that which we call ‘learning’, happens to each of us in the same way all of the time. Learning is change; change learning. ‘Teacher’ and ‘Learner’ change (learn) together in a constant feedback network of communication.

In the first part of the article I present an epistemological critique of forms of pedagogy founded on Piagetian constructivism. Despite the appeal of the notion that learners construct their understanding, I argue that constructivism is problematic because it ignores the subjectivity of the learner and the socially and historically situated nature of knowing; it denies the essentially collaborative and social nature of meaning making; and it privileges only one form of knowledge, namely, the technical rational. I then present a critique of active learning and student-centered forms of pedagogy. I argue that in our models of teaching we rely on too many unexamined assumptions from developmental psychology and we take for granted the problematic notion that children learn by doing. My central thesis is that constructivism is flawed because of its inability to come to grips with the essential issues of culture, power, and discourse in the classroom. In the concluding section of the article I present a preliminary account of a sociocultural approach to teaching and learning that takes seriously the notion that learning is situated in contexts, that students bring their own subjectivities and cultural perspectives to bear in constructing understanding, that issues of power exist in the classroom that need to be addressed, and that education into scientific ways of knowing requires understanding modes of classroom discourse and enabling students to negotiate these modes effectively so that they may master and critique scientific ways of knowing without, in the process, sacrificing their own personally and culturally constructed ways of knowing.

Context: Radical constructivism (RC) is seen as a fruitful way to teach innovation, as Ernst von Glasersfeld’s concepts of knowing, learning, and teaching provide an epistemological framework fostering processes of generating an autonomous conceptual understanding. Problem: Classical educational approaches do not meet the requirements for teaching and learning innovation because they mostly aim at students’ competent performance, not at students’ understanding and developing their creative capabilities. Method: Analysis of theoretical principles from the constructivist framework and how they can be used as a foundation for designing a course in the field of innovation. The empirical results are based on qualitative journal entries that were coded and categorized according to Charmaz’s grounded theory approach. Results: It is shown that there is a close relationship between learning and innovation processes. The proposed investigated course design based on RC incorporates the following concepts: the course setting is understood as a framework to guide understanding; students work in teams and are subjective constructors of their own knowledge; instructors take on the role of coaches, guiding students through an innovation process as co-creators. Such a framework facilitates dynamic processes of assimilation and accommodation, as well as perturbation through the “other,” which potentially lead to novel, and viable, conceptual structures crucial for sustainable innovation. Constructivist Content: The paper argues in favor of RC principles in the context of teaching and learning. The proposed course setting is oriented at von Glasersfeld’s understanding of knowing, learning, and teaching (vs. training. It outlines theoretical and practical aspects of these principles in the context of a course design for innovation. Furthermore, it shows the importance of von Glasersfeld’s concept of intersubjectivity for processes of accommodation and the generation of (novel) autonomous conceptual structures. The interplay between creating coherence, perturbation, and irritation through interacting with the “other” (in the form of co-students and instructors) is assumed to be vital for such processes, as it leads to the creation of not only novel but also viable conceptual structures, therefore re-establishing a relative equilibrium critical for sustainable innovation.

Key words: Innovation, teaching, learning, course design, co-creation, Enabling Space, radical constructivism.

Constructivism, or more precisely, a constructivist metatheory, presently prevails throughout professional education circles. Most educators easily accept constructivism’s central premise that learners approach tasks with prior knowledge and expectations based on their knowledge of the world around them. Naturally, then, constructivist educational technologists have been guided by the implicit (and increasingly explicit) desire to create “authentic” environments for learning: environments that correspond to the real world. In this paper, I argue that technologists have tended to paper over the critical epistemological dimension of constructivism by “preauthenticating” learning environments: creating environments that are predetermined to reflect the real world even though constructivist theory contrindicates precisely this. I suggest that a rhetorical perspective on constructivism offers a way out of this bind and I propose some guidelines to assist developers of educational technologies in accommodating the essentially dialogic nature of teaching and learning.