Excerpt: Constructivism must be careful not to confine itself to the purely cognitive domain of human experience. Educators must strive to include the body, its actions, and its passions more prominently in the curriculum. The pragmatic social constructivism of George Herbert Mead and John Dewey allows us to do so. Mead and Dewey maintained a lifelong friendship and were colleagues for many years during which they visited each other nearly every day. So intermeshed was their influence on each other that it is often impossible to determine who originated what. Such entwinement is typical of socially constructive contexts and illustrates a central thesis of pragmatic social constructivism – it decenters the locus of mind and self.

Excerpt: I would like to show how the constructivist point of view makes it possible to develop a vision of the whole of educational phenomena which is comprehensive and penetrating and which, at the same time, is both viable and even fertile. This kind of vision would embrace education as much in terms of its psychological, developmental, socioaffective, and psychopedagogical aspects as of its cognitive and didactic aspects. By the same token, I would also like to show what occurs when the constructivist approach is widened to include all educational phenomena: It is possible at that point to contextualize and delimit application of the approach in relation to more specific problematics involved with schooling and teaching – two areas that, after all, form only a subset of the entire educational field.

In this rejoinder, I try to clarify and to develop further the concept of “reflexive law” by expanding its theoretical framework. I make use of the theory of autopoietic systems-a recently developed version of system theory. Legal autonomy and social autonomy turn out to be the crucial concepts. Their reformulation in terms of closed, self-referential, and self-reproductive structures leads to the core problem for a post-interventionist law: Can the law adapt its internal models of social reality to the autopoietic organization of legally regulated social systems?

The actions of the mathematics teacher are bound up in ethical decisions that impact the learner and teacher, both within and external to the formal school curriculum. This paper argues that the principles of a radical constructivist theory of knowing underlie a model for an ethics of liberation. A learner’s active construction of their experiential reality, including the construction of the independent existence of the other and resulting social implications, frame guidelines for actions that are liberatory. To demonstrate this point, the paper develops the ideas of responsibility of the self, unique directions of learning, and socially-generated disequilibrium. When teachers and their students act according to such guidelines, they are freed to know mathematics and hence themselves in ways that allow them to work toward social justice and democratic ideals.

This chapter promotes alignment of worldview, theoretical frameworks and research approaches in relation to constructivism and its philosophical underpinnings. It presents an overview of constructivist theories of learning. The chapter then focuses on constructivist approaches to research: its traditions and methods. It provides examples from various disciplines including clinical medicine, healthcare profession education and nursing. The chapter explains how the philosophy of constructivism gives rise to certain theories of learning which we rely on in our daily practice. It explains the role of the researcher in constructivist research. The constructivist researcher would accept that the information being shared through the interview process is the result of an exchange between the researcher and the participant, rather than the conveying of ‘pure, unfiltered’ fact. Authenticity criteria assess the fairness of research within the constructivist domain.

Daß wir kognitive Akte vollziehen, erscheint uns selbstverständlich. Genau im Vollzug dessen, was ich tue, erscheint mir Kognition als meine unmittelbare Erfahrung. Ich vollziehe einen Erkenntnisakt, wenn ich in einer Weise handle, die ich als Beeinflussung oder Manipulation der Welt beschreibe, in der ich existiere. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum trifft diesen Sachverhalt und weist der Erfahrung der Erkenntnis eine zentrale Rolle zu: das cogito, der Akt des Erkennens, ist für Descartes der Ausgangspunkt. Oder mit anderen Worten: Kognition ist eine menschliche Eigenschaft und wird nicht weiter problematisiert. Das möchte ich ändern. Ich möchte darstellen, auf welche Weise ich Kognition zum Problem mache und wie ich die Frage beantworte: “Was für ein Phänomen ist das Phänomen der Kognition?”

Die Theorie der autopoietischen Systeme (TAPS) versteht sich als endgültige Überwindung einer subjektphilosophischen Argumentationstradition. Dieses Selbstverständnis kontrastiert in auffälliger Weise mit dem Sachverhalt, daß die TAPS die für diese Tradition maßgebliche Figur einer selbstreferentiellen lmmanenz zum formalen Prinzip ihrer gesamten Theoriebildung erhebt. Die radikale Verzeitlichung des Systembegriffs, ebenfalls ein grundlegendes Prinzip der TAPS, führt aber zugleich zu einer Unterminierung dieses Immanenzprinzips. Über die Zeittheorie schleicht sich das Moment einer irreduziblen Transzendenz und damit Weltverhaftetheit der autopoietischen Systeme ein. Daraus ergibt sich ein interner theoretischer Widerspruch, den die TAPS mit ihren am konstruktivistischen Paradigma orientierten kategorialen Mitteln nicht mehr auflösen kann. Dieses Problem weist frappierende Analogien zu jenem zeittheoretischen Dilemma klassischer Theorien des transzendentalen Subjekts auf, auf das die phänomenologischen Zeittheorien Heideggers und Merleau-Pontys, gestützt auf die Husserlschen Analysen zum inneren Zeitbewußtsein, aufmerksam gemacht haben.

Excerpt: Maturana envisions a comprehensive theory that makes both the cognitive subject in its “functional organization” and the cognitive performance produced by this subject equally understandable. The aim of this article is to examine Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis concept, which refers to biological facts and provides the basis for all further considerations, for its sustainability from the biological perspective.