“The only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself… For instance, through the response which is made to the child’s instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language.” -Dewey, 1897

What is meant by “knowledge is socially constructed”?

According to Dewey (1897), the father of constructivism, children naturally learn by interacting with their social environment. School knowledge, then, is only useful if it helps a student exist in the world at large, or fulfills them personally. Learning is both a psychological and sociological function; a child’s brain processes what they learn from society to develop schemata, then uses these schemata to interpret future social observations. The role of the teacher is to help students break and re-form schemata, and provide critical input experiences that expose students to new knowledge (Marzano, 2007).

I connected with the quote from Dewey at the beginning of this post, because I am an avid foreign language learner, as well as a past and future language teacher. I studied Spanish and French in school in the “usual way” with a textbook and a teacher at the front of the classroom, and achieved a degree of proficiency, at least as far as my grades were concerned. I had authentic communication experiences with native speakers, both in the United States, and in Spanish and French speaking countries, but Dewey and I would both agree that my knowledge of these languages is artificial and incomplete. After only a few years away from the classroom, my speaking proficiency has dropped to near uselessness.

On the other hand, I am also a learner of Ukrainian, Russian and Polish– languages to which I was exposed in a purely social way. I first started learning Polish many years ago around my best friend’s kitchen table, listening to her and her mother fight, share recipes, and laugh in a mixture of English and Polish. I could not tell you how to conjugate a verb, but I do know lots of food words, a collection of comparative adjectives, and several expressions of disgust, excitement, and surprise.

I learned Ukrainian and Russian in a similar way, side by side, when I moved to Ukraine in 2009. From the moment I stepped off the airplane, I barely heard any English. My survival depended on learning to understand the people around me, and to do that, I had to start by observing nonverbal cues, and applying them to the sounds I was hearing. I learned to copy tones and a few phrases before I was ever given any formal instruction. For two months, I worked in a small group with a tutor up to four hours a day to develop a working knowledge of Ukrainian, but I still learned the most from sitting at the kitchen table with my host mother. Even class time was usually spent defining words we had heard on the street, or discussing the cultural reasons why some words do not accurately match their translations.

Since Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian are all Slavic languages, they share similarities that help me understand each language in relation to the other two. My grammar is fair to poor, and my word choice is somewhat childish. I am only literate in Ukrainian, and my handwriting is a nearly illegible joke. However, I have no problems understanding and making myself understood in these languages, and I feel more comfortable creating and experimenting with them than I do French or Spanish. Even though I would score lower on a four-part proficiency exam, I “know” Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian better than French and Spanish, because those are the languages I can use in meaningful situations.

References
Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogical creed. The School Journal.

Marzano, R.J. (2007). The Art and Science of Teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD