Jerome Seymour Bruner
Jerome Seymour Bruner (1915- ) is one of the world's foremost psychologists. His PhD thesis in 1941 was on the
psychology of public opinion and propaganda. Since 1946 his work has ranged from a constructivist view of perception
- or 'new look' to the 'cognitive revolution', to the study of infancy and language development,
to cultural roles and interaction, to the development of the notion of the self, and more recently to narrative and the law.
In 1947 he pointed out that "perception has been treated as though the perceiver were a passive recording instrument of
rather complex design." He suggested that it would be better to look at the variations which perception itself undergoes
- in hunger, in love, in pain, in problem-solving, and so on. He found ingenious ways of testing and confirming, in children
and in adults, an apparently
simple hypothesis which hadn't been tested before - that we see what we want to see.
Discovering first the work of Jean Piaget and then that
Lev Vygotsky, leaning more to Vygotsky than to
Piaget, he developed an approach to education according to which,
"learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves." But
discoveries are made by those who know what they are looking for. He writes,
"Culture shapes the mind... it provides us with the toolkit by which we
construct not only our worlds but our very conception of our selves and our powers."
At the centre of this thinking, there is the idea of categorisation. Bruner writes "To perceive is to categorize, to
conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize." To learn about
categorisation, such as that of animals,
children and teacher examine both similarities and differences, with the teacher preventing mistakes.
The children are active contributors in the learning process. But each step has to be prepared.
Learning is thus an active process in which learners construct new categories, based on their current knowledge. The
learner constructs hypotheses, and makes decisions.
In a way which echoes a similar idea from the linguist, Noam Chomsky, this allows the individual
to "go beyond the information given."
Bruner suggests three ways of representing knowledge, coming to the fore in turn, enacted
physically, as by the throwing of a ball or the playing of an instrument, iconically, as by a mental
image or diagram, or symbolically, using a system of abstract symbols. These are not stages, but
shifts of balance. Enactive representation predominates in early childhood. Symbolic representation does not typically
predominate until adolescence.
Four famous and influential books represent the evolution of this thinking,
The Process of Education (1960), Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966),
The Relevance of Education (1971), and The Culture of Education (1996).
By its simple and intuitive interface, Pigeon Post allows different sorts of representation
to support the development of literacy.
Writing and illustrating a story is a process of creation
which can be helped by advance preparation.