I was recently reading a pre-print of a book chapter, which offered an overview of the work of some of the “giants” of educational theory.
This was an interesting publication from a strong team of academics, yet it fell into a trap that I see far too often in discussions of education research: it made caricatures out of key researchers whose work underpins our understanding of teaching and learning.
One such researcher is Jerome Bruner. He was an influential American psychologist and educator who was a pioneer in the field of cognitive psychology.
However, he is sometimes simply portrayed as the person who formulated “discovery learning” - a pedagogical approach that broadly involves children “learning through doing” and finding answers out for themselves with minimal teacher involvement, rather than learning through explicit instruction.
It is true that Bruner was a supporter of discovery learning methods, but this is absolutely not the only thing he advocated for. For example, consider another term that he coined, “sڴڴDZ徱Բ”, and it becomes clear that he was never truly advocating for children to be set loose to learn with minimal guidance from the word “go”.
Scaffolding typically involves providing structured support when a learner is first introduced to a new concept; gradually reducing that support as the learner becomes more competent; tailoring assistance to the learner’s current level of understanding; and, finally, encouraging independence by eventually removing the scaffold, once the learner can perform the task unaided.
This approach helps learners to focus on mastering specific skills without being overwhelmed by complexity, in the same way that physical scaffolding supports a building under construction.
Unfair caricatures in education research
Knowing that it was Bruner who came up with this terminology places the view of him as the “champion of discovery learning” in a completely different light.
Bruner also wrote about the idea of a spiral curriculum and, in mathematics education, inspired Singapore’s “concrete, pictorial, abstract” approach. In his theory of cognitive development, he introduced three modes of representation that describe how individuals mentally encode and process information, going from an “enactive representation”, where learning happens; through action, “iconic representation”, where learning involves images and visual aids; and finally “symbolic representation” where knowledge is represented through language, symbols and logic.
These ideas are all highly compatible with what we know about what makes teaching and learning effective but, in some quarters, Bruner is still just the guy who loved discovery learning.
So, what could the authors of the pre-print chapter that I was reading, or others in the sector, do to stop promoting the caricature version of people like Bruner?
Ideally, everyone would read the original source texts. Unfortunately, these are not always easy to get hold of, especially when they are more than 50 years old. For instance, it recently took me many months to get the original research report from a famous Direct Instruction trial.
Meanwhile, incorrect caricatures are, unfortunately, being propagated. One of the most popular education research articles of the past decade, for example, mentions Bruner in relation to discovery but omits his name when talking about scaffolding.
In the absence of the original source materials, our best bet is to read broadly and widely.
Alternatively, we can practise “steelmanning”. This involves presenting someone else’s argument in its strongest, most persuasive form - even stronger than they originally stated it - before engaging with it. So you could seek out the strongest sources for arguments that you disagree with.
This practice is used when preparing for debates, but could easily be used for evidence gathering in general. The result, hopefully, will be better arguments across the board - and, in the case of a figure like Bruner, greater historical understanding.
Christian Bokhove is a professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies
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