Teachers and Teaching: theory and practiceVol. 10, No. 2, April 2004ISSN 1354–0602 (print)/ISSN 1470–1278 (online)/04/010199–23© 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1354060042000188035Constructing constructivism: how student-teachers construct ideas of development, knowledge, learning, and teachingLinda R. Kroll*Mills College, Oakland, CA, USAThis case study investigates the development of the understanding of constructivist theory amongstudents in a Masters level elementary teacher education program within a particular course. Thefocus of the study is a seminar entitled ‘Advanced Seminar in Child Development’. The questionsexplored include: How do students’ ideas of teaching, learning and knowledge develop within thecontext of their experience in this course? How do they come to understand constructivism? Whatare their definitions of constructivism? What is the course of the development of this understanding?The nature of the students’ learning processes is examined through three sources of data: dialogjournals, videotaped sessions and the instructor’s reflective teaching journal. The study looks bothat student development and instructional practice to further understanding of how student-teacherscan learn to apply constructivist theory to their teaching and to understand the learning process,both within themselves and their students. Their development is placed in the context of Korthagenand Kessels’s model of teacher understanding and practice, and within a broader context of princi-ples of practice that emphasize a belief in equity and social justice. The case illustrates how the waystudent-teachers are taught theory can help them integrate their own ideas of learning and teachingwith constructivist theory in order to think critically about their own practice in an ongoing devel-opmental manner.IntroductionAs students study to become teachers they must form concepts about what learningand teaching are. Within the confines of a teacher education program that believes ina constructivist and developmental view of the teaching and learning process,students must also develop an understanding of the theory of constructivism. Thepurpose of this study is to look at one context in which students in a graduate teachereducation program at a small liberal arts college in the midst of a large urban schooldistrict (where many of the students will teach) develop their ideas of development,learning, teaching, the nature of knowledge and constructivism. The focus of the*Professor and Dean of Education, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland, CA94613, USA. Email: [email protected] L. R. Krollstudy is a seminar entitled ‘Advanced Seminar in Child Development’. The questionsto be answered are: How do students’ ideas of teaching and learning develop withinthe context of their experience in this course? How do their ideas about the nature ofknowledge develop and change? How do they come to understand constructivism?What is the course of the development of these understandings in the context of thisclass experience?PerspectivesStudents who are studying to become teachers begin their studies with personal,preconceived notions about the nature of teaching and learning. They bring withthem anywhere from 16 to 20 years of personal experience as students themselves,and, in addition, have often served as teachers in a variety of capacities. The notionof learning as a process of construction and reconstruction often conflicts with theirown naïve views of teaching as telling and learning as copying or memorizing what is‘true’. Thus, in the context of a teacher education program built on principles thatinclude the notion of learning as a developmental/constructivist process, we createcontexts in which they can challenge their own assumptions.Constructivism, or constructivist theories, represent a multiplicity of ways to thinkabout learning and development, and consequently about teaching. Steffe and Gale(1995) underscore this multiplicity by noting that a single colloquium series on alter-native epistemologies in education included six different constructivist paradigms,which they identify as social constructivism, radical constructivism, social construc-tionism, information-processing constructivism, cybernetic systems, and sociocul-tural approaches to mediated action. Thus, in thinking about how to teach aboutconstructivism in the context of thinking about teaching and learning, students needto be exposed to the variety of ways this theoretical perspective is framed. Theapproaches lie along a continuum from individual construction of knowledge to socialconstruction of knowledge. Cobb (1996) makes an important contribution in demon-strating how the span of the continuum contributes to our understanding of howpeople learn, with different constructivist perspectives acting as foreground and back-ground for one another. Thus, in thinking about how to teach student-teachers aboutconstructivism, a range of ideas and readings are presented. Students are expected tostruggle with the readings and ideas and begin to construct for themselves an articu-lated vision of learning, teaching, development and knowledge.We know student-teachers’ (and experienced teachers’) ideas about the nature oflearning, teaching, development and knowledge change across time, as they becomemore experienced in their profession (Ammon & Hutcheson, 1989). Part of thisdevelopmental change is as a result of instructional experiences they have as student-teachers, at the university. All student-teachers have some coursework about devel-opment and theoretical perspectives on learning and teaching.It is well recognized that students have difficulty connecting theory and practice.Korthagen and Kessels (1999) point out a lack of transfer between theoretical contentof pre-service programs and teachers’ practice. Korthagen and Kessels categorizeteacher knowledge as either mostly perceptual and situated or mostly conceptual andConstructing contstructivism 201general. They describe the relationship between teacher knowledge and teacherbehavior in three levels: ‘gestalt’ or ‘holistic’, ‘schema’ or ‘networks of elements andrelations’, and ‘theory’ or ‘logical ordering of the relations in the schema’ (1999,p. 10). Korthagen and Kessels are careful to point out that this is theory with a small‘t’, a personal theory about teaching, and contrast it to theory with a big ‘T’,