Meta-learning: constructivism & constructionism

In this piece, we're going to learn about learning. By the title, this sounds like a technical article but I promise this is just a light read.

Coming across constructivism and constructionism in this past week piqued my interest in wanting to know more about them and how they help learners embed their own comprehension of something concretely in that wrinkled weird organ encapsulated within the skull which we call - the brain.

Disclaimer: I am in no way a professional, just someone who happened to read some stuff pertaining to the topic and decided to share.

First of all, what are constructivism and constructionism? Both of them are similar, constructivism came first while constructionism was an extended branch of the former. They both put the focus on the learner, process-based rather than product-based, interactive, implements subjectivism instead of objectivism which means these theories believe an individual learns based on their prior experiences (which everyone is different). Knowledge is not seen as an absolute value and teachers are not a transmitter but a facilitator.

To put it simply, instead of handling you the procedures and all the ingredients in the exact amount for baking a cake (instructionism). The constructivism/constructionism way would be giving you a bunch of ingredients and let you figure out the steps on your own (based on your previous experiences and understanding) to bake a cake of your liking.

Why do constructivism and constructionism work?

There's one metaphor from Taimur Abdaal's blog that I found pretty interesting and apt when used to explain these theories. A direct excerpt:

The classic instructionism way of learning will be brute-forcing information into our brains, in the Dark Room metaphor's context: memorizing the pictures of the room over and over (rote learning). While this might be helpful in learning mere facts, eg: your friend's birthday, your grandma's address, the password to that account you never use. In most cases, we aren't learning just to regurgitate (hmm, exams 👀), we are learning because we want to apply it to our career and daily lives.

Constructionism/constructivism aids us in developing our own unique mental models and neural pathways that would actually be easier to retain in our long-term memory and retrieve later.

My personal experience with constructivism/constructionism has of course been great.

I tend to find myself not really understanding lab sessions when we were merely following the procedures and instructions given by the lecturer. Or when I found myself not remembering the things I have memorized and vomited back onto the exam paper. My mind was deliberately being lazy: "let's just do this and get it done and over with".

But when I learn things through project-based learning or student-centered learning, knowledge sticks around and gets ingrain into my long-term memory unintendedly or with minimum effort.

A little story from Design for How People Learn:

When I was in college, I took an architecture class. The professor was explaining about early church buildings. She explained that the people building the churches wanted to make the buildings as tall as possible, because they believed high ceilings enhanced churchgoers’ religious feeling.

There were two different ways, the professor said, to make a building really tall: Use clever engineering to support the walls, or just make the walls really thick.

Implementing an effective learning approach (in this case constructivism/constructionism) will help you leverage your capabilities in preserving information longer. Better yet, encode them in your long-term memory with lesser time and effort, just like how clever engineering makes the buildings taller with lesser resources.

How should we do it? you might ask

The abstract way:

Think of your brain as a huge room or warehouse that has humongous shelves. On these shelves are your memories, each memory arranged according to their categories: childhood trauma, songs that made me feel cozy inside, maths I learned from high school, etc. One memory can be "replicated" and stored on multiple shelves too, a particular pink dress can be placed on [dresses my mom bought for me] and [dresses that made me look fat], 'a hen lays an egg everyday' memory can be placed on [things I've learned in vet school] and [things I've observed at my grandma's farm].

The point is, if a particular memory/fact/information is placed on multiple shelves, you are more likely to be able to remember it. (shelves metaphor from the book Design for How People Learn)

While trying to relate other prior memories you have formed with the things that you are learning, constructionism/tivism takes place. You are placing new knowledge into multiple shelves, overall strengthening your competence in remembering and retrieving it later.

There are also a few different types of memory in the human brain, including semantic, episodic, conditioned, procedural memory. Now, focusing on: episodic memory, which is the memory that remembers stories and experiences. I'm sure most of us have no problem recalling what happened to us in our lives or the plot of a movie even though we just watched it once, there are a few reasons why we are able to remember stories better and easier which I'm not going to talk about here. (you could check out online sources, like this)

"This is why Jesus speaks in parables throughout the New Testament — in ways that stick with you long after you’ve read them" wrote Nabeel Qureshi in his blog.

In a similar way, creating a story stimulates constructionism/tivism, helping you to comprehend things in a way that is relatable, special and of course easier to remain tenacious in the brain.

There are a lot more ways constructionism and constructivism are implemented, building your own project, flipped classroom, problem-based learning, etc. Whether on an individual level or on a school system level, combining them with classic instructionism definitely yields remarkable results.