“What determines the level of intellectual development is the extent to which the child has been given appropriate instruction together with practice or experience. So – the right way of presentation and the right explanation will enable a child to grasp a concept usually only understood by an adult.”

-Jerome Bruner

 

Jerome S. Bruner

Jerome Bruner has made significant contributions to the study of constructivism. He has taken the earlier works of Dewey, Vygotsky, and Piaget and expanded on them to a new phase of applying constructivist theory in schools.  

 

Resources and Links

 

BIOGRAPHY

        Jerome S. Bruner has had a long and varied journey through the field of psychology. The child of Polish immigrants, Bruner grew up in New York before pursuing an undergraduate degree in psychology from Duke University in 1939 and a PhD in psychology from Harvard University in 1941. Bruner began his career serving as a social psychologist under Eisenhower.  (Wikipedia.com)

       After the war, Bruner began teaching at Harvard University. This is where his interest in educational psychology began.  Bruner worked with Leo Postman to study how “mental sets” influence perception. (Smith, 2002) He also began to look at human cognition. From this early research, Bruner became interested in “schooling in the USA”. (Smith, 2002) As a result of this interest, he was asked to chair a conference sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation. The outcome of this conference was Bruner’s first book The Process of Education published in 1960. (Smith, 2002)

       In addition to the book, Bruner’s work with educational psychology influenced another key psychologist, Howard Gardner. At the time, Gardner was a researcher on the MACOS project which Bruner also worked on. The project’s goal was to “produce a comprehensive curriculum drawing upon the behavioural sciences.” (Smith, 2002) Through this research, Bruner began to hone his ideas on cognition.

       Bruner went on to teach at Oxford for roughly twenty years beginning in the 1970s. Throughout these years, Bruner continued to develop his theory of education and publish on the topic. He began to take a look at the cultural aspect of his educational theories. In 1996, Bruner published The Culture of Education to reflect the cultural psychology aspect of his theory. (Smith, 2002)

       Bruner returned to the United States in 1991 when he accepted a teaching position at New York University. His psychology journey turned toward how psychology can affect the practice of law. (Wikipedia.com). While almost 100 years old, Jerome Bruner is still listed as adjunct faculty at NYU. (psych.nyu.edu)

 

BRUNER’S THEORY

       Bruner’s theory fits into the constructivist approach.  Constructivism is based on the idea that the learner needs to be an active participant in their learning through “constructing” knowledge rather than being told information as with humanist approaches. With constructivist approaches, the instructor models learning in a way that the learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive structure to do so.” (“Constructivist Theory”, 2013)

       The foundations of Bruner’s work began to take shape in his first book, The Process of Education.  This important work will be discussed in more detail later. The major themes of Bruner’s work to come out of this work rely on the basic premise that a learner can be taught any topic at virtually any age. The two important keys to this are that the learning needs to be presented in a manner consistent with the learner’s previous knowledge and current cognitive development, as well as, focusing on how to teach learners to learn.  Ultimately, “what determines the level of intellectual development is the extent to which the child has been given appropriate instruction together with practice or experience. So – the right way of presentation and the right explanation will enable a child to grasp a concept usually only understood by an adult.” (McLeod, 2008)

        Like Piaget, Bruner described stages of cognition. These are referred to as the Three Modes of Representation.  A major difference between Piaget’s and Bruner’s stages is that Piaget described a sequential development where Bruner’s modes are more of a continuum. (McLeod, 2008)  While there are age ranges associated with Bruner’s Modes of Representation, Bruner feels that there is a progression through each of these modes whenever something new is learned (McLeod, 2008). With this continuum forming the basis of learning, it becomes easier to understand how Bruner concluded that children could be taught topics previously thought to be too advanced. His rationale is that it all depends on how the material is presented (Bruner, 1960). The materials need to coincide with the mode the learner is in.

       In order to present materials in a way conducive to learning, Bruner suggests the use of scaffolding.  McLeod (2008) compares Bruner’s scaffolding concept to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. Scaffolding involves active participation between the facilitator/instructor and the learner. The facilitator’s role is to structure the learning process in a way that allows the learner to focus “on the difficult skill she is in the process of acquiring” (Bruner, 1978, p.19). The learner’s role is to use their prior knowledge to acquire this new skill or knowledge (McLeod, 2008). By working together, the facilitator assists the learner in being an active participant in their own learning.

This model can be followed from the basic introduction of a topic through to the most advanced skills/ideas associated with the topic. Bruner calls this a spiral curriculum. Spiral curriculum is structured in a way that basic concepts are presented first. Once the basic concept is mastered, increasingly complex or difficult concepts would be introduced. As each stage is mastered, a more complex concept is introduced. The basic concepts are re-visited throughout the process as part of the more complex concepts (McLeod, 2008).

       As mentioned previously, Bruner first presented some of his ideas in his 1960 publication, The Process of Education. While most ideas in this book are rough versions of what became Bruner’s learning theory, the basic concepts form the scaffold of this particular spiral.

 

THE PROCESS OF EDUCATION

                The Preface to Bruner’s first work The Process of Education discusses an important educational meeting that happened in September of 1959 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts (Bruner, 1960). As Bruner describes, this meeting brought together “some thirty-five scientists, scholars, and educators to discuss how education in science might be improved in our primary and secondary schools.” (Bruner, 1960)  The focus of the book is a collection of ideas that came out of this meeting with some expansion of these ideas by Bruner.  The beginnings of the ideas discussed in the previous section all got their start in this integral work. 

                One interesting suggestion to come out of the work is the idea of presenting broader, general concepts early on in the child’s education and then applying these concepts to specific subjects later on (Bruner, 1960). This fits in with the idea of the spiral curriculum discussed previously. This would allow for the learner to begin to learn some concepts earlier and then build on those basics as they move into the next stage of cognitive development. The argument is that, not only would learners be able to be introduced to these general topics one time in their education (rather than in every subject where the topic arises), but learners are able to experience these concepts in a way that is understandable to them yet challenges them to be active in the learning process.

                There was input from a variety of experts of different fields discussed yet all input seemed to center on the idea that learners need to be the focus of any curriculum. From starting with basic concepts and building on them to more complex skills and ideas to creating an environment where the learner is challenged but in a supported setting through scaffolding, the learning experience becomes one where the learner not only comes away with increased subject knowledge and skills but, ultimately, comes away having learned how to learn.

 

IMPACT

                Jerome Bruner has made significant contributions to the study of constructivism. He has taken the earlier works of Dewey, Vygotsky, and Piaget and expanded on them to a new phase of applying constructivist theory in schools.  Honoring a learner’s previous knowledge and what level they are at in cognitive development, whether overall or within a specific learning goal, allows for the individual to be looked as an individual rather than looking at curriculum as a “one size fits all”. Bruner discusses the importance, not only of seeing the individual, but working with the “late bloomer, the early rebel” on an individual basis to ensure success for all students, not just the students who would succeed in any environment (Bruner, 1960).  It is disappointing to look at the current state of elementary and secondary education in the United States and see Bruner’s suggestions not being taken. Sadly, many of his predictions have come to pass with many students being left behind due to standardization in both curriculum and testing.

                While Bruner’s focus in his early career and in The Process of Education was on children, the concepts he puts forth can easily be applied to adult education. It is equally important to look at the adult learner as an individual. Adults come to the classroom with a variety of past experiences. Being conscious of these experiences is an important step in creating “buy in” as an instructor. In addition, highlighting these experiences can enhance the learning process by allowing the learner to connect past experiences to new material. This forms the basis for a spiral curriculum approach. Overall, Bruner continues the work of constructivism in that he emphasizes the importance of allowing the learner to actively participate in learning rather than be a passive participant.

 

REFERENCES

 

Bruner, J. (1960) The process of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 

Constructivist Theory (Jerome Bruner).  Retrieved from [http://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/constructivist]  Retrieved 2/5/2015.

 

McLeod, S. (2008) “Bruner”. [http://www.simplypsychology.org/bruner]. Retrieved 2/5/2015.

 

Smith, M.K. (2002) “Jerome S. Bruner and the process of education: the encyclopedia of informal education. [http://infed.org/mobi/jerome-bruner-and-the-process-of-edcuation] Retrieved: 2/5/2015.

 

Jerome Bruner. Retrived from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Bruner. Retrieved: 2/5/15.

 

Jerome Bruner. Retrieved from: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/bruner/. Retrieved: 2/5/15

 

 

Books

Simple Psychology

 

Jerome Bruner and the Process of Education