Ishabor Makvandi

Week 2: Theorist Graphic

Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist/philosopher who created
what is called genetic epistemology, which is focused on the origins of thinking.
His work focused on childrens cognitive development, and he believed that children
developed best in a classroom with interaction. Learning, in his framework,
happens through mental and physical experience. He also believed that attaining
knowledge was bound by the learners mental development, but at the same time,
knowledge could also be attained by basically building on the things that someone
already knows.
Jerome Bruner was an American psychologist who believed that cognitive
growth was a combination of human capabilities and culturally invented
technologies that magnify ones capabilities. Education, for him, was not about
memorizing facts, but about creating students who were capable of learning for
themselves. He thought that creating autonomous learners that could learn how
to learn on their own was a big part of educations goal.
Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist who was the founder of culturalhistorical psychology or Social Development Theory. He believed that community,
and thus social interaction, played a huge role in how peoples cognition developed
and how people made meaning out of things. Distinct from Piaget, everything for
Vygotsky in terms of development was rooted in social processes.
What I find interesting about all three of these ideas is that they all connect
learning to other people somehow. For Piaget, development best happens when
students have interaction with others. For Bruner, though it seems a bit forced to
show the connection, cognitive grown happened when it was connected to
culturally invented technologies, which in my mind means that development
needs the contributions of other people as well as ones own capabilities. For
Vygotsky, social interaction with other people was a huge part of the foundation for
cognitive development.
What I also like about these ideas is that, since they all involve people and
since Bruners theories include the idea of technologies, technology can be a
harmonizing of all three. The picture I chose below is of a classroom using clickers
to gauge what the students in the class believe to be the correct answer to some
problem. This touches one of each of the theorists main points that should happen
in education: social interaction with culturally invented technology. What this all
means to me is that using technology in the classroom can theoretically be proven
to actually enhance learning and cognition because it encourages what theorists
have stated as essential for learning.