Bruner

Saul McLeod published 2008, updated 2012

The outcome of cognitive development is thinking. The intelligent mind creates from
experience "generic coding systems that permit one to go beyond the data to new and
possibly fruitful predictions" (Bruner, 1957, p. 234).

Thus, children as they grow must acquire a way of representing the "recurrent regularities" in
their environment.

So, to Bruner, important outcomes of learning include not just the concepts, categories, and
problem-solving procedures invented previously by the culture, but also the ability to
"invent" these things for oneself.

Cognitive growth involves an interaction between basic human capabilities and "culturally
invented technologies that serve as amplifiers of these capabilities."

These culturally invented technologies include not just obvious things such as computers and
television, but also more abstract notions such as the way a culture categorizes phenomena,
and language itself. Bruner would likely agree with Vygotsky that language serves to mediate
between environmental stimuli and the individual's response.

The aim of education should be to create autonomous learners (i.e., learning to learn).

In his research on the cognitive development of children (1966), Jerome Bruner proposed
three modes of representation:

Enactive representation (action-based)

Iconic representation (image-based)
Symbolic representation (language-based)

Bruner's Three Modes of Representation

Modes of representation are the way in which information or knowledge are stored and
encoded in memory.

Rather than neat age related stages (like Piaget), the modes of representation are integrated
and only loosely sequential as they "translate" into each other.

Enactive (0 - 1 years)
This appears first. It involves encoding action based information and storing it in our
memory. For example, in the form of movement as a muscle memory, a baby might
remember the action of shaking a rattle.

The child represents past events through motor responses, i.e. an infant will shake a rattle
which has just been removed or dropped, as if the movements themselves are expected to
produce the accustomed sound. And this is not just limited to children.

Many adults can perform a variety of motor tasks (typing, sewing a shirt, operating a lawn
mower) that they would find difficult to describe in iconic (picture) or symbolic (word) form.

Iconic (1 - 6 years)

This is where information is stored visually in the form of images (a mental picture in the
minds eye). For some, this is conscious; others say they dont experience it. This may
explain why, when we are learning a new subject, it is often helpful to have diagrams or
illustrations to accompany verbal information.

Symbolic (7 years onwards)

This develops last. This is where information is stored in the form of a code or symbol, such
as language. This is the most adaptable form of representation, for actions & images have a
fixed relation to that which they represent. Dog is a symbolic representation of a single class.

Symbols are flexible in that they can be manipulated, ordered, classified etc., so the user isnt
constrained by actions or images. In the symbolic stage, knowledge is stored primarily as
words, mathematical symbols, or in other symbol systems.

Bruner's constructivist theory suggests it is effective when faced with new material to follow
a progression from enactive to iconic to symbolic representation; this holds true even for
adult learners. A true instructional designer, Bruner's work also suggests that a learner even
of a very young age is capable of learning any material so long as the instruction is organized
appropriately, in sharp contrast to the beliefs of Piaget and other stage theorists.

The Importance of Language

Language is important for the increased ability to deal with abstract concepts. Bruner argues
that language can code stimuli and free an individual from the constraints of dealing only
with appearances, to provide a more complex yet flexible cognition.

The use of words can aid the development of the concepts they represent and can remove the
constraints of the here & now concept. Basically, he sees the infant as an intelligent &
active problem solver from birth, with intellectual abilities basically similar to those of the
mature adult.
Educational Implications
For Bruner (1961), the purpose of education is not to impart knowledge, but instead to
facilitate a child's thinking and problem solving skills which can then be transferred to a
range of situations. Specifically, education should also develop symbolic thinking in children.

In 1960 Bruner's text, The Process of Education was published. The main premise of
Bruner's text was that students are active learners who construct their own knowledge.

Bruner (1960) opposed Piaget's notion of readiness. He argued that schools waste time trying
to match the complexity of subject material to a child's cognitive stage of development. This
means students are held back by teachers as certain topics are deemed too difficult to
understand and must be taught when the teacher believes the child has reached the
appropriate state of cognitive maturity.

Bruner (1960) adopts a different view and believes a child (of any age) is capable of
understanding complex information: 'We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be
taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of
development'. (p. 33)

Bruner (1960) explained how this was possible through the concept of the spiral curriculum.
This involved information being structured so that complex ideas can be taught at a
simplified level first, and then re-visited at more complex levels later on. Therefore, subjects
would be taught at levels of gradually increasing difficultly (hence the spiral analogy).
Ideally, teaching his way should lead to children being able to solve problems by themselves.

Bruner (1961) proposes that learners construct their own knowledge and do this by
organizing and categorizing information using a coding system. Bruner believed that the most
effective way to develop a coding system is to discover it rather than being told it by the
teacher. The concept of discovery learning implies that students construct their own
knowledge for themselves (also known as a constructivist approach).

The role of the teacher should not be to teach information by rote learning, but instead to
facilitate the learning process. This means that a good teacher will design lessons that help
student discover the relationship between bits of information. To do this a teacher must give
students the information they need, but without organizing for them. The use of the spiral
curriculum can aid the process of discovery learning.

Bruner and Vygotsky

Both Bruner and Vygotsky emphasise a child's environment, especially the social
environment, more than Piaget did. Both agree that adults should play an active role in
assisting the child's learning.

Bruner, like Vygotsky, emphasized the social nature of learning, citing that other people
should help a child develop skills through the process of scaffolding. The term scaffolding
first appeared in the literature when Wood, Bruner and Ross described how tutors' interacted
with preschooler to help them solve a block reconstruction problem (Wood et al., 1976).

The concept of scaffolding is very similar to Vygotsky's notion of the zone of proximal
development, and it's not uncommon for the terms to be used interchangeably. Scaffolding
involves helpful, structured interaction between an adult and a child with the aim of helping
the child achieve a specific goal.

'[Scaffolding] refers to the steps taken to reduce the degrees of freedom in carrying out some
task so that the child can concentrate on the difficult skill she is in the process of acquiring'
(Bruner, 1978, p. 19).

Bruner and Piaget

Obviously there are similarities between Piaget and Bruner, but an important difference is
that Bruners modes are not related in terms of which presuppose the one that precedes it.
Whilst sometimes one mode may dominate in usage, they coexist.

Bruner states that 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. His theory stresses the role of education and the adult.

Although Bruner proposes stages of cognitive development, he doesnt see them as

representing different separate modes of thought at different points of development (like
Piaget). Instead, he sees a gradual development of cognitive skills and techniques into more
integrated adult cognitive techniques.

Bruner views symbolic representation as crucial for cognitive development and since
language is our primary means of symbolizing the world, he attaches great importance to
language in determining cognitive development.

BRUNER AGREES WITH

PIAGET
1. Children are PRE-ADAPTED to
learning
2. Children have a NATURAL
CURIOSITY
3. Childrens COGNITIVE
STRUCTURES develop over time
4. Children are ACTIVE
participants in the learning process
5. Cognitive development entails the
acquisition of SYMBOLS
BRUNER DISAGREES WITH PIAGET
1. Development is a CONTINUOUS PROCESS not a
series of stages
2. The development of LANGUAGE is a cause not a
consequence of cognitive development
3. You can SPEED-UP cognitive development. You
dont have to wait for the child to be ready
4. The involvement of ADULTS and MORE
KNOWLEDGEABLE PEERS makes a big difference
5. Symbolic thought does NOT REPLACE EARLIER
MODES OF REPRESENTATION

References
Bruner, J. S. (1957). Going beyond the information given. New York: Norton.

Bruner, J. S. (1960). The Process of education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. S. (1961). The act of discovery. Harvard Educational Review, 31, 21-32.

Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction, Cambridge, Mass.: Belkapp Press.

Bruner, J. S. (1973). The relevance of education. New York: Norton.

Bruner, J. S. (1978). The role of dialogue in language acquisition. In A. Sinclair, R., J.

Jarvelle, and W. J.M. Levelt (eds.) The Child's Concept of Language. New York: Springer-
Verlag.

Wood, D. J., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving.
Journal of Child Psychiatry and Psychology, 17(2), 89-100.

How to cite this article:

McLeod, S. A. (2008). Bruner. Retrieved from www.simplypsychology.org/bruner.html

Further Information

Lev Vygotsky

Zone of Proximal Development

Cognitive Approach

Jean Piaget

Jerome Bruner: The lesson of the story (Guardian Article)

https://www.simplypsychology.org/bruner.html

Jerome Bruner: The lesson of the story

The richest learning experience comes from narrative, the groundbreaking psychologist tells
John Crace

Jerome Bruner: "You think you meet people by chance, but when you look back on your life
you realise there was nothing random going on at all." Photograph: Martin Argles


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John Crace

@JohnJCrace

Tuesday 27 March 2007 23.45 BST

It's easy to forget that, 50 years ago, early years education was an afterthought in policy and
funding. It was the universities that were considered worth spending money on, and if they
tended to be filled with the middle-classes, then that's just the way things were. The better-off
simply happened to have brighter children. Thanks to Jerome Bruner and the other pioneers
of cognitive development, views like these have long been gathering dust. But Bruner et al no
longer get the recognition they deserve. The idea that children go through developmental
stages of learning has pretty much been absorbed into mainstream public debate and can
seem uncontroversial, even plain obvious. There may be some scraps to argue over, but it's
no longer cutting-edge stuff; neurology is the modern academic battleground. Old-timers
such as Bruner are sidelined, because there are few takers for what they offer in a 21st-
century psychology department.

But Bruner has no intention of changing his line of work. At 91, he's still going strong,
teaching in the law department at New York University. At a ceremony in Oxford only this
month, at which a building in the education department was named in his honour, he lectured
on his recent theories of story-telling as a vital learning tool.

"Why are we so intellectually dismissive towards narrative?" he asks. "Why are we inclined
to treat it as rather a trashy, if entertaining, way of thinking about and talking about what we
do with our minds? Storytelling performs the dual cultural functions of making the strange
familiar and ourselves private and distinctive. If pupils are encouraged to think about the
different outcomes that could have resulted from a set of circumstances, they are
demonstrating useability of knowledge about a subject. Rather than just retaining knowledge
and facts, they go beyond them to use their imaginations to think about other outcomes, as
they don't need the completion of a logical argument to understand a story. This helps them to
think about facing the future, and it stimulates the teacher too."

Context and culture has underpinned all Bruner's work, dating back to his undergraduate
years at Duke University in the 1930s, where he was taught by the distinguished British
psychologist William McDougall. "Psychology was dominated by the behaviourists at that
time," he says, "and McDougall encouraged me to think of simple 'stimulus and response' as
an extremely limited, atavistic model. It was clear to me that it was the interaction - the
context in which, the how, a thing is learned - that is key to a person's understanding and
development, rather than the mere fact that knowledge is acquired. Take punishment, for
example. Not everyone interprets it in the same way; it's what any given action represents to a
person that determines whether it is seen as a punishment or not."

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McDougall's parting words to Bruner were: "Don't go on to Harvard whatever you do; they're
much too positive in their views." So, naturally, that's where he went. And it was there that he
developed many of his ideas on the importance of pre-school learning and created a parallel,
more interactive, model of Piaget's theory of reasoning and childhood development. His work
brought him to national attention and John F Kennedy invited him to head a presidential
scientific advisory board, where he was instrumental in diverting government cash away from
higher education and into pre-school learning.

Bureaucracy of politics

Lyndon Johnson invited him to run the National Institute of Child Health and Development.
"Johnson was a very underrated president," says Bruner. "He had a persuasive Texan drawl
and I was tempted. But I had become frustrated with the bureaucracy of politics; I wanted to
be free from the pressure of putting details into operation. So I declined - something I rather
regret in hindsight."

Bruner was also getting fed up with Harvard, which he began to see as increasingly stuffy. "It
was the late 60s, and many of the students were getting involved in the civil rights and anti-
war movements. The old sacred cows were being challenged," he explains. "They also
wanted more say in how the university was run, and that seemed utterly reasonable to me.
Saying that students were old enough to go to war but not old enough to be involved in the
administration of their academic life was just a nonsense. But I was made to feel like a
rebellious outsider by the Harvard authorities for voicing my support so, when Isaiah Berlin
invited me to teach at Oxford, I leapt at the opportunity."

Was Oxford really so much more liberal than Harvard in 1968? Bruner smiles. "I don't
suppose so," he says, "but I didn't know any better. I just thought anything must be an
improvement on Harvard."

His method of arrival in England - "I think I'm the only academic in the university's history to
take up his chair by sailing his boat across the Atlantic" - was as unorthodox as his teaching
and research.

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He counts his 10 years at Oxford as one of the most productive periods of his life. "There was
a wonderfully talented group of academics and tutors that worked flat out, challenging and
developing each others' research in a way that was unusual in Britain at the time," he says.
"And we produced some great work, highlighting the fact that those who were missing out on
the important family interactions were those who were failing in fifth grade. That was taken
up by Lady Plowden [who delivered a groundbreaking report on early years education in
1967] in her battles with the then minister for education, Margaret Thatcher."
Though he was now well into his 60s, Bruner had no thought of retiring. He has just kept on
going and, even in his 80s, was still making regular trips to the Italian village of Reggio
Emilia, the epicentre of liberal education in action. He has not kept on working out of a desire
to preserve his place in history, but because he loves what he does. He constantly
acknowledges the work of those who have collaborated with him and hardly bothers to
conceal his pleasure at the misfortunes of those who have got up his nose. He might need a
stick to get about these days, but his mind is as lively as ever and he oozes a boyish
enthusiasm and curiosity.

Bruner was born blind and only regained his sight after an operation to remove the cataracts
when he was two years old. Does he have any recollection of those early years? "Not really,"
he says, "but there must have been a lasting effect. It's not the worst thing in the world only to
have a vision of your parents that you have created for yourself, but there is still a large
sensory deprivation. There must have been a longing for attachment that went partially
unfulfilled."

Shy and geeky

Bruner grew up on the south shore of Long Island and was mainly looked after by his mother,
while his father ran the family watch-making firm. He spent a lot of time by the sea. "I was
quite a shy, geeky boy," he says. "Not at all like my older sister, Alice, who was much more
confident and outgoing. I had one or two close friends, and we would go out rowing or
sailing together, creating our own fantasies in which no one else had ever done what we were
then doing. We were the fastest oarsmen, the best sailors ... This attraction for the water has
never left me. Somehow it's the perfect metaphor for your ability to establish your authority
over the world while maintaining your own untouchable separation from it."

Everything changed when Bruner was 12. "My father died of liver cancer and my mother
never really came to terms with it," he says. "She went into a period of prolonged wandering.
We moved from place to place, and I went from school to school. It's hard to say what sense I
made of it. On one level, I just took it to be normal and got on with my life but on another,
subconscious level, I think I understood she was overwhelmed by grief. What I think I did
learn, though, was the importance of context in communication. It's not so much the words
and syntax we use, but the way we interact that defines how we understand something."

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As with many families in which one parent dies prematurely, Bruner's never fully regained its
former intimacy and, with his sister Alice getting married young, he learned to make a virtue
of his self-sufficiency. "My mother's real legacy was to make me rebellious and
autonomous," he says, "though I'm not sure how my father would have felt about my leftwing
political leanings. He was an old-fashioned kind of tough guy, who worshipped Theodore
Roosevelt. I loved and respected him, but I suspect we might have fallen out if he had lived.

No one could accuse Bruner of not walking the walk. "I tried to sign up for the Republicans
in the Spanish Civil War, and even went along to the Chinese consulate to enlist in the Sixth
Army in their struggle against Japan. I can still remember my shame at being told, 'Mr
Bruner, we Chinese do not have manpower problems'."
At the start of the second world war, he tried to join the US military, but was turned down
because of his poor eyesight and conscripted instead into the Office for Strategic Studies, the
equivalent of MI5. "We began by studying foreign radio broadcasts," he remembers, "but our
main task came in 1944 when we were sent in behind the invasion force on D-Day to
determine whether liberated French villages could be trusted. It was a tricky time; there were
still Vichy sympathisers but the Free French hated the idea that some Yanks were
interrogating their people. Still, it was a useful lesson in learning that people don't always
mean what they say."

Once the war was over, Bruner's academic life proceded more smoothly than his personal
one. He divorced his first wife after his return from Europe and has been married twice since.
"You know," he sighs, "you think you meet people by chance, but when you look back on
your life you realise there was nothing random going on at all. We're all just trying to resolve
our lives as best we can." He pauses. "And that's all I want to say on that."

And regrets? "My critics have always accused me of ignoring potentially interesting areas of
research," he says. "And they've got a point. The whole field of cognitive development was
just so new, so exciting, and so open when we started that you could only do so much at any
one time, and you just headed off in the directions that seemed most interesting. So,
undoubtedly, there are bits I would like to go back and look at more thoroughly."

Curriculum vitae

Age: 91

Job: Research professor of psychology, senior research fellow in law, New York University

Books: A Study of Thinking; Studies in Cognitive Growth; Acts of Meaning; The Culture of
Education

Likes: sailing

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/mar/27/academicexperts.highereducationprofile

Jerome Bruner and the process of

education
Jerome Bruner and the process of education. Jerome
Bruner has made a profound contribution to our
appreciation of the process of education and to the
development of curriculum theory. We explore his work
and draw out some important lessons for informal
educators and those concerned with the practice of lifelong
learning.
contents: introduction jerome s. bruner his life the process of education the culture of
education conclusion further reading and references links

It is surely the case that schooling is only one small part of how a culture inducts the young
into its canonical ways. Indeed, schooling may even be at odds with a cultures other ways of
inducting the young into the requirements of communal living. What has become
increasingly clear is that education is not just about conventional school matters like
curriculum or standards or testing. What we resolve to do in school only makes sense when
considered in the broader context of what the society intends to accomplish through its
educational investment in the young. How one conceives of education, we have finally come
to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of culture and its aims, professed and
otherwise.(Jerome S. Bruner 1996: ix-x)

Jerome S. Bruner (1915- ) is one of the best known and influential psychologists of the
twentieth century. He was one of the key figures in the so called cognitive revolution but
it is the field of education that his influence has been especially felt. His books The Process
of Education and Towards a Theory of Instruction have been widely read and become
recognized as classics, and his work on the social studies programme Man: A Course of
Study (MACOS) in the mid-1960s is a landmark in curriculum development. More recently
Bruner has come to be critical of the cognitive revolution and has looked to the building of
a cultural psychology that takes proper account of the historical and social context of
participants. In his 1996 book The Culture of Education these arguments were developed
with respect to schooling (and education more generally). How one conceives of education,
he wrote, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of the
culture and its aims, professed and otherwise (Bruner 1996: ix-x).

Jerome S. Bruner life

Bruner was born in New York City and later educated at Duke University and Harvard (from
which he was awarded a PhD in 1947). During World War II, Bruner worked as a social
psychologist exploring propaganda public opinion and social attitudes for U.S. Army
intelligence. After obtaining his PhD he became a member of faculty, serving as professor of
psychology, as well as cofounder and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies.

Beginning in the 1940s, Jerome Bruner, along with Leo Postman, worked on the ways in
which needs, motivations, and expectations (or mental sets) influence perception.
Sometimes dubbed as the New Look, they explored perception from a functional orientation
(as against a process to separate from the world around it). In addition to this work, Bruner
began to look at the role of strategies in the process of human categorization, and more
generally, the development of human cognition. This concern with cognitive psychology led
to a particular interest in the cognitive development of children (and their modes of
representation) and just what the appropriate forms of education might be.

From the late 1950s on Jerome Bruner became interested in schooling in the USA and was
invited to chair an influential ten day meeting of scholars and educators at Woods Hole on
Cape Cod in 1959 (under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences and the National
Science Foundation). One result was Bruners landmark book The Process of Education
(1960). It developed some of the key themes of that meeting and was an crucial factor in the
generation of a range of educational programmes and experiments in the 1960s. Jerome
Bruner subsequently joined a number of key panels and committees (including the
Presidents Advisory Panel of Education). In 1963, he received the Distinguished Scientific
Award from the American Psychological Association, and in 1965 he served as its president.

Jerome S. Bruner also became involved in the design and implementation of the influential
MACOS project (which sought to produce a comprehensive curriculum drawing upon the
behavioural sciences). The curriculum famously aimed to address three questions:

What is uniquely human about human beings?

How did they get that way?

How could they be made more so? (Bruner 1976: 74)

The project involved a number of young researchers, including Howard Gardner, who
subsequently have made an impact on educational thinking and practice. MACOS was
attacked by conservatives (especially the cross-cultural nature of the materials). It was also
difficult to implement requiring a degree of sophistication and learning on the part of
teachers, and ability and motivation on the part of students. The educational tide had begun to
move away from more liberal and progressive thinkers like Jerome Bruner.

In the 1960s Jerome Bruner developed a theory of cognitive growth. His approach (in
contrast to Piaget) looked to environmental and experiential factors. Bruner suggested that
intellectual ability developed in stages through step-by-step changes in how the mind is used.
Bruners thinking became increasingly influenced by writers like Lev Vygotsky and he began
to be critical of the intrapersonal focus he had taken, and the lack of attention paid to social
and political context. In the early 1970s Bruner left Harvard to teach for several years at the
university of Oxford. There he continued his research into questions of agency in infants and
began a series of explorations of childrens language. He returned to Harvard as a visiting
professor in 1979 and then, two years later, joined the faculty of the new School for Social
Research in New York City. He became critical of the cognitive revolution and began to
argue for the building of a cultural psychology. This cultural turn was then reflected in his
work on education most especially in his 1996 book: The Culture of Education.

The process of education

The Process of Education (1960) was a landmark text. It had a direct impact on policy
formation in the United States and influenced the thinking and orientation of a wide group of
teachers and scholars, Its view of children as active problem-solvers who are ready to explore
difficult subjects while being out of step with the dominant view in education at that time,
struck a chord with many. It was a surprise, Jerome Bruner was later to write (in the preface
to the 1977 edition), that a book expressing so structuralist a view of knowledge and so
intuitionist an approach to the process of knowing should attract so much attention in
America, where empiricism had long been the dominant voice and learning theory its
amplifier (ibid.: vii).

Four key themes emerge out of the work around The Process of Education (1960: 11-16):

The role of structure in learning and how it may be made central in teaching. The
approach taken should be a practical one. The teaching and learning of structure, rather than
simply the mastery of facts and techniques, is at the center of the classic problem of
transfer If earlier learning is to render later learning easier, it must do so by providing a
general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later
are made as clear as possible (ibid.: 12).

Readiness for learning. Here the argument is that schools have wasted a great deal of
peoples time by postponing the teaching of important areas because they are deemed too
difficult.

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually
honest form to any child at any stage of development. (ibid.: 33)

This notion underpins the idea of the spiral curriculum A curriculum as it develops
should revisit this basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them until the student has grasped the
full formal apparatus that goes with them (ibid.: 13).

Intuitive and analytical thinking. Intuition (the intellectual technique of arriving and
plausible but tentative formulations without going through the analytical steps by which such
formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions ibid.: 13) is a much neglected
but essential feature of productive thinking. Here Bruner notes how experts in different fields
appear to leap intuitively into a decision or to a solution to a problem (ibid.: 62) a
phenomenon that Donald Schn was to explore some years later and looked to how
teachers and schools might create the conditions for intuition to flourish.

Motives for learning. Ideally, Jerome Bruner writes, interest in the material to be learned is
the best stimulus to learning, rather than such external goals as grades or later competitive
advantage (ibid.: 14). In an age of increasing spectatorship, motives for learning must be
kept from going passive they must be based as much as possible upon the arousal of
interest in what there is be learned, and they must be kept broad and diverse in expression
(ibid.: 80).

Bruner was to write two postscripts to The Process of Education: Towards a theory of
instruction (1966) and The Relevance of Education (1971). In these books Bruner put forth
his evolving ideas about the ways in which instruction actually affects the mental models of
the world that students construct, elaborate on and transform (Gardner 2001: 93). In the first
book the various essays deal with matters such as patterns of growth, the will to learn, and on
making and judging (including some helpful material around evaluation). Two essays are of
particular interest his reflections on MACOS (see above), and his notes on a theory of
instruction. The latter essay makes the case for taking into account questions of
predisposition, structure, sequence, and reinforcement in preparing curricula and
programmes. He makes the case for education as a knowledge-getting process:

To instruct someone is not a matter of getting him to commit results to mind. Rather, it is
to teach him to participate in the process that makes possible the establishment of knowledge.
We teach a subject not to produce little living libraries on that subject, but rather to get a
student to think mathematically for himself, to consider matters as an historian does, to take
part in the process of knowledge-getting. Knowing is a process not a product. (1966: 72)

The essays in The Relevance of Education (1971) apply his theories to infant development.
The culture of education

Jerome Bruners reflections on education in The Culture of Education (1996) show the
impact of the changes in his thinking since the 1960s. He now placed his work within a
thorough appreciation of culture: culture shapes the mind it provides us with the toolkit by
which we construct not only our worlds but our very conception of our selves and our
powers (ibid.: x). This orientation presupposes that human mental activity is neither solo
nor conducted unassisted, even when it goes on inside the head (ibid.: xi). It also takes
Bruner well beyond the confines of schooling.

Conclusion

Jerome S. Bruner has had a profound effect on education and upon those researchers and
students he has worked with. Howard Gardner has commented:

Jerome Bruner is not merely one of the foremost educational thinkers of the era; he is also an
inspired learner and teacher. His infectious curiosity inspires all who are not completely
jaded. Individuals of every age and background are invited to join in. Logical analyses,
technical dissertations, rich and wide knowledge of diverse subject matters, asides to an ever
wider orbit of information, intuitive leaps, pregnant enigmas pour forth from his indefatigable
mouth and pen. In his words, Intellectual activity is anywhere and everywhere, whether at
the frontier of knowledge or in a third-grade classroom. To those who know him, Bruner
remains the Compleat Educator in the flesh (Gardner 2001: 94)

To be completed

Further reading and references

Bruner, J (1960) The Process of Education, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 97
+ xxvi pages. Rightly recognized as a twentieth century educational classic, this book
argues that schooling and curricula should be constructed to foster intuitive graspings.
Bruner makes the case for a spiral curriculum. The second edition, 1977, has a a new
preface that reassesses the book.

Bruner, J. S. (1966) Toward a Theory of Instruction, Cambridge, Mass.: Belkapp Press. 176 +
x pages.

Bruner, J. S. (1971) The Relevance of Education, New York: Norton. In this book Bruner
applied his theories to infant development.

Bruner, J. (1996) The Culture of Education, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
224 + xvi pages.

References

Bruner, J. (1973) Going Beyond the Information Given, New York: Norton.

Bruner, J. (1983) Childs Talk: Learning to Use Language, New York: Norton.

Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. (1990) Acts of Meaning Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J., Goodnow, J., & Austin, A. (1956) A Study of Thinking, New York: Wiley.

Gardner, H. (2001) Jerome S. Bruner in J. A. Palmer (ed.) Fifty Modern Thinkers on

Education. From Piaget to the present, London: Routledge.

Links

To cite this article: 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-
education/ Retrieved: enter date]

Mark K. Smith 2002

http://infed.org/mobi/jerome-bruner-and-the-process-of-education/

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Jerome Bruner (19152016)

Patricia Marks Greenfield

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Psychologist who shaped ideas about perception, cognition and education.

Subject terms:
Human behaviour
Psychology

Jerome Seymour Bruner helped to launch the cognitive revolution in psychology the shift
from focusing on how stimuli or rewards provoke behaviours (behaviourism) to trying to
understand the workings of the mind.
AP

Bruner, who died on 5 June, aged 100, was born blind in New York City in 1915. His
sight was restored by cataract operations when he was two. In 1937, he earned a degree in
psychology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He received master's and doctoral
degrees in psychology from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1939 and
1941. After working in military intelligence during the Second World War, he took a faculty
position at Harvard in 1945.

Bruner once noted that during his two years of blindness, he had constructed a visual world in
his mind. His early experiences may explain why, in the 1940s and 1950s, he sought to
demonstrate how perception is not just a bottom-up process controlled by the senses, but also
a top-down process controlled by the mind.

In collaborative experiments conducted at Harvard, Bruner revealed how certain mental

factors influence visual perception. In one study, for instance, he demonstrated that ten-year-
old children overestimate the size of bigger coins and underestimate the size of smaller coins,
and that poor children overestimate the size of the larger coins more than affluent ones do (J.
S. Bruner et al. J. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol. 42, 3344; 1947). His work inspired a new
approach to the study of perception that became known as the new look in perception.

Bruner transformed perception from a stimulus-dependent response into something that

involved mental processing. But he wanted to study cognition more directly. With
psychologists Jacqueline Goodnow and George Austin, he performed innovative experiments
that explored how people infer concepts and categories (for instance, of colour and shape).
Their 1956 book A Study of Thinking was crucial in ushering in the cognitive revolution.

Bruner's 1960 book, The Process of Education brought the cognitive revolution to
educational thinking in the United States and elsewhere. His concepts of the development of
representational capacities, suggested that ideas should be communicated to students using
actions, icons or symbols, in that order, and depending on their age. In 1963, after my first
year in graduate school at Harvard, Bruner arranged for me to go to Senegal to study culture
and cognitive development. Because his book had tightly linked schooling with cognitive
development, Bruner was delighted when my data from Senegal showed that various
measures of such development depended on whether or not children had attended school, not
just their age.

I had first encountered Bruner during my first year of university, when he lectured in one of
my courses. In his lectures, he described the concept of human intentionality the ability of
the mind to be proactive and to represent future goals as another challenge to
behaviourism. When I returned to Harvard as a research fellow in 1968, Bruner was studying
cognitive development in infancy. Intentionality was now central to his thinking. Crucially,
he observed that infants only a few weeks or months old have intentions and goals, even
before they are able to act on them.

In 1972, Bruner sailed his boat across the Atlantic to take up the first Watts Professorship of
Psychology at the University of Oxford, UK. There, he shifted focus from 'intentional action'
to 'intentional interaction'. In 1975, Michael Scaife and Bruner reported that starting at eight
months old, most infants will follow an adult's gaze when the adult turns to look at something
(M. Scaife & J. S. Bruner Nature 253, 265266; 1975). The pair called this phenomenon joint
visual attention because it established a common focus between adult and infant. It has since
become widely recognized as an essential social mechanism for guiding infants to link words
to objects in language acquisition.

Bruner returned to the United States in 1980. First at the New School for Social Research in
New York, then at New York University, he explored people's propensity to tell stories. He
argued that unlike logic, narrative thought is universal. Once again, he was trying to expand
cognitive psychology to encompass human experience. His 1986 book on narrative, Actual
Minds, Possible Worlds, has more than 14,100 citations. Applying ideas about narrative to
the law, Bruner started working with legal scholar Anthony Amsterdam at the New York
University School of Law. Their 2000 book Minding the Law describes how courts rely on
storytelling and how the stories change the way we understand the law and ourselves.

Jerry made seminal contributions to an astonishing number of fields each a stop on the
road to finding out what makes us human. Beginning in the 1960s, computer simulations
became the model of the human mind in cognitive psychology, with researchers trying to
simulate how humans solve problems, form concepts, comprehend language and learn. But
reducing humans to computers was antithetical to Jerry's humanistic perspective.

Given this, it was surprising that computer scientist Alan Kay, the designer of what became
the Macintosh graphical user interface, turned up more than 30 years ago on Bruner's
Manhattan doorstep with a gift of a Macintosh computer. Jerry's ideas of representing
information through actions, icons and symbols, central to his theory of cognitive
development, had inspired Kay to get users (even children) to act (through a computer
mouse) on icons, enabling the use of an abstract set of symbols (computer program). This
was the foundation for what became the Macintosh interface.

Jerry had a towering intellect and an insatiable curiosity. When I returned from Senegal with
my data, he made me feel as if I had done the most exciting research in the world. His
reaction fuelled the rest of my career and has greatly influenced my own mentoring.

Author information
Affiliations
1. Patricia Marks Greenfield is distinguished professor of psychology at
the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Jerome Bruner was her
teacher, mentor, colleague and lifelong friend.

Corresponding author
Correspondence to:

Patricia Marks Greenfield

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1915-
American psychologist and educator whose principal areas of study are in the fields of
cognitive psychology and language development.

Jerome S. Bruner was born in New York City and educated at Duke University. During
World War II, Bruner worked on the subject of propaganda and popular attitudes for U.S.
Army intelligence at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters in France. He obtained
his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1947, after which he became a member of the faculty,
serving as professor of psychology, as well as cofounder and director of the Center for
Cognitive Studies. In 1972 Bruner left Harvard to teach for several years at Oxford
University. He returned to Harvard as a visiting professor in 1979 and two years later joined
the faculty of the new School for Social Research in New York City. Bruner's early work in
cognitive psychology focused on the sequences of decisions made by subjects as part of their
problem-solving strategies in experimental situations.

Beginning in the 1940s, Bruner, together with his colleague Leo Postman, did important work
on the ways in which needs, motivations, and expectations (or "mental sets") affect
perception. Their approach, sometimes referred to as the "New Look," contrasted a
functional perspective with the prevailing "formal" one that treated perception as a self-
sufficient process to be considered separately from the world around it. When Bruner and
Postman showed young children toys and plain blocks of equal height, the children,
expecting toys to be larger than blocks, thought the toys were taller. The toys also seemed to
increase in size when the researchers made them unavailable. In further experiments
involving mental sets, the two scientists used an instrument called a tachistoscope to show
their subjects brief views of playing cards, including some nonstandard cards, such as a red
ace of

Jerome S. Bruner (Archives of the History of American Psychology. Reproduced with

permission.)

spades. As long as the subjects were not alerted to the presence of the abnormal cards, almost
none saw them.

Bruner's work in cognitive psychology led to an interest in the cognitive development of

children and related issues of education, and in the 1960s he developed a theory of cognitive
growth. Bruner's theories, which approach development from a different angle than those of
Jean Piaget, focus on the environmental and experiential factors influencing each
individual's specific development pattern. His argument that human intellectual ability
develops in stages from infancy to adulthood through step-by-step progress in how the mind
is used has influenced experimental psychologists and educators throughout the world.
Bruner is particularly interested in language and other representations of human thought. In
one of his best-known papers, Bruner defines three modes of representing, or "symbolizing,"
human thought. The enactive mode involves human motor capacities and includes activities
such as using tools. The iconic mode pertains to sensory capacities. Finally, the symbolic
mode involves reasoning, and is exemplified by language, which plays a central role in
Bruner's theories of cognition and development. He has called it "a means, not only for
representing experience, but also for transforming it."

Bruner's view that the student should become an active participant in the educational process
has been widely accepted. In The Process of Education (1960) he asserts that, given the
appropriate teaching method, every child can successfully study any subject at any stage of
his or her intellectual development. Bruner's later work involves the study of the pre-speech
developmental processes and linguistic communication skills in children. The Relevance of
Education (1971) applied his theories to infant development. Bruner was appointed a visiting
member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. In 1963, he received the
Distinguished Scientific Award from the American Psychological Association, and in 1965
he served as its president. Bruner's expertise in the field of education led to his appointment
to the President's Advisory Panel of Education, and he has also advised agencies of the
United Nations. Bruner's books include A Study of Thinking (1956), On Knowing: Essays For
the Left Hand (1962), On Knowing (1964), Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966), Processes
of Cognitive Growth (1968), Beyond the Information Given (1973), and Child's Talk (1983).

See also Child development; Cognitive development; Developmental psychology

Further Reading
Bruner, Jerome S. In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography. New York: Harper & Row,
1983.

Read more: Jerome S. Bruner - Social Perception, Development, and Cognitive - JRank Articles
http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/98/Jerome-S-Bruner.html#ixzz4wzSv5p10

http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/98/Jerome-S-Bruner.html

Jerome Bruner and the cultural

construction of emotions
Posted on April 22, 2012 by Jules Evans

Professor Jerome Bruner

I just finished a fascinating small book by Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner (thats him on
the right), called Acts of Meaning. Although it was published in 1990, I dont think its
widely known among lay-people, and I think its ideas are worth briefly discussing because
they offer an interesting critique of cognitive science, including Cognitive Behavioural
Therapy (CBT), and a call for it to become more culturally aware.

Let me say at the outset that CBT helped me enormously and that what follows is not a
rejection of CBT but an exploration of how it could be expanded to include more from the
arts and humanities.

Bruner was one of the pioneers of the cognitive revolution, which transformed psychology
from the 1950s on. The cognitive revolution was a rebellion against behaviourism, which
insisted that all human behaviour could be described by a very simple process: Stimulus
Response. There was no need, behaviourists said, to inquire into human thoughts or beliefs or
values. We simply respond to external stimuli, and change our automatic responses
accordingly, like automatons, or rats in a laboratory.

The psychologists of the cognitive revolution rebelled against this view of human
psychology, and countered that humans internal thoughts and values play a powerful role in
defining how we experience reality, how we feel about it, and how we respond to it. Between
the Stimulus and Response lies a persons beliefs and values and we can change our beliefs
and become the authors of ourselves.

This, of course, is a very different view of humanity. We go from being helpless automatons
passively reacting to stimuli, to autonomous beings, actively creating meaning from our
experience, able to choose how we respond to lifes challenges.

Part of the cognitive revolution is Cognitive

Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which was invented by Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck in the
1950s. Both Ellis and Beck were inspired by their reading of ancient Greek philosophy,
particularly of the Stoics, who declared that humans create their experience of the world
through their beliefs. As the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote:
Life itself is but what you deem it.

The Stoics were the vanguard of the cognitive revolution, 2000 years before it happened.
Humans, they insisted, were disturbed not by events, but by their opinions about them, as
Epictetus wrote. Therefore, to heal yourself of emotional disorders, you should simply
become aware of your beliefs, see how they cause your emotions, and then change your
beliefs if you decide they are false and irrational. Eventually, the Stoics believe, we will be
able to perfectly match our beliefs to external reality (or God), and nothing that ever happens
will ever upset us.

The therapeutic process is, the Stoics believe, entirely individual. We cant expect society to
change its foolish ways. Rather, the lone Stoic heroically separates themselves from their
toxic culture, and makes of themselves a perfect little fortress of calm rationality amid the
irrationality of their society. CBT might not believe in God, but apart from that, this is pretty
much a description of CBTs therapeutic approach. We must rationally examine our beliefs,
and reject any that are false, until we become perfectly adapted to reality and nothing truly
upsets us anymore. As in Stoicism, this recovery process is entirely individual.

Clearly the Stoics got something right our emotions do follow our beliefs, and if we change
our beliefs we change our emotions. Realising this helped me personally to overcome
depression. But perhaps both CBT and Stoicism are too individualist, and ignore the
importance of culture both in emotional disturbances and in the recovery process. Other
Greco-Roman philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, agreed with the Stoics that our emotions
are caused by our beliefs. But they had a much keener sense of how our beliefs are shaped by
our culture and political system. So the process of recovery is not just individual it is also
cultural and political.

From meaning-makers to information-processors

 Certainly, Jerome Bruner argues that the
cognitive revolution went wrong, and that cognitive science in general lost a sense of how
our beliefs are shaped by culture. Bruner warns that the cognitive revolution went wrong
when it moved from the idea of humans as meaning-makers to the idea of humans as
information-processors. The computational model of the human mind become paramount in
cognitive science.

This shift, he writes, had enormous consequences for psychology. According to the
computational model of the mind, there is an objective reality out there which the mind
simply has to process correctly. Beliefs can be logically analysed for their truth-content, and
either accepted or rejected.

Its very much a positivist, scientific rationalist view of the human mind. Cognitive science
has shown an indifference or even intolerance for peoples cultural beliefs about the universe,
or what cognitive scientists dismiss as folk psychology things like a persons religious
beliefs. Look, for example, at the scorn cognitive scientists like Daniel Dennett or Steven
Pinker show for religious beliefs. Religious people are simply faulty information-processors
with outdated operating systems. They need to be upgraded to Scientific Rationalism 2.0,
then they will see the world clearly and feel less emotional disturbance.

In many ways, CBT also has a computational model of the mind. If youre suffering from an
emotional disorder, its the fault of your thinking errors. You are processing information
incorrectly catastrophising, say, or discounting the positive, or jumping to conclusions. You
just need to rid yourself of these thinking errors, like someone listening to a radio who tunes
it to get rid of static (to use a metaphor from the famous CBT expert David Burns). Reality is
out there to be picked up correctly, like a radio broadcast, as long as our information-
processing equipment works correctly.

Eventually our beliefs will perfectly match with reality, and we will be free of any emotional
disturbance. And this recovery process in CBT is individual, as it is in Stoicism. It doesnt
matter what your culture believes. We can create an island of perfect rationality amid the sea
of human foolishness so CBT and Stoicism insist.

No man is an island

There are several potential problems with such an approach. Firstly, it ignores the fact that
our beliefs can impact on social reality, and become self-fulfilling prophecies. For example,
we may strongly believe that other people dont like us. This will make us less trusting and
more wary of other people, more quick to take offence. And that, in turn, will mean others
react to us badly. So a persons negative beliefs about their environment might become
accurate. The question then becomes not Is this true? but Is this something I should care
about? and Is this something I can change? It becomes an ethical and cultural question
rather than an information-processing one. Our beliefs exist in a dynamic relationship with
our social environment, feeding off each other.

For example, a young black man might feel paranoid in British society. They might feel like
other people are judging them negatively and out to get them. Orthodox CBT would simply
say this is a thinking error. But it might not be! They might genuinely exist in a racist culture,
which fears them, thereby feeding their own sense of alienation and anger, thereby feeding
their societys fear of them, and so on. In which case, the therapeutic approach becomes more
existential: if my evaluation of my society is true to some extent, what can I do about it?
How can I shape a wise response and transform this situation?

The computational model found in CBT is completely culture-blind. It shows no interest in

how a persons beliefs are shaped by their culture. It asks only if they are true or not. So if a
Rastafari hears voices, for example, conventional CBT would show no interest in how that
experience might be shaped by that persons culture. It would expect that person instead to
upgrade their operating system to Scientific Rationalism 2.0 (though some new CBT is much
more culturally aware than this, as I discuss here).

CBT also ignores the crucial role of narrative in shaping a persons experience. It only asks,
is this belief here in the present moment true or false. But we shape our experience into
narratives, into a story. And the recovery from mental illness is an incredibly important part
of that story. We are not simply information-processors, we are story-makers.

And, again, this is why culture is so important we take the narratives we use to shape our
experience from our culture. Our culture is a cupboard, as it were, of available narratives for
peoples lives, which they try on and wear. A good psychologist, Bruner writes, should be as
much a sociologist or cultural anthropologist, or even a literary critic, as a scientist. They
should be alive to the narrative structures a person uses
for their experience.

This doesnt mean that anything goes, that a person

can believe whatever they want about reality without
asking if their beliefs are plausible. We are part of a
shared public culture, and need to fit our narrative into
that culture although we also shape that culture and
change it with our personal narrative, as Martin Luther
King did. We dont necessarily have to adapt to our
cultures values. We can choose not to adapt but
instead to push back, thereby creating new narratives
for the people in our culture to follow.

The process of therapy, in other words, may be political as much as individual. If your
cultures values are making you sick, you can try and make yourself a perfect island of
rationality, like the Stoics suggest. Or you can find a group of people who share your new
values, and work together to support each other, like a lifeboat in a sea (this is how the
Epicureans approached therapy). Or you can go a step further, and actively try and change
your culture, challenge those beliefs and values that you think are toxic, and shape it into
something better.
Of course this is quite a lot to ask of therapy! We already have a hugely over-worked CBT
services in the UKs NHS, trying to help millions of people quickly. I guess we dont want
them all to turn into Marxist sociologists. Nonetheless, Bruner makes some good points, and I
very much recommend his book.

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