Chapter 4
From Educational Theory to
Educational Practice
It gave me a very good feel for what school looked like to children.
(Bruner 1980, p. 117)
We are being forced, finally, to recognize that tradition and history,
institutional rigidities and individual predilections, are as important in the
conducting of education as technical insights into the learning process.
(Bruner 2006, p. x)
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Education is both a domain for scholarship and a practical enterprise. While
theories may be lofty, to have impact they must be, as we say, implementable.
There must be some way to put them into practice. Indeed, one of the
appeals of The Process of Education was that it appeared to have direct and
immediate implications for educational practice whether in the design of
curricula, in the pedagogical practices involved in teaching that curriculum,
or in the assessment of learning and understanding. These were combined
in an ambitious curriculum innovation project called ‘Man: A Course of
Study’, or MACOS, for short.
MACOS – Man: A Course of Study
Writing The Process of Education had given Bruner the opportunity to take a
‘fresh look’ at education, but a logical next step was to see if one could do
anything about improving it. Bruner was given a two-year leave of absence
by his Harvard Dean to undertake to develop a new curriculum that would
embody the principles worked out at the Woods Hole conference. The
goal was to improve the teaching of social studies in the middle grades by
developing a new curriculum that combined recent developments in the
sciences of anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary biology in a course
on the nature of man as a species. The focus of the course was on ‘What is
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From Educational Theory to Educational Practice
43
uniquely human about human beings?’ and ‘How did human beings get that
way?’ ‘What could be done to make them more so?’ The goals of the unit
of study were, first and foremost, to give pupils respect for and confidence
in the powers of their own minds, the power to think about the human
condition, to develop a set of models for understanding the social world,
and to show that human evolution is an ongoing process (see Bruner 1996c,
Chapter 4). Notice how the goal of getting the students to think was seen
as more important than, and indeed, the key to the learning of content
knowledge whether in anthropology, psychology, or biology. Peter Dow,
a participant in the project and later its principal administrator, drawing
on the vast archives from the project, has written a brilliant and detailed
history of the project from its inception, through its development to its
impact. The aim, as Dow (1991) put it, ‘was to construct a new model for
social studies education that would change the existing pattern’ (p. 73) and
‘close the gap between intellectual discovery as it occurs on the cutting edge
of scholarship, and learning as it occurs in a growing young mind’ (p. 273).
In collaboration with experts, teachers, teacher trainers, and graduate
students Bruner developed, extensively piloted with groups of children,
and revised course materials, films and texts dealing with the life cycle
of different non-human animal species, including baboons, as well as two
‘traditional’ human societies, Netsilik Eskimos and Kalahari Bushmen. The
goal was to explore what was distinctive about humans as a species and
to explore the relationship between environment, culture, and behavior.
Topics such as why Eskimos ate raw meat were particularly appealing to
children and drew both emotion and debate. Topics that did not work were
dropped from the program. One such unit of instruction, the ‘containers
unit’ that ‘challenged children to create from simple materials durable
carrying devices that would allow safe transport to and from school of two
raw eggs and a cup of water, failed to produce a measurable impact on
children’s thinking about technology, even though it was hugely popular
with students’, quipped Petter Dow (1991, p. 114).
Language, of course, was one of the things that make humans unique
and so was part of the curriculum. However, teaching children what made
language special proved to be unexpectedly difficult, nigh unto impossible.
This was 1966, shortly after Chomsky had defended the claim that what
was unique about humans was their innate grammatical competence. The
grammar, namely rules for turning separate words into sentences, was to be
distinguished from the semantics, the meaning that sentences expressed.
Thus ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ was a grammatical sentence
even if it did not mean anything. Children simply could not grasp that that
was a sentence while they were quite willing to accept ungrammatical strings
such as ‘The man hat has’ as a sentence because they knew what it meant.
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44
Critical Exposition of Bruner’s Work
Grammar as a metalinguistic concept was too difficult and so had to be
approached in another way.6 In this other way a series of simple sentences
was written on the board and the children were encouraged to read one
word from each column to make up new sentences.
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The
A
The
My
man
boy
dog
father
ate
stole
chased
skidded
his
a
my
the
lunch
bike
cat
car
Some sentences such as ‘My father ate a car’ were undoubtedly odd but
by this means children were able to grasp the notion of the grammar as
composed of parts such as nouns, verbs, and modifiers, and to think about
what a language was (Bruner 1971, pp. 73–4). Yet, despite the heroic efforts
of teachers, these ten-year-olds were reluctant to grant that the sounds made
by other species were any less ‘linguistic’ than those made by humans. Nor
did they easily shed their anthropomorphism, identifying easily with the
young of all other species including salmon, herring gulls, and baboons
and expressing a willingness to project human feelings on to them.
The research was indeed exemplary. It combined the best of current
knowledge and advances in the human sciences, it had clear goals and
appropriate means of assessment, it was tried out with the types of students
that it was designed to teach, and teachers and educators were taught how
to use the program and how to introduce it into their schools. It involved
a gargantuan effort. Bruner devoted his two-year leave of absence from
Harvard to the development of the program, assembled a staff of over
60 people to try out the new curriculum over two summers, conducted
systematic appraisals of the program and, after several attempts delivered
this into a publisher’s hand. In its final form it included nine teacher’s
guides, 30 children’s booklets, 16 films, four records, five filmstrips, three
games, 54 artifact cards, two large maps, three large charts, 11 posters and
a ‘take-apart seal’ (Dow 1991, p. 134).
Dissemination of the program was almost as complex as developing it. Lectures and workshops, demonstrations and word-of-mouth contacts spread
the program, trained the teachers, and developed materials even before
publishers came on board. The program was enthusiastically received by
reform-minded educators and by 1970 there were 918 teachers using the
program with more than 22,000 pupils. The American Educational Research
Association together with the American Educational Publishers Institute
presented Bruner with an award for ‘one of the most important efforts of
our time to relate research findings and theory in educational psychology
to the development of new and better instructional material’ and praised it
as ‘enormously suggestive of what we could and should be doing to equip
the instructional process adequately’ (Dow 1991, p. 135).
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From Educational Theory to Educational Practice
45
Yet, by and large, it failed not only to survive but also to have a lasting
impact on schooling. Schooling has tended to revert to the old standard
methods of teaching and testing. Why? There are many answers that I
shall examine when we come to discuss the reception of Bruner’s work.
But in a word, although progressively minded educators enthusiastically
received and adopted the new curriculum, it was treated skeptically by a
conservative, indeed, a reactionary public and it became a battleground
on which governing officials and policy makers fought their internecine
battles.
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Scaffolding: Explorations in Pedagogy
If one can describe a trajectory in Bruner’s thinking from his efforts in
curriculum development to his later work, it was his increasing attention
to what actually happened in the instructional processes. He set out to
describe ‘the close-textured pattern of reciprocity about the intentional
states of one’s partners’ (Bruner 1996, p. 182). He would later describe this
reciprocity in terms of intersubjectivity. But at the end of his curriculum
efforts, he looked for the analysis in terms of the actual pedagogical moves
available to the teacher as instructor. It was a kind of teaching by modeling,
showing and telling, that he called scaffolding.
At the time that Bruner was writing, the perspective on pedagogy, like
the perspective on curriculum, was still essentially teacher-centered and
teacher-controlled. It was a deliberate attempt to bring the behavior of the
learner into compliance with the ideas and goals of the teacher. Of course,
what else is instruction but the attempt to shape a learner’s habits, attitudes
and beliefs? But, unlike some of the proposals Bruner examined later, he
saw instruction as essentially the attempt to bring the learner up to the
adult’s standard by providing a framework for the child’s learning.
Scaffolding was the application of an engineering model to pedagogical
practice. The teacher constructed a scaffold that could be used to support
the efforts of the learner to construct his or her own understandings. Once
complete, the scaffold could be removed and the learner’s own mental
structures would sustain understanding and enquiry. With David Wood of
Nottingham University, Bruner studied the process involved when an adult
tutored three- to five-year-old children on how to assemble a complex pyramid puzzle. Rather than teach in the conventional sense of telling and
explaining the adult tutor would ‘scaffold’ the efforts by carrying out the
parts of the task that the child could not quite successfully manage for itself.
As the learner mastered parts of the task, the adult would give control of
those aspects back to the learner. Ultimately, the child could manage the
entire process by him or herself.
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46
Critical Exposition of Bruner’s Work
These interactive structures Bruner re-described as ‘formats’ and found
them not only in situations with a specific pedagogical intent, as in the
scaffolding context for teaching, but also in the routines that parents engage
in with their children, routines important for language learning and cultural
learning more generally. A format is a cultural routine in a conventionalized
setting in which parent and child take on interactive roles to complete a
task or play a game. One such format he studied in more detail was that
of ‘book reading’ in which the mother pointed out and named pictures in
a book, a practice progressively taken over by the year-old child. Here is
Bruner’s description:
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What a strikingly stable routine it was. Each step of the way, the mother
incorporated whatever competencies the child had already developed –
to be clued by pointing, to appreciate that sounds ‘stood for’ things
and events, etc. The mother remained the constant throughout. Thereby
she was his scaffold – calling his attention, making a query, providing
an answering label if he lacked one, and confirming his offer of one,
whatever it might be. As he gained competence, she would raise her
criterion. Almost any vocalization the child might offer at the start would
be accepted. But each time the child came closer to the standard form,
she would hold out for it. What was changing was, of course, what the
mother expected in response – and that, of course, was ‘fine-tuned’ by
her ‘theory’ of the child’s capacities. When he switched from babbling
to offering shorter vocalization as ‘labels’ (still quite nonstandard), she
would no longer accept babbles but would insist on the shorter ‘names’.
Then finally, sure that her son knew the standard label, she would shift
to delivering her ‘What’s that?’ with a falling intonation on the second
word and a special smile to distinguish a rhetorical from a nonrhetorical
question. And so it went. (1983a, pp. 171–2; see also Bruner 1983b).
Scaffolding learning, as Bruner acknowledged, was what apprenticeships
traded on. A novice would be given small tasks at the margins of a complex
task and, as mastery increased, be given greater and greater responsibility
for more and more complex tasks. Apprenticeships had long been studied
in traditional craft societies but the applicability of these methods to education in a modern industrial society had been largely overlooked. More
recent studies by Greenfield and Lave (1982), Lave and Wenger (1991)
and Rogoff (1990; Rogoff, Mutusov, and White 1996) have not only shown
the importance of these methods to contemporary schooling but also that
they are already inescapably common if unacknowledged. Students in classrooms tend to be given responsibility for tasks for which they have a reasonable chance of success, with requirements increasing as they demonstrate
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From Educational Theory to Educational Practice
47
increased competence. What is often neglected, however, is the fact that
students often fail to grasp ‘the larger purpose’ behind these more local
tasks. Studying punctuation, for example, may have limited returns unless
the learner sees how punctuation can actually increase comprehensibility.
It is worth noting that Bruner’s pedagogical explorations tended to
involve one-on-one teaching episodes. In such a context it is enormously
easier to keep track of what the learner is thinking. In whole-class teaching,
on the other hand, such close monitoring is virtually impossible and teachers have to monitor for general signs of incomprehension, say, watching
the modal student, and adjusting teaching accordingly. Just how teachers
do this has not been studied in detail and as Bruner acknowledged, ‘The
chemistry of classroom still eludes me – whether it produces leaden gloom
or total and concentrated involvement’ (1980, pp. 129–30).
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Head Start
As mentioned, as an insider to President Johnson’s War on Poverty in
the 1960s Bruner was drawn into Project Head Start, a program that was
designed to overcome the difficulties faced by poor and underprivileged
children on entering school. Although Bruner has been an advocate of and
spokesman for Head Start’s early educational intervention program, and
although he served on a White House committee, he did not play an active
role in that program. The idea was fueled not only by obvious social need but
also by psychological research that had shown the debilitating effects of sensory deprivation in animals. Animals reared in impoverished environments
were found to be severely disabled on later learning and problem-solving
tasks. At about the same time, studies of human infants showed that they
were alert, attentive to the social world, and more active than reactive than
had been suspected, and in addition, were rapid learners. So somewhere
between these intelligent and engaged infants and the onset of schooling
something seemed to have numbed the intellect. The problem was seen as
one of the impoverished conditions experienced by children of the poor.
What was called ‘cultural deprivation’ was seen as limiting their continuing
mental growth. Head Start was created to fill that gap.
Head Start was premised on the notion that if pre-school children could
be given a richer environment they would be more intellectually developed
and more prepared for formal schooling. Faith in the effectiveness of these
early interventions faded in the 1970s when the research began to show
that the advantages gained tended to disappear within a few years. Bruner
disagreed, arguing that the disappointing results that were reported did
not give a fair account of the effectiveness of the programs because the
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Critical Exposition of Bruner’s Work
criteria used to evaluate them were limited to simple skills. He had urged
rather that those criteria should have included the growth of an interest
in and thoughtfulness about the world and a willingness to share those
experiences with others. Nonetheless the disappointing data, coupled with
the costs of the program (which in fact were trivial in comparison to those
required by the Vietnam War) led to severe reductions in the program
although it did not disappear completely. Although Head Start was not ‘a
magic elixir’ (Bruner 1996, p. 75), recent re-evaluations have shown that if
the interventions are continued over a longer period they do indeed have
cumulative and long-lasting effects (Schweinhart and Weikart 1980; Barnett
1993). Disadvantaged children can indeed be helped. Bruner continues to
be a staunch advocate of pre-school education. Head Start, he said, ‘created
a new consciousness that, by intervening in the developmental scene early
enough, you could change the life of children later’ (1996, p. 74). Indeed,
currently, pre-school education is high on the agenda of most developed
nations.
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Reggio Emilia
Over the past two decades Bruner has been advisor and consultant to a
unique education program in Reggio Emilia, an autonomous region of
Italy, that combines a strong socialist stance with a deep commitment to
educational equality. The program is very much built on the constructivist
principles described by Bruner in which children take control of their own
learning and in which the teacher’s role is primarily helping the children
achieve their own goals and succeed with their own projects. The primary
observations Bruner made in this context were that no child was incapable
of actively participating in the enterprise, no child failed to learn both the
skills and knowledge valued by the school, and furthermore a true learning
community was possible. For his help with this enterprise Bruner was made
an honorary citizen of the community. Lillard (2005) has recently appraised
the Montessori early education program and found it to possess many of
the virtues that Bruner found laudatory in Reggio Emilia.
Programs which put the mental activities of the learners at the forefront
of pedagogical efforts are not confined to foreign shores. Bruner observed
and commented on the encouraging effects of the reciprocal teaching and
collaborative learning practices implemented by Ann Brown, Joe Campione,
and Anne-Marie Palincsar in a disadvantaged area of Oakland, California
(Palincsar 1984; Brown and Campione 1994). What was distinctive was not
only that the children achieved unpredictably well but also that they had succeeded in creating a collaborative school culture, a community of learners
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From Educational Theory to Educational Practice
49
(Bruner 1996, pp. 76–9; see also Rogoff, Matusov, and White 1996).
Children worked on shared projects, they put their proposals up for
common discussion, they assigned various roles – researcher, chairman,
reporter – to different children at different times, they shared their discoveries, summarized, questioned, and clarified their views and thereby jointly
contributed to a common project. The teacher played a critical role in the
process but one of helping the community to get the job done, thereby keeping the agency and responsibility in the hands of the learners rather than
in the hands of the teacher. Bruner attributed the success of the practice to
an established principle: ‘We have known for years that if you treat people,
young kids included, as responsible, contributing parties to the group, as
having a job to do, they will grow into it.’ The school culture that results
from such practices he described as ‘creating communities of learners . . .
Learning is best when it is participatory, proactive, communal, collaborative, and given over to constructing meanings rather than receiving them’
(1996, p. 84). These were the very practices he had identified in Reggio
Emilia.
Bruner’s contributions to pedagogy, then, were both theoretical and practical. He showed that the new understanding of mind as hypothesis testing
and model building could provide an alternative approach to both curriculum development and pedagogy. In the former, he showed that a curriculum with a defined content with high intellectual goals could be developed
and taught using what he called the ‘hypothetical mode’, namely, getting
children to invent hypotheses, discuss them, weigh them against alternative hypotheses and against further evidence. Furthermore, he showed that
such practices could be implemented in an ordinary classroom. In regard
to the latter, he demonstrated the complementary roles between teacher
and learner could be seen as a form of scaffolding in which the actions
of the teacher served primarily to allow the learner to progressively take
over the component skills as competence developed. Thus the role of the
teacher moved aside somewhat to allow greater freedom for the child to
increasingly take responsibility for his or her actions. And as an advocate,
he provided both the encouragement and the rationale for education in a
modern society and for methods that acknowledge the role of the learner in
constructing his or her own knowledge and understanding. (I interviewed
Bruner about his concept of teaching the hypothetical and a transcript of
the discussion is presented in Appendix C. Our discussion of Reggio Emilia
is found in Appendix E.)
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