It’s really astonishing how little we really understand about how people learn and how much of what we do know is on such a low level (e.g., how our brains identify shapes in the visual cortex, how we segment voice sounds into language phonemes, etc.) It is very, very hard to map what we actually know about the basic processes onto the incredibly complex pragmatic situations involved in most real-world learning. Much of what passes for theory in cognitivist, constructivist, and behaviorist learning liturature can more accurately described as inspired by cognitive sciences rather than empirically supported by them.

Nevertheless, we have to make principled pedagogical decisions based on what we do know, right? Often times, this comes down to relying on intuition. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this by itself, because I tend to believe that intuitions are often motivated by coherent (or at least semi-coherent) theories of learning that are mostly tacit knowledge. If we can find the method in those intuitions then we can evaluate the extent to which it is a method worth repeating and expanding (i.e., we can turn the method into a methodology).

My original post was very much in this spirit; I was observing that my own intuitive method bears some resemblance to each of the three schools of thought at various times and, furthermore, that there is a systematic pattern in my intuitions that is tied to the ways in which the instructional goals are set for the class by the sponsors. I learned something from that observation and will probably think about it the next time I sit down to design a course. Is it cognitive science? No. Does it mean that we can throw cognitive science out the window when we think about teaching? Of course not. But in absence of a theory of learning that I feel confident is both strongly grounded in empirical evidence (or even empirically provable or disprovable in principle!) and practically applicable to the every-day tasks of course design, learning from the systematic intuitions of experienced practitioners seems like as good a place to start as any when searching for a methodology.

The epistemologies of the title are just that — beliefs about how, fundamentally, people learn. Now, there are also some instructional strategies that happen to be stronly tied to each of them, but they are two very different things. You point at this when you say, e.g., “Constructivist techniques”, but it’s a point, I think, worth beating like the dead horse that it is.

The problem is clearly mine, but it drives me nutso when people ask me, “How can I use constructivism? What good is it to me?” One could as that about PBL, of course, but any PBL session could just as easily be an instantiation of constructivist principles as cognitivist principles.

The reason I think the distinction is important is this: everyone *has* a set of beliefs about how learning occurs. When someone says they’re “eclectic” or “just use what works in the situation”, what they’re telling me most of the time is that they don’t understand their own view of learning and hence don’t know how it’s affecting their instructional decisions.

Most people, if they’re honest with themselves, won’t have a personal epistemology that fits nicely into the cannonical writings surrounding one of the concepts of the title. And for most of us, hopefully, our view of learning changes as we get more experience and reflect on more things. But when people reduce beliefs about learning to a fleeting preference for some set of methodologies, well, they’re missing a chance to think things through in a way that can have serious pedagogical effects.

I know it’s not nice for my first post to be a rant, but there it is.