Learning and social construction

Berger and Luckman, Vygotsky, and Peirce all seem to agree that we learn from social world which we created. Moreover, I felt they underlined that it is essential for humans to be in a collective group, rather than alone, in order to learn.

Berger and Luckman stated in the beginning that “Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations.” Humans habituate their actions in order to make their life easier. If we habituate our every action, we don’t have to think about the meanings of each action, each object, and each situation. For example, we don’t think about the function of chairs and tables whenever we go into classrooms. We have learned that when we, students, go into classrooms, there should be chairs to sit on and tables to be used for taking notes and we take it as a natural thing to do. This is the basis of institutionalization. “There we go again” becomes “This is how these things are done.” When this is taken into a much larger context, we find that society is also a construction of people and children learn from this “objective reality.” Hence Berger and Luckman state that “man is a social product.”

Vygotsky also believes that “the mechanism of individual developmental change is rooted in society and culture” (p.7) because children learn the meaning of their actions and their relation to the world by the reaction from the surroundings. When a child makes a grasping movement, another person (i.e. mother) interprets it as a gesture which imply a meaning which child wants to express. Hence, “the primary meaning of that unsuccessful grasping movement is established by others.”

Peirce was difficult to understand and I couldn’t fully grasp his thought but I thought what he is trying to say is that signs and objects are understood by having someone interpret it.

From these four authors, I thought we’re in a cycle of learning: giving influence to the society and getting influenced by the society. In this process, society changes and so do our understandings and meanings we give to things. Vygotsky said, “Development, as often happens, proceeds here not in a circle but in a spiral through the same point at each new revolution while advancing to a higher level” (p. 56).