Dr. Jerome Bruner Speaks
at Columbia Teachers College: “Educating a Sense of
the Possible”
By Emily Sherwood, Ph.D.
When Dr. Jerome S.
Bruner took the podium on a recent evening at Columbia University’s
Lerner Hall, a palpable tingle permeated the packed auditorium.
The audience, mostly Teachers College students and faculty
who had assembled for the kickoff Virginia and Leonard Marx
lecture of the 2005-06 academic year, knew they were in the
presence of greatness, and indeed, Bruner, who in 1941 received
his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University where he
co-founded and directed their Center for Cognitive Studies,
is now widely regarded as one of the most influential twentieth
century writers and thinkers to apply principles of psychology
to modern education and curriculum theory.
Noting that there is “no greater challenge than thinking
ahead to how effectively to educate the young to face the changes
we know are coming in the next generation,” the 90 year
old Bruner, currently University Professor at NYU Law School,
proceeded to captivate his audience with an intellectually
rigorous and at times abstractly philosophical discussion of
his latest work in the area of “intersubjectivity.” Bruner
explains that “we construct and we reconstruct our world,
not just with bricks and mortar, but by creating and re-creating
the meaning of different things,” a process that takes
place largely through social interaction, wherein the role
of culture is key to shaping the mind. Bruner’s theory
of “cultural psychology” stands in sharp contrast
to the more reductionist theory that the mind is simply a mechanism
for information processing (“the exchange of intersubjectivity
transcends Freud,” Bruner adds.) We are “the most
fanciful and searching of species, as well as the most quarrelsome
and unpredictable. We like capricious disagreement,” observes
Bruner. And so it is crucial that modern psychology and education
take into account the “import of sharing notions of how
things work. We depend on each other to have common views.” Ultimately,
it is this “struggle between the conventional and the
possible in the way we view the world” that has enormous
implications for educating new generations of learners.
Quickly moving from
the theoretical to pragmatic application of his principles,
Bruner exhorts those in the field of education to “transmit conventional ideas but encourage students
to make the leap to imagine the possible,” to be ever-mindful
of teaching “alternative views of thinking.” To
wit, is history merely an account of what happened, or an interpretation? “There
is no history without historiography,” Bruner adds, vehemently
answering his own question. “History must include the
study of possibilities: Why did this happen rather than something
else? If we make it a study of dates, places and facts, we
don’t do justice to the teaching of history.” Likewise,
science, math and language arts should be imbued with “the
challenge of different possibilities,” according to Bruner. “We
must teach not to present fact, but to open up questions.” Bruner
urges modern educators to include more fiction writing in their
curricula: “We need more consciousness-raising from narrative,” he
exhorts, noting that his college freshmen wrote alternative
versions of plays, work that was “full of the invitation
of possibilities.”
On a personal note,
Bruner shares with the audience that his pedagogy was heavily
influenced during his formative years by growing up with
an older sister who would constantly challenge his sense
of reality. “The shape of my mind was formed
by preparing myself to answer her questions,” he laughs.
And so Bruner has continued the cycle by challenging new generations
of students to question and think critically about their world.
Perhaps no one could say it better than famed Harvard educator
and cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner, born nearly 30 years
after Bruner, who wrote in a 2001 book on Fifty Modern Thinkers
in Education. From Piaget to Present, “Jerome Bruner
is not merely one of the foremost educational thinkers of his
era; he is also an inspired learner and teacher. His infectious
curiosity inspires all who are not completely jaded.”#
