Radical constructivism at work in education -- an apercu

Introduction, by guest editor, to special issue on radical constructivism in education

Whether the subject is the production of scholarly knowledge, or the development by an individual of his or her own knowledge, radical constructivism adopts a point of view distinctly at odds with the perspective afforded by the empirico-realist tradition. Whereas in the latter current, interest is focused on determining whether knowledge of various types truly corresponds to 'states of the world', the constructivist perspective centers more on the 'living being' who constructs these various forms of knowledge and who so doing also devises for him- or herself an image or theory about the world. Or, as the work of Piaget (1971, 1972) has tellingly indicated, the focus is placed on the processes and resources which a subject draws on to create a certain order of things out of his or her experiences, thereby producing within him/her the impression of dealing with a 'stable' world, and occasionally a world endowed with 'states'.