Jerome Bruner American Psychologist

Background  Born in New York, NY  Attended Duke University and Harvard  Currently a senior research fellow at NYU School of Law  Wrote over a dozen books on education and cognitive psychology. Two major publications: The Process of Education (1960) and The Culture of Education (1996)

The 3 Big C’s  Constructivism  Content Structure  Culture

Contructivism “Picasso did not find the world he produced. He invented it.” 1

Content Structure - Categorization "To perceive is to categorize, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize.” 2

Content Structure – Spiral Curriculum “A curriculum as it develops should revisit this basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them” 3

Content Structure – Three Stage Notion Action stage - physical Iconic stage - pictures Abstract stage – thinking

Content Structure – Narrative “Recall that when Peter Pan asks Wendy to return to Never Never Land with him, he gives as his reason that she could teach the Lost Boys there how to tell stories. If they knew how to tell them, the Lost Boys might be able to grow up.” 4

Culture “It was the ‘discovery of poverty’ and the civil rights movement in America that woke most of us from our unthinking complacency about reforming education – specifically, the discovery of the impact of poverty, racism and alienation on the mental life and growth of the child victims of these blights” 5

References 1.Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2.lifecircles-inc website 3.Smith, M.K. (2002) 'Jerome S. Bruner and the process of education', the encyclopedia of informal education Bruner, J. (1996) The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 5.Bruner, J. (1996) The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Preface XIII.