Perspective-Taking and Object Construction: Two Keys to Learning

Piaget defines intelligence as adaptation, or the ability to maintain a balance between stability and change, or, in his own words, between assimilation and accommodation. When people assimilate the world to their current knowledge, they impose their order upon things. This momentary closure is useful to build "invariants" that lend existence to the world, independent of immediate interaction. In accommodation, people become one with the object of attention. This may lead to momentary loss of control, since fusion loosens boundaries, but allows for change. I choose the domain of perspective-taking to illustrate how this alternation between assimilation and accommodation punctuate individuals' interactions with the world. I show that the ability to move away from one's own standpoint, and to take on another person's view, requires the construction of cognitive invariants: a recasting of the world's stabilities that transcends any given viewpoint. I conclude that separation is a necessary step toward the construction of a deeper understanding, and that adopting a "god's eyes view" is by no means contrary to situating one's one stance in the world. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Reference: Ackermann, E. (1996). Perspective-Taking and object Construction. In Constuctionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and Learning in a Digital World (Kafai, Y., and Resnick, M., Eds.). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Part 1, Chap. 2. pp. 25-37 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[A early version of this paper was presented at the 22nd Annual Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society, on the theme: "Development and Vulnerability in Close Relashionships– Importance for Learning," Montreal, May 28, 1992] Knowing as Ways of Relating to the World In recent years, an increasing number of psychologists and cognitive scientists have adopted the view that knowledge is essentially situated and thus should not be divorced from the contexts in which it is constructed and actualized (e.g. Brown & Collins & Duguid, 1989; Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Lave & Wenger, 1991). This growing interest in knowledge as it lives and grows in context has led many researchers in developmental psychology and other disciplines to focus on people's interactions with, and descriptions of, specific situations. They look at how these interactions and descriptions evolve over time. Such an emphasis on the richness and diversity of individual paths-in-context provides a far less coherent picture of cognitive growth than is suggested by most stage theories. It challenges the prevalent view among developmentalists (such as Piaget and Kohlberg) that removed, analytical modes of thought are necessarily more advanced forms of cognitive functioning. It questions the notion that cognitive growth consists in an uni-directional progression from concrete to abstract, from fusion to separation (Ackermann, 1991; Kegan, 1982; Turkle and Papert, 1991). Several scholars further elaborate on the idea that divorcing knowledge from experience, by adopting a "god's eye view"—an all encompassing view that transcends any given viewpoint—is by no means a higher form of knowing. It is certainly not, in their views, the most appropriate mode of functioning in all situations (e.g. Fox-Keller, 1985; Gilligan, 1987; Harding, 1991; Haraway, 1991). They argue that to know is to relate and that to know better, or gain deeper understanding, is to grow-in-connection (Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver, Surrey, 1991). Lave went as far as to suggest that learning should be distinguished from knowledge acquisition. Learning, to Lave, is the ability to function in situ, that is, to become an active participant within a multiplicity of communities of practices (Lave, 1992). What is common to all these approaches is that they bring back subjectivity, standpoint, and context to the center of discussions about knowledge, science, and learning. They also remind us that, indeed, people can develop different ways of knowing while remaining excellent at what they do. Piaget and Situated Knowledge One could argue that situated cognition has been with us for a long time. Piaget has taught us that knowledge is not a commodity to be transmitted. Nor is it information to be delivered from one end, encoded, stored and reapplied at the other end. Instead, knowledge is experience, in the sense that it is actively constructed and reconstructed through direct interaction with the environment. This idea is similar, in many ways, to the ideas expressed by various "situated cognition" scholars: To know is to relate. However, recent claims emphasize that people's ability to make sense of their world and themselves, and to construct progressively deeper understandings, cannot be portrayed as Piaget has done. A person's development is not a smooth, incremental progression from concrete to abstract, from fusion to separation, from connectedness to autonomy. A closer look into the meanderings of individual minds in context reveals a far more complex picture, which calls for a redefinition of Piaget's general stages of cognitive development (Ackermann, 1991; Carey, 1987; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). Stage theory emphasizes how the average child, or epistemic subject, becomes detached from the world of concrete objects and local contingencies, increasingly able to internalize action and to mentally manipulate symbolic objects within the realm of hypothetical worlds. While this is an important aspect of cognitive development, it does not account for the processes by