Constructivism as a Contemporary Teaching Paradigm

Abstract

In the educational process based on the principles of the traditional class-subject system, the essence of teaching is focused on teaching and the memorization and reproduction of the content by students, while teacher’s verbal activity, personality, and the unrivalled authority are in the center of this process. Contrary to this concept, in the process of teaching flexibly organized on the constructivist paradigm, the focus of educational activity shifts from the sphere of teaching (passive listening and memorizing content) to the field of active learning, experimenting, exploring, and discovering the cause and effect relations among the studied phenomena and objects. Knowledge is based on students’ individual perception, memory, thinking, imagination, discovery, and logical reasoning. This actually means that constructivist teaching is focused on the process of acquiring meaningful knowledge and skills, adopting positive attitudes, cultural values and competencies, with the maximum use and development of each individual’s cognitive, affective, psychomotor, and experiential potentials. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to put in focus the objective understanding and critical description of the traditional concept of teaching and learning by using the method of theoretical analysis. At the same time, the paper focuses on elaborating on cognitive starting points, possibilities, advantages, and limitations of a relatively modern concept based on constructivist, more precisely, critical constructivist didactic paradigm.

Keywords

• teaching
• student
• teacher
• learning
• contextual cognition
• traditional and contemporary constructivist paradigm