Open peer commentary on the article “Beyond Technocentrism: Supporting Constructionism in the Classroom” by Karen Brennan. Upshot: Brennan describes strategies designed to help teachers use Scratch in their classrooms, emphasising interfaces between the tool and its users, between users and between hope and happening. Previous work with similar aims identified apparently significant cultural approaches to initiating constructionist practice. Questions arise about the development of practice from technocentric to pedagogic over time that may have some answers in the data accumulated.

Open peer commentary on the article “Constructing Constructivism” by Hugh Gash. Upshot: Radical constructivism is explicitly discussed in Gash’s target article outlining “stages” or types of constructivism. The stages contextualize radical constructivism in a series of research phases involving a number of domains using a variety of approaches. The target article begs the query: “just how radical are many constructivist approaches in teaching and learning?”.

Open peer commentary on the article “Religion: A Radical-Constructivist Perspective” by Andreas Quale. Upshot: The aim of this commentary is to examine whether religious belief is a cognitive activity. It is proposed that religious belief can be the result of cognitive processes individually construed and constructed upon layers of prior experience, thus adhering to the fundamental tenets of radical constructivism. However, a distinction should be made between cognizing religious beliefs and religious experience. The use of the science versus religion dichotomy (...) is explored and relegated to the status of a “phoney war.”. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Negotiating Between Learner and Mathematics: A Conceptual Framework to Analyze Teacher Sensitivity Toward Constructivism in a Mathematics Classroom” by Philip Borg, Dave Hewitt & Ian Jones. Upshot: I review the arguments put forward by Borg et al. as to why a teacher cannot be constructivist in their methodologies and ask why they have not considered constructivist methodologies that emphasise negotiation.