Literature for Adolescents and Social Reconstructivism

I'm taking a class this semester called Literature for Adolescents. Now, as a disclaimer, I love to read, but I loved it even more when I was a teenager, and thus, in many ways, my interests in books still falls a bit on the juvenile side. So really, this class is perfect for me.

But the most interesting part of the class is the professor. The first day, we jumped right into activities and sharing and discussion, which is usually not at all up my alley, but he was so positive about it, and was clear that these activities were things he really believed in, and things that he thought were going to ultimately be very important to us in constructing our knowledge of Young Adult Literature. At the end of that first class (which was just last week), Dr. Moore told us that he considers himself to be a social constructivist.

I'm now pulling out my Ed Psych book to give you an accurate idea of what social constructivism is. Vygotsky is the name of the man who did a lot with this theory (you may remember old Lev from my discussion of the Zone of Proximal Development earlier when I was talking about Scrabble). Vygotsky believed that "learners first construct knowledge in a social context and then appropriate and internalize it." Which basically means that by treating this class as a discussion group, we're going to come up with our own theories and ideas about the books we're reading, construct a meaning for them together, and then internalize that meaning and knowledge in our own ways.

Now, I love Vygotsky for his ZPD idea, but generally I think social constructivism is a bunch of hooey. This might be, in part, because I never got much out of working with groups in school because I always ended up doing most of the work and constructing my own meaning (to which Vygotsky would probably argue that if I had been afforded a peer group at the same mental level as I, I would have been able to construct better meaning from the knowledge I was supposed to be gaining). In addition, there are some real problems to just letting kids go with constructing their own knowledge and hoping that they'll stumble across the "right" knowledge. For some areas of school, that's not important -- for example, it's ok to come to one interpretation of a text and is different from someone else's, but it's NOT ok to come to an interpretation of gravity that isn't correct.

But despite all of my general dislike for this theory of education, Dr. Moore is so clearly intelligent and implementing this idea so well that I have to say he's bringing me around. There's no touchy-feely crap going on in the class (at least, not thus far), and he is giving us significantly difficult assignments and a pretty heavy workload, both things I don't associate with social constructivism. To me, however, there's nothing so satisfying as taking a class with someone who is both incredibly intelligent and, at the same time, personable and good at teaching (not someone who's a genius but who can't explain simple concepts). I take those people more seriously, especially when I'm paying them to teach me.