Piaget and Constructivism

I've been struggling with a certain aspect of my studies lately. It concerns Piaget and Vygotsky. I really like them both, but I'm not sure I understand the link between them and constructivism and my work.

Piaget studied childhood development. Like Kegan, who studied adult development, and saw that there were stages that adults moved through, socialized mind, self authored mind, self transforming mind; Piaget saw that children went through stages . . . babies begin to understand that with peekaboo, the other person isn't really gone, gone,. . . then that the world can be different but that it has a logic,  . . .then that they are not the center of the world, and so on. 

Vygotsky is all about ZPD, which I've written about before. He believes learners need to be set up and ready for their learning. Too rigorous and they won't be up for the task. Too easy and they're discount it. The idea of scaffolding understanding is through ZPD. 

I listened and watched a video on Piaget and constructivism, and it seemed to help. The narrator brought up that with Piaget he was concerned with "schema" for frameworks that children use to learn. That as they learn new things they must either apply what they learn to an existing schema or create a new one. Additionally, children learn through experience. It's our job as teachers to facilitate that learning through experience, not just tell them things. This is in line with constructivism, where you learn based on previous experience and reflection, and in line with what we are trying to do with VR, where we want our learners to play around and experience a bit in VR rather than just telling the learner information. 

So what about Vygotsky? Vygotsky felt that children developed independently of stages, and instead developed through social and cultural environments that moved our mental functions higher. This in many cases is helped along by mentors who help scaffold your understanding. Think about a toddler beginning to learn to walk. If one has a mentor who helps them walk, they will walk faster. If left along a toddler may eventually learn to walk alone, but not as quickly. 

What does all of this have to do with VR? Well, we allow the learner the opportunity explore in VR and try things out. Are we mentoring them? I don't think so really. We do have a bit of ZPD in that we know where we learner to go, and where they may be, but really, I think our VR exercise leans more heavily on the experience and the construction of information via that environment. More of the Piaget realm.

What's the truth? Which is more right? I think it's a bit of both or a bit in-between. There's a bit of experience and a bit of mentorship. It's a grey area rather than a binary.