Personal Construction of Formal Knowledge

Maureen L. Pope/University of Surrey, U.K.

Many educationalists are sceptical about the role psychology plays in educa- tion. Some have rejected the discipline because of the orientation it took during the year,,; of "mechanistic behaviorism." Biggs (1976) argued that the discipline had little to offer the teacher at the chalkface. Novak (1981) notes that critiques of behavioral approaches are based on the argument that:

Ignoring or negating the internal world of people misses the essence of their person- hood, flattens human reality and leads to educational practices which are mechanistic and lacking in respect for the basic integrity of the person.

Personal construct psychology, based upon George Kelly's seminal work (see, e.g., Kelly, 1955), offers a psychological perspective which does justice to the internal world 0fthe person. In Pope and Keen (1981), I highlighted those aspects of Kelly's views which I saw as relevant to current concerns in education. In particular, I suggested that his "perspective of the personal" and concern with such issues as relativity of knowledge, relevance, and the process of psycholog- ical research formed an alternative approach that had policy implications for curriculum design and pedagogical practice.

Kellyian Metaphysical Commitments Reynolds (1981) discusses the "paradigmatic crisis in the early 1920s" wherein structural functionalism gave way to "interpretive" sociologies which stand

opposed to the tenets of the old positivism. None of the symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists believe that social science should aim to produce lawlike sets of propositions, believing instead that social science should provide a deeper under- standing of individuals, their perceptions, and the meanings they attach to social life.

The metaphysical commitments reflected in the above quote are shared by Kellyian psychologists. In Pope and Keen (1981) and Pope (1981), the common themata emphasized by the Kellyian perspective and those of, for example, ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel, 1967; Cicourel, 1974), symbolic interactionists (Mead, 1934), Schutz's (1967) phenomenological perspective, and Berger and Luckman's (1967) views on the social construction of reality are noted. These theoretical and methodological orientations fall within the "verstehen" ap- proach, the central spirit of which is coming to an understanding of the view of the world held by those people involved in a situation rather than adopting a "stranger" perspective or ascribing structural function to external aspects (stimuli) of the environment.

In putting forward his psychology of personal constructs, Kelly was offer- ing a constructive alternative to the behaviorist framework which was dominant

Interchange / Vol. 13. No. 4 / 1982 3

in the '50s. Kelly was quite clear in his antagonism toward a psychology which sees man as reactive rather than constructivist:

A psychology that pins its anticipations on the repetitions of events it calls "stimuli", or on the concatenations of events it calls "reinforcements", can sCarcely hope to survive as man's audacities multiply. (Kelly, 1969)

Kelly rejected the notion of the person as an "impotent reactor" whose behavior is determined by environmental circumstances or genes. He prefer- red to portray people as active agents capable of making things happen and able to construct events; his was a self-determining model as opposed to the deter- ministic models which were prevalent in his lifetime.

Kelly was also concerned about the nomothetic emphasis of psychometric research and the extent to which the therapist's view of the problems shaped the analysis and procedures used within the therapy. Nomothetic research does little to help the therapist deal with the individual client, and the presupposi- tions and theoretical framework held by the therapist may hinder progress by placing an inappropriate definition on "the client's problem." For Kelly, the client's definition of the problem was important and ought to be elicited. One shOuld seek the client's views m after all, "he might know."

Kelly's major domain was therapeutic practice. However, his writings offer "ways of seeing and doing" which are potentially applicable to many teachings and learning issues. Reynolds (1981) notes the rediscovery of symbolic inter- actionism after almost a decade of neglect. Likewise, for many years, personal construct theory was a neglected area within psychology; but it would seem that the Zietgeis t i s presently conducive to its fundamental tenets. There is renewed interest in Kelly's views not only amongst clinical psychologists but also amongst educators in schools, colleges, and industry.

So far in this paper, ! have tried to give a flavor of the network of concerns which underpin the views of those educators, sociologists, and psychologists who place value on the personal meanings of individuals. Kelly's original work and subsequent developments within personal construct psychology are aligned with this general thrust. Much of the current emphasis is on the person's construction of social reality. In this paper, I shall focus on the personal construction of formal knowledge m i.e., the material presented in school or college as representing the "official" view of "facts" of a subject.

Candy (1981) used techniques based upon Kelly's repertory grid to elicit views of teaching and learning held by adult learners, He argued that teaching is an intervention in the processes whereby learners make sense of their exper- iences, and so:

We have a clear duty to recognize the integrity of their construct systems, and to attempt to enter, however inadequately, into their individual universes. And this responsibility extends beyond their views of teaching and learning to the subject matter which is to be taught and learned. [emphasis added]

In this paper I concentrate on issues related to the subject matter. In particu- lar, Iwill focus on the "formal" knowledge of science since it is an area of the curriculum with which I and my colleagues in the Personal Construction of Knowledge Group, IET, University of Surrey, are particularly concerned. Some of the ideas would, if implemented, require a paradigm shift in the practice of teaching similar to the theoretical and methodological changes in orientation discussed by Reynolds (1981) in relation to educational research. There would be a rejection of positivism and naive realism and a recognition of constructivist views of knowledge.

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Constructive Alternativism - - Personal and Scientific Kelly's approach to the development of a person is based upon the concept of "man-the-scientist" and provides a useful generative metaphor (Schon, 1980) for models of Science Education. He invites us to entertain the possibility that looking at people as i f they were scientists - - i.e., viewing their "scientist-like aspects" - - might illuminate human behavior. Person-the-scientist and scien- tist-the person are both engaged in a process of observation, interpretation, prediction, and control. According to Kelly, each person erects for himself a representational model of the world, and this model enables him/her to chart a course of behavior in relation to it. The model is subject to change over time, since constructions of reality are constantly tested out and modified to allow better predictions. Thus, for Kelly, the questioning and exploring and the revising in the light of predictive failure (which is symptomatic of scientific theorizing) is precisely what a person does in his or her attempts to anticipate events. Just as the scientist designs experiments around rival hypotheses, so each of us can be seen as designing our daily explorations of life around rival hypotheses which form part of our system of constructs or "world-view." People can be seen as scientists, constantly experimenting with their definitions of existence.

Important, too, is the notion that people may construe their environment in an infinite number of ways, depending on their imagination and the courageousness of their experimentation. Kelly did not deny the importance of early experiences or present environmental circumstances, but he suggested that it was more important to know what and how people think about their present situation - - i.e., their current hypotheses/constructs - - than to know what their early childhood experiences were or what environmental circum- stances they now find themselves in. Rather than see people as trapped by their early experiences or present environmental constraints, Kelly suggested that individuals be encouraged to see their ideas as hypotheses or representational models open to refutation. These representational models are composed of a series of interrelated personal constructs or tentative hypotheses about the world. Constructs are used by a person to describe present experience, to forecasll events (theory building), and to assess the accuracy of previous fore- casts after the events have occurred, thereby testing their predictive efficiency (theory testing). Kelly's main emphasis was on the uniqueness of each person's construction of the world and on the construct systems that each evolves, and continues to evolve, in order to impose meanings on his or her experiences.

Kelly described his epistemological position as that of "Constructive A1- ternativism," in that people understand themselves and their surroundings and anticipate future eventualities by constructing tentative models and evaluating these against personal criteria as to the successful prediction and control of events based upon the model. He claimed that it was presumptuous to assume that a person's constructions of reality were convergent with reality and suggested that "the open question for man is not whether reality exists or not but what he can make of it" (Kelly, 1969a). For Kelly, any event is open to as many reconstructions of it as our imaginations will allow. He rejected an absolutist view of truth and contrasted his position with that of "Accumulative Fragmentalism" - - i.e., the notion that knowledge is a growing collection of substantiated facts or "nuggets of truth."

Keen and I (1981) looked at some of the major themes inherent in differing educational ideologies and related these to particular models of the nature of knowledge and of psychological development. We argued that a "cultural

transmission" approach has dominated Western education and that teachers of this persuasion would therefore see the primary task of the educator as the transmission of information, rules, or values which form the "truths" of one's cultural heritage. In the extreme, the teachers' philosophical approach is that absolute truth can be accumulated bit by bit, subject by subject; their epis- temological position is that of the naive realist who views "true knowledge" as knowledge that corresponds to the world as it is and is, therefore, independent of the subjective constructions of the learner. This is the "accumulative frag- mentalism" which Kelly sees as contrasting with his epistemology.

Traditional teaching methods based upon the cultural transmission ap- proach emphasize the student's role as the passive receiver rather than the active participant. The positivist, empiricist/inductivist conception of science is in sympathy with this absolutist view of truth and knowledge, and thus if teachers hold to that conception of science, then curriculum content and the manner in which students are taught will place little or no emphasis on the student's own conceptions and active participation.

For Kelly, the construction of reality is a subjective, personal, active, creative, rational, and emotional affair; and if we are to believe modern philosophers of science, then similar adjectives can be applied to scientific theorizing and methodology, although students of science in schools and col- leges do not appear to be acquiring this viewpoint (see Cawthorn & RoweU, 1978; West, 1981).

Knowledge can be seen as being produced by transactions between a person and the environment, and an emphasis is now placed upon the active person reaching out to make sense of events by engaging in the construction and interpretation of his or her own experience. When applied to an educational context, this constructivist view of knowledge lends support to teachers who are concerned with the investigation of students' views, who seek to incor- porate these views within the teaching/learning dialogue, and who see the importance of encouraging students to reflect upon, and make known, their construction of some aspect of reality.

Kelly pointed out that all theories are hypotheses created by people and that, although they may fit all the known facts at any particular time, they may eventually be found wanting and eventually be replaced by a "better theory." An example from physics is the re-appraisal of Newton's theory by Einstein. However, Einstein's theory is not the ultimate truth - - Einstein himself re- garded his theory as defective and spent much of his life trying to find a better one. This view of theory, science, and knowledge is echoed in the writings of Popper (1963L Kuhn (1970), Lakatos (1970), and Feyerabend (1975), all of whom argue for a more relativistic picture of knowledge.

The Relativistic approach to knowledge permeates recent scientific articles. Davies (1980), in discussing the implications of quantum theory, writes: It leads to the conclusion that the world of our experience -- the universe that we ordinarily perceive -- is not the only universe.

He suggests that quantum theory reinstates the observer at the center of the stage . . . . Reality, inasmuch as it has any meaning at all, is not a property of the external world on its own but is intimately bound up with our perception of the world - - our presence as conscious observers:

Davies's observation acknowledges subjectivity in science and falls within a constructivist frame. Koestler (1976) also draws attention to the personal nature of theorizing in science and the affective component. He argues it is a myth that scientists' reasoning processes are strictly logical and lacking in the sensuous

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and original quality of the poetic imagination, and he coins the term "Bisociation" to describe the act of discovery in Science or Art, which term he distinguishes from "pedestrian routine of association along beaten tracks." Such a process is followed by "an inaudible Eureka cry which combines intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis."

Kelly (1969b) drew similar parallels between the artist and the scientist. He rejected the compartmentalism that was found in the psychological writings of his time and, in seeking to take an holistic view of the person, he argued that the split into intellectual/cognitive and affective components was inappropriate. A construct, he believed, should be seen as a unity of the two.

Many philosophers now reject the notion that knowledge and reason should be impersonal and detached and suggest that reason is informed by passion. In discussing Popper's philosophy of science, Magee (1973) notes that:

It puts the greatest premium of all on boldness of imagination . . . . It is fundamentally at variance with all views of science or rationality which see these as excluding passion or imagination or creative instruction: and it condemns as "scientism" the notion that science gives us certain knowledge.

For Popper, there is "no pure disinterested free observation," insofar as all observations are "theory impregnated." Whilst believing in the existence of "real facts" independent of people, Popper is not an absolutist; he does not believe that "objective knowledge of real facts" is ever attainable. As scien- tists, we must approach every situation with the possibility of a radical trans- formation of our present conceptual scheme - - i.e., we should invite refutation. Kuhn (1970) draws attention to sociological and psychological components of knowledge and, like Popper, he adopts an anti-positivistic stance in discussing the revolutionary character of paradigm shifts in science. Kuhn suggests that new and old paradigms represent "incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practising science in it." Paradigms are "strong networks of commit- ments," and individuals who undergo a revolution of ideas may experience a crisis which involves emotional insecurity while the loosening of old paradigm restrictions and the contentions of alternative theories are considered. Thus the old stereotype of the sober, reticent, controlled scientist who operates accord- ing to a set of definite norms is giving way to notions of personal commitment in science.

Formal knowledge in science is now seen as a progression from the personal constructions of individual scientists seeking to make sense of their experiences and to anticipate events toward some consensus construing by a community of scientists. Along the way, the journey is fraught with conflicts, both personal and interpersonal; furthermore, it is a journey which will not end, since we must be open to transformations of the consensus viewpoint. The body of formal knowledge which we call science should be seen as constructed by, and related to, the personal commitments of those who form the scientific community. The ideas held by a consensus of the scientific community are neither inviolate nor incorrigible. As Watts, Gilbert, and Pope (1982) suggest, Kelly's epistemology and theory of personal constructs allow one to blur the distinction between personal meaning and the formal knowledge of science:

Rather than treating all concepts as if they are the distinct clear-cut entities of physics, we propose to view the process through which scientists structure their domains as being similar to the way that people deliberately construct their own world-views.

Accepting Kelly's model of man-the-scientist emphasizes that we see people as essen- tially inquisitive and constructively scientific, whilst at the same time casting science as yet another form of frail and fragile human activity.

Toward a Construetivist Curriculum Feyerabend (1980) argues that science education should strengthen the minds of the young . . , against any easy acceptance of comprehensive views. What we need here is an education that makes people contrary, counter-sugges- t i ve . . , without making them incapable of devoting themselves to the elaboration of any single view.

He suggests that children possess tremendous imagination and that we should develop to the full the "spirit of contradiction that exists in them." We should devise teaching strategies which encourage students' o w n theorizing and elaboration of their personal constructs. It is not sufficient that a body of knowledge either derived from a textbook or given out by the teacher is accepted unquestioningly by the student. Students must find the knowledge to be true for themselves; they must be able to incorporate it within their view of the world. As teachers, we should encourage students to develop their own criteria about the quality and relevance of ideas and allow this ability to develop by minimizing our role as arbiters of what is acceptable.

Kelly (1970) recognized learning as a personal exploration and saw the teacher 's role as helping

to design and implement each child's own undertakings . . . . To become a fully accredited participant in the experimental enterprise, she [the teacher] must gain some sense of what is being seen through the child's eyes.

For Kelly, successful communication between people depended not so much on commonality of construct systems but upon the extent to which people could "construe the construct system of the o ther" - - i.e., have some empathy and understanding of someone else's constructs whilst not necessarily holding the same constructs oneself. There is now a growing group of educators who argue that, for the teaching/learning dialogue to be effective, it is important for the teacher to come to an understanding of the student's frameworks. What is relevant to the learner is of importance, and for education to be a joint venture between teacher and learner, it is essential that each has some awareness of the other 's personal constructs. The following quote from Berman and Roderick (1973) indicates some assumptions-about curriculum which are compatible with Kelly's viewpoint:

Curriculum has long been thought of as that which is taught to somebody else. Persons act as though what is a fact one day is a fact the next, as though all persons perceive phenomena in the same way, as though the world is static rather than dynamic.

The view of these writers is that curriculum must put the person at the centre of what is learned. Curriculum development. . , will then see the person as the meaning maker and plan curricula experiences which enable the child to consider, contemplate and expand his meanings.

Emphasis on the person-as-meaning-maker is now a dominant theme in educa- tional theorizing but, in practice, the phenomenological world of the learner is often neglected. However , in science education, there are some who do stress the need for teachers to become aware of the personal constructs or "alterna- tive f rameworks" which students bring with them to science lessons (Driver & Easley, 1978). Some of these explicitly refer to Kelly's notions whilst others appear to be Kellyian in spirit.

Head and Sutton (1981) liken a construct system to a mosaic which changes with time, and they suggest that coherent areas of this mosaic contribute to a person's personal identity and that we should recognize that affective factors integrate with cognitive factors in the person's attempts to make sense of experience. They note the importance of listening to a student 's spontaneous

use of words when faced with novel experiences. They argue that when a student looking at a Bunsen burner says "it 's a sort of gas candle," this kind of interpretation should be encouraged and developed by the teacher since it opens up possibilities for a unified view of combustion. They give another example of a student looking down a microscope at particles in Brownian motion who says "it 's like a lot of glow-worms," although this description misses the essential passivity of the Brownian particles. But, as they note, the spontaneous reasoning of both students is important since their descriptions are

experiments in ways of seeing and ways of talking about experience. To understand the growth points of a learner's cognitive structure we suggest that greater attention should be paid to them. At the same time, we must not see interest in learners' constructs as being confined to the teaching of schoolchildren. Posner (1981) also stresses the need to consider college students' preconceptions, purposes, values, and concep- tions of past experiences which they bring to particular curricular tasks. He points out that college students' preconceptions can be resistant to change because they may have been acquired through interaction with the physical world, not through formal instruction, and are "therefore very functional in and adaptable to most circumstances." Posner suggests that physics students, for example, may simply compartmentalize their knowledge, "claiming that the problem is a physics problem and therefore does not have anything to do with the 'real world'."

Recent interview data show a pattern of five possible outcomes when "children's science" - - i.e., the understanding that children bring with them to the science classroom - - interacts with "teacher's science" (Gilbert, 1981). One outcome is referred to as "the two-perspective outcome" in which the teacher's science view is rejected as a personal model but the teacher's science may be learnt by rote. For example, in the middle of an interview, a student was asked for a definition of force, and his reply was:

Oh, now I've got it . . . a force is an action or reaction (laughs) that they (teachers) always give us . . . . Well, they normally give examples that are easy to explain, but I don't get it. If I push the wall, I can't see how it can possibly push me back.

The student does not find the Newtonian contention that "action and reaction are equal and opposite" to be plausible in his terms but gives evidence within the interview of being able to use the language of science. In Kellyian terms, the "teachers' science" can be incorporated into a person's system of constructs, but it may remain fragmented, not connected in any meaningful way with the person's more central constructs. There would be no personal commitment to this compartmentalized view of the world.

Unfortunately there are many areas of the science curriculum where it is impossible to organize direct physical experience with exemplars of the con- cepts. However, attempts to bridge the gap between "formal science" and the personal constructions of the learner need to take place. If we wish to effect a transition from student's science to scientist's science, experiential procedures and open-system approaches seem to be necessary since it is clear that merely telling the student a correct answer, couched in the language of high science, is ineffectual (Driver, 1973).

Hewson (1980) argues that a person who is faced with a new conception is not going to incorporate it without good reason, particularly if it is in conflict with an existing conception which forms part of his or her central commit- ments. He stresses the need for the teacher to become aware of the initial conceptions (personal constructs) of students - - "particularly those which are

implicit and inarticulated" - - before planning an appropriate teaching strategy to encourage transition to scientist's science.

Many research studies in recent years have shown clearly that children develop tenacious and durable scientific world views to enable them to predict future events (Driver & Easley, 1978). These views and beliefs are not simply isolated ideas but form part of complex construct systems which provide a sensible and coherent understanding of the world as seen from the child's perspective. Watts, Gilbert, and Pope (1982) suggest that successful science teaching requires an appreciation not only of the scientist's view of the world but also of the language, beliefs, and expectations which children bring whole and intact to science lessons. However, they note that for many science educators there is an assumption that children's beliefs must be directly and efficiently over- come by the strength and logic of"true" science. When noticed, children's constructs are not to be built and developed, but "corrected".

"True" or formal science is treated as unproblematic, whereas the epistemo- logical and educational status of children's knowledge is devalued. Nussbaum and Novick (1980) argue that when students use a naive "alternative frame- work" or preconception to interpret classroom experiences, they may well give the experiences meanings which are different from, or in total conflict with, those intended by the teacher. The learner may be unaware of this gap, and the teacher may therefore assume that the student is "not understanding" the lesson. Nussbaum and Novick argue that:

It is not a matter of his "not understanding" but of his "understanding differently" from what was intended. He may very well give sophisticated and rational meaning to the new information, despite the variance with accepted meaning.

For them, the teacher's task is to encourage articulation of students' personal models and, at the same time, to create situations which will encourage the students to confront the official science viewpoints.

Nussbaum and Novick present a case study of a teaching situation in which brainstorming was used with a group of 12- to 13-year-olds in an attempt to encourage them to invent a particle model for gases. The students were encour- aged to describe verbally and pictorially their personal models, to confront each other's viewpoints, and to debate the pros and cons of the different frameworks offered. They were asked to test the ideas inherent in their personal models against experimental observations, and this gave them the opportunity to de- cide for themselves whether there was any need to modify their ideas to eliminate contradictions between their theories and their experimental observa- tions. Such experiences may help the teacher to come to an understanding of the student's framework, and the student will be exposed to a range of alterna- tive frameworks held by the teacher and his or her peers. This interchange of ideas should help communication, as well as offering a further range of experi- ence within which the student is able to construct his or her personal models. BuL of course, it doesn't necessarily follow that the outcome will be a full transition to scientist's science, for sometimes the student will hold on to his or her own perspective whilst, at the same time, temporarily adopting a perspec- tive (cf. the "two-perspective outcome" mentioned earlier).

The student may choose to see his or her model as being invalidated and replace it with another model which seems to offer greater elaboration of his or her construct system. The replacement model could be that of the teacher or a fellow student. Or the student could resolutely hold on to the original model and reject those of others - - however he or she will now have a better understand-

10

ing of the other perspectives. Another outcome could be that a student discards his or her previous model, rejects all the other models put forward by members of the group, and erects an alternative model which goes beyond any of the models proposed q which may well be one of the more desirable outcomes should the alternative model prove to be fruitful in explaining events. The development of science depends on people having the courage to go beyond currently accepted notions. We must support courageous exploration of ideas and help students to develop a sense of agency in the construction of know- ledge. This will be be achieved if formal knowledge is presented as unproblem, atic and the student, striving to make sense of the world, is ignored. As Esland (1971) pointed out: If knowledge is dereified, it is, then, a much more negotiable commodity between the teacher and pupil. Its socio-historic relativity is likely to be transparent... �9 New configurations of knowledge are likely to emerge from the combinations of questions which arise in the learning situations . . . the boundaries (between "subjects" of knowledge) are only human constructs and can, therefore, be broken.

This echoes Perkinson's (1969) suggestion that we should adopt fallibilism as a theory of instruction: The fallibist teacher treats that body of knowledge called subject matte r as conjectural. . . . The science teacher does not use laboratory periods to demonstrate or prove the theories of science but rather to test those theories by experiments designed to refute them -- preferably experiments devised by students themselves . . . . . The fallibist history teacher realises that each historical interpretation is a conjecture or a collection of conjectures. So any interpretation can be refuted and replaced by a better inter- pretation - - and this is what he tries to teach to his students. [emphasis added]

Feyerabend (1975) is also arguing that science should be taught as an historical phenomenon and not as a set of absolute facts. If experiences in school are such that learning science is seen as an impersonal and mechanical storage of facts and techniques, we should not be surprised if students entering science courses in higher education, albeit with reasonable grades, lack an inventive andper- sonally committed attitude toward their studies. Unless science educators re-examine their approach to the teaching of science, there may well exist a gulf between current philosophy on the nature of science and the events which are devised for teaching science and from which students construct their experi: ences of the subject.

Working within a Kellyian framework, Pope and Shaw (1981)) have discussed the use of repertory grid techniques to aid the process of negotiation between learner's and teacher's perspectives. The Interview-about-Instances (de: veloped by Osborne & Gilbert, 1980), based upon a series of exemplars and non-exemplars of concepts in science, is another tool for attempting to enter the phenomenological world of the learner. Watts (1981a), Pope (1981), and Watts, Gilbert, and Pope (1982) discuss the relevance of I.A.I. both as a tool in educational research and as a means of helping students to articulate their per- sonal meanings within a teaching/learning dialogue. Repertory grids and I.A.I. are useful for such a purpose but, as Novak (1981) notes, "there are no guaranteed techniques which would work with all students." He points to the need for teachers to use "methods and materials which are perceived as meaningful and challenging but are not overly threatening." The appropriate balance between "personal challenge and threat is the task of the delicate art of teaching." This is especially important if we assume that: Knowledge is not something external to the person but relates to the adequacy of the constructs the individual develops and uses as he or she anticipates the world. (Novak, 1981)

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The teacher's constructs and learner's constructs may represent two incom- mensurable paradigms (Kulm, 1970) or~ two distinct research programs (Lakatos, 1970). However, unless the learner's views are articulated, the teacher cannot devise a strategy whereby the learner's model can be put to the test. Kelly noted that change in construing will only take place if the person experiments with his or her way of seeing things, construes the implications of these experiments, and sees that it would be fruitful (i.e., result in an elabora- tion of his or her construct system) to adopt an alternative way of seeing things.

Watts (1981b) notes some similarities between Lakatosian views of science and Kelly's view of man-the-scientist. He gives a caricature of the classroom interaction which would result from adopting some of Kelly's and Lakatos's notions. I quote this caricature in toto as it represents an hypothesis of what a Kellyian-based classroom interaction might imply.

The teacher makes himself aware of his student's theories, notes their variance with his own and any inconsistencies within themselves. He treats these equitably whilst encouraging the student to articulate his ideas.

He patiently challenges the students' theories, or allows his own to be attacked, and provides for a series of empirical tests to be made. Over a period of time he points to the inadequacies (lack of coherence) of his students' ideas and questions some of his basic assumptions. At the same time he explores the virtues of his own theory and its reasons for success. Aware of the difficulties of challenging core assumptions, he is prepared to "offer the client support" (Pope and Keen, 1981); the support of his own "constructive criticism" (Lakatos). He encourages the student to independent study and personal reconstruction of the mature science employing the student's own strategies and learning organisation.

A Challenge to Explore Kelly provided us with an articulation of some of his constructs. In putting forward his theory, he suggested that it would be subject to revision since it was itself an example of a human construct and therefore should be treated as an hypothesis waiting to be put to the test. The challenge to educators is for them to experiment with Kelly's notions as i f they were useful ways of seeing teaching and learning. If some or all of his notions do not provide a more useful model, then they can be rejected. At the beginning of this paper, I suggested that some educators have rejected psychology - - perhaps because they con- strued it as mechanistic and irrelevant to their views of teaching. It would be a great pity if educators failed to experiment with Kelly's views because they represent a psychological perspective, and I hope that I have presented some of his ideas in a way which will encourage further exploration of his theory.

My own view is that Kelly's philosophy of Constructive Alternativism has provided a framework which is in sympathy with current philosophies of science and which places value on the personal constructions of meaning held by individuals. I would suggest that the teaching of science should reflect current notions on the philosophy of the subject and should present formal knowledge as conjectural - - having been formed by the personal constructions of the originator(s) and open to the personal reconstruction and appraisal of the learner. This view is not restricted t o the teaching of science. As a matter of classroom policy, differences between the learner's personal meanings and formal knowledge could be dealt with in open forum where both are valued for what they are - - i.e., constructive alternative ways of seeing the world.

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