Carlos Andres Patiño

    

 Constructivism as a school of thought focuses mainly on learners’ active participation as a form of social nature of learning. Likewise, Constructivism establishes that knowledge must be actively constructed having into account what the learning environment can and cannot offer.

     In addition, constructivism has some known variants, one of which is based on Vygotsky’s philosophy that is known as the social or realist constructivism which stands out the central role of the social environment in learning. In this way, learning happens through the interaction with the immediate learning environment and therefore learning may be considered to be depending on the situation and the context.

     Now, to illustrate what was proposed by Vygotsky, it is possible to mention the following situations as examples:

• Based on the social constructivism, groups of students with the same characteristics attended to class and interacted as much as possible in the social cultural setting with the support of a teacher. All students went home after school day and they did not have to do homework or review the topics that were experienced because just in class students had the opportunity to participate socially and collectively. In general, students got good grades but it was decided that some students had to implement an additional work consisting of homework and individual review regarding the topics of the school day. After some time, the students that had to carry out additional activities were above the other students regarding grades and development. The described situation happened because to Vygotsky, one’s cultural development appears on two planes, so certainly appears on the social plane as the base of social constructivism but there is a psychological plane too that has to be developed. In this way education not only depends on the social and the collective but also on the individual consciousness about what it is learned.

• A group of five students had to read a long paper that was written in a foreign language and based on that they had to make a mind map. The students decided to read the paper individually and made their own mind maps and after that they would gather one another to decide which the best map is and complement it with the information from the other four maps. After that experience, the students had to repeat the same process with a new paper but this time bearing in mind that they knew a lot of vocabulary and grammar but they did not fully master the language yet; they decided to gather each other for reading the paper together and make only one mind map with everyone's ideas. When they finished the work they realized that the second experience was way better than the first one. They spent less time reading the paper because they supported one another to read it and they had the opportunity to join their ideas and make only one map with everyone's contributions. This example can be explained according to Vygotsky’s theoretical system which establishes that "the collective is always larger than the total sum of individual persons" because as individuals students only interchanged contributions but as a  collective they were interconnected, functionally unified and constantly interacting to achieve larger accomplishments than what the total number of separate individuals could achieve.