Jerome Bruner

Guest blogger and Pocketbook author Brin Best gives an overview of Jerome Bruner’s contribution to education and educational thinking:

JEROME BRUNER

 Jerome Bruner (1915 — ) is an American psychologist who has been a very influential figure in the field of education. His work, bringing together the ideas of Vygotsky, Freud and Piaget, has helped teachers to understand the process of education. In more recent years he has made a special contribution to the importance of culture in learning.

An influential theory

Bruner’s most important book (The Process of Education, published in 1960 – see ‘Further reading’) emerged following a 1959 meeting of scientists, psychologists and educators who were united by a desire to improve scientific education in the USA. It profoundly influenced some of the finest minds to work in education in the remainder of the 20^th Century, such as Howard Gardner, who has gone on record to say that he was drawn to a life in education after reading Bruner’s landmark volume.

Five concepts underpinned the ideas in The Process of Education:

• Knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it – it is the underlying structure of a subject that is most important
• The child is an active learner and problem-solver
• Children are always learning: intellectual activity is all around us
• Any subject can be taught in some meaningful form to any child at any stage of development – Bruner called this concept the ‘spiral curriculum’

The representation of knowledge

Bruner’s core work has focused on the full range of human capacities involved in teaching and learning, including language, creativity and motivation. He has developed a powerful three-stage model to help us understand how children represent experiences and convert these into knowledge, which included the following ‘modes’:

• The enactive mode – involving physical action
• The iconic mode – where one thing stands for another (eg a child uses a stick to simulate a rifle)
• The symbolic mode – involving children representing their experiences through a variety of symbolic systems (eg writing).

Bruner differed from Piaget in believing that, instead of children’s progression through these modes being a one-way process, their entry point depended more on the level of experience of the individual. Children are more likely to choose the enactive mode of representation for things that are new to them; as they become more experienced they move towards symbolic representational modes.

The importance of culture

Bruner’s more recent work places much emphasis on the key role of culture in education.  He believes that cultural psychology can help explain the intentional behaviour of people and that education provides a test-bed for developing cultural psychology as a field of study. Writing in his book The Culture of Education Bruner states, ‘Culture shapes the mind…it provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but our very conception of ourselves and our powers.’

Further reading

The Process of Education (Latest edition published by Harvard University Press, 1977 and still available on Amazon) is Bruner’s key contribution to education. The 1977 edition has an introduction by Bruner that considers the strengths and weaknesses of the original work, published in 1960. Also of special note is Bruner’s volume The Culture of Education (Latest edition published by Harvard University Press, 1997).

 

 

 

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