Sociological, Postmodern, and New Realism Perspectives in Social Constructionism: Implications for Literacy Research.
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| Title: | Sociological, Postmodern, and New Realism Perspectives in Social Constructionism: Implications for Literacy Research. |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Hruby, George G. |
| Source: | Reading Research Quarterly. Jan-Mar 2001 36(1):48-62. |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 15 |
| Publication Date: | 2001 |
| Document Type: | Guides - Non-Classroom Information Analyses Journal Articles |
| Descriptors: | Educational History, Educational Research, Educational Theories, Educational Trends, Elementary Secondary Education, Higher Education, Literacy |
| ISSN: | 0034-0553 |
| Abstract: | Offers an historical definition of social constructionism, a review of its conceptual bases, and an exploration of its epistemological implications. Describes a history comprised of three paradigmatically distinct waves: a sociological, a postmodern, and an emerging third wave grounded in new realism or neonaturalism. Suggests potential uses of each for literacy education scholars. (SR) |
| Journal Code: | CIJJUL2001 |
| Entry Date: | 2001 |
| Accession Number: | EJ619538 |
| Database: | ERIC |
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| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwGcU8bY5g2B_cvfe3o1o48hAAAA4TCB3gYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHQMIHNAgEAMIHHBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDBuWG4NGKx10NyFEFgIBEICBmajUlm9cyBtv7sBsrOZzSt5S9WFsqMwnN-yXhigDvn5fW7hUG4v_g6ZTaAr4tJ0GrbX2gpSxf1m66ZhsLo1wcepoDDD1gh0NKzA5FvLUmcC6vCAYQLjkSSf9SK-mvjSB_CrAwURXfsbjEhv5Yq7Swp1LhcK5ryP7NXNgU_7CuSkqMkmQPbouyim_DZjyzm4qBEYsJiUdoCHs1A== Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0004020883;RRQ01JAN.01;2001Feb14.16:27;v4.1</anid> <title id="AN0004020883-1">SOCIOLOGICAL, POSTMODERN, AND NEW REALISM PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM: IMPLICATIONS FOR LITERACY RESEARCH </title> <sbt id="AN0004020883-2">ABSTRACTS</sbt> <p>In this article, I attempt an historical definition of social constructionism, a review of its conceptual bases, and an exploration of its epistemological implications. I suggest a history for social constructionism comprised of three paradigmatically distinct waves. The first of these is sociological and empirical in nature, the second, psychological and postmodern, and the third is developmental and tied to what I here term the new realisms. I emphasize that these three formal senses of social constructionism need to be distinguished from both psychological theories of social constructivism, and from looser, colloquial senses of social construction employed in current literacy research. I then modestly speculate on how each of these formal social constructionisms could inspire future directions in literacy education research. </p> <p>The term social constructionism is cropping up with increasing prevalance at literacy conferences, around graduate seminar tables, and during informal conversations between literacy researchers and theorists. But just what this term means, or should mean, in literacy education research, and whether it is of any value to the field is not at all clear. Constructivism, a related term, seems reasonably well understood as a theory or set of theories about how individuals fashion or structure knowledge, rather than receive it pipeline fashion, all of a piece (Spivey, 1997). Cognitive constructivism, often associated with the work of Jean Piaget (1932) as well as with more recent research from cognitive psychology (Anderson, 1995; Kintsch, 1998; Zwaan &amp; Graesser, 1998), focuses on how these processes occur either metacognitively or unconsciously. Social constructivism (Bruner, 1986), which is generally understood to include Soviet activity theory (e.g., Vygotsky, 1978), pays more attention to the social scaffolds and frameworks that promote the fashioning of such internal structures in accordance with the requirements of an individual's social surroundings (Schwandt, 1994; Spivey, 1997). But what, then, is social constructionism? </p> <p>This question is an important one, I believe, because a reasonable case can be made that there is potential value in a well--if multiply--defined social constructionist framework for literacy education research. One of the noticeable gaps in the construction metaphor for educational psychology and reading theory to date has been the implication in such a metaphor of a constructor, who is in fact absent in most of the metaphor's prevalent iterations (Spivey, 1997). Constructions do not just appear, after all. The existence of something constructed strongly implies a willful constructor with a deliberate purpose. In the case of metacognitive knowledge production, of course, the active agent is the conscientious learner, possibly assisted by adult or peer-aged counteragents. But most learning or comprehension would seem to be consciously effortless or automatic, and the understanding that emerges as a result of presumed nonconscious processes thus seems to be received rather than constructed. Who, then, in these more common instances, is the willful constructor? </p> <p>Were the construction metaphor merely a figure of speech, this would hardly be a matter of concern. But such structural metaphors guide our thinking (Lakoff &amp; Johnson, 1999) and, when incorporated into our models of cognition, stake out the parameters of our epistemologies. Seen this way, the constructivist metaphor, for all its seeming promise, is sorely lacking even as a functional metaphor. Indeed, without an agent of some sort to act as constructor, the whole notion of construction as an analogy for knowledge processes inside the head reduces to a piecemeal version of a transmission model of learning (Iran-Nejad, 2000). </p> <p>By contrast, because social constructionism situates knowledge processes outside the head and cites agents in congress as the willful constructors of shared understandings and narratives, the construction metaphor is made whole, the analogy coherent. Insofar as this metaphor has any value for understanding literacy development, I believe it is worthy of some detailed review. (There is even growing promise, in the most current formulations of social constructionism, of eluding the inside/outside the head dichotomy altogether.) In addition, social constructionism has evolved over several decades using many of the same theoretical motifs and methodological lenses as literacy research, but it has matched these in very different ways with interesting results. Researchers in literacy development, therefore, may gain insights and inspiration from a review of how these different approaches have played out to date. </p> <hd id="AN0004020883-3">A preliminary definition</hd> <p>Perhaps the simplest way of distinguishing constructionism from constructivism is by defining the former as a sociological description of knowledge, while understanding the latter as a psychological description of knowledge (Berger &amp; Luckmann, 1966; Burr, 1995; Gergen, 1985). That is to say, while constructivism deals with knowledge formation in the head, constructionism deals with knowledge formation outside the head between participants in social relationship (J. Green, personal communication, May 18, 1997). Although some scholars consider social constructionism synonymous with social constructivism (Spivey, 1997), such forms of macroconstructivism still primarily concern themselves with the influence of social processes upon an individual's psychological (or phenomenological) construction of meaning. Constructionism, by contrast, may be usefully understood as being about the way knowledge is constructed by, for, and between members of a discursively mediated community. </p> <p>This distinction is oversimplified, however, as it relies uncritically on the disciplinary distinction between sociological and psychological phenomena, a distinction that is itself socially constructed. It also ignores much of the work in social constructionism on how collectivities generate meaning often without an explicit intention to do so. Socially constructed meaning is often taken at face value by members of a community as fact, reality, common sense, or otherwise inarguably foundational. Social constructionism is as concerned with this constitution of life worlds as it is with the construction of particular phenomena. </p> <p>Unfortunately, as this term has been borrowed into both adjacent and far-flung fields of inquiry, its definition has blurred. Hence, while in communication theory constructionism has been posited as an alternative to transmission and constructivist models (Gronbeck, 1981), and while in composition studies it has more recently been contrasted with expressivism (Fishman &amp; McCarthy, 1992; Keppel, 1995), in feminist studies constructionism is opposed to essentialism (DeLamater &amp; Hyde, 1998), and in social problems theory it is countered by naturalism (Gubrium, 1993). However, such simplistic dichotomies do not explicate what social constructionism is; they only intimate what it is not. </p> <p>Even within ostensibly social constructionist literature, ambiguities and uncertainties abound. There is a distinction made by many authors (and blurred by others) between strong or extreme social constructionism, and weak or mild constructionism (Burningham &amp; Cooper, 1999). Some cognitive constructivists appropriate the term constructionism to differentiate their particular take on Piaget (Feffer, 1988; Papert, 1993). Certain social constructivists use the term to indicate the sociohistorical developmental psychology of Lev Vygotsky (Gavelek &amp; Raphael, 1996). Other analysts of what is clearly social constructionism (i.e., the work of Kenneth Gergen) inexplicably label it constructivism (Fuller, 1998; Lynch, 1998). Related terms such as constructuralism (Goodman, 1978) and deconstruction (Derrida, 1976) add to the confusion. And, increasingly, the adjective social and the verb construct are bandied about in social science research, including literacy education research, where the terms signify nothing more than productive collective activity. </p> <p>In this article, I hope to clarify three ways in which social constructionism can be formally understood, and how these three models of social constructionism might prove useful for literacy education theory and research. I will suggest that social constructionism can be subdivided historically and paradigmatically into three waves: a sociological social constructionist wave, a poststructural social constructionist wave, and a fairly recent third wave predicated on what I will term the new realism(s). I will conclude by maintaining that any of these three may prove useful as a framework for current research in reading and literacy education. It is beyond the scope of this article to analyze these frameworks in comprehensive detail, and so I will restrict myself to close treatments of salient authors whose texts, I believe, can fairly be said to represent each wave. </p> <hd id="AN0004020883-4">Social constructionism's first wave</hd> <hd1 id="AN0004020883-5"> The sociology of knowledge </hd1> <p>The historical roots of constructionism emerged in the 1920s from Max Scheler's (1980) founding and Karl Mannheim's (1991) subsequent development of the sociology of knowledge. These scholars drew their ideas from (and often in refutation to) a substratum of 19th- and early 20th-century German philosophy including Marx's (1967) historical materialism, Nietzsche's (1967, 1996) anti-idealist critique, and Dilthey's (1996) hermeneutic historicism (Berger &amp; Luckmann, 1966). Subsequently, the anthropologist Emile Durkheim (1983), the sociologist Max Weber (1978), and, in the United States, the social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1982) and the sociologist Robert Merton (1996) all played formative roles in demonstrating the application of the sociology of knowledge within their respective fields (Berger &amp; Luckmann, 1966; Burr, 1995). The root of all this would seem to be neo-Hegelian historicism (and its metaphysical predicates in German Idealism, continental Romanticism, and neo-Kantian philosophy), with sociocultural forces replacing historical forces as the central determining factor in human knowledge and behavior (Farrell, 1996). Sociology of knowledge strove to analyze how these forces constructed knowledge and the type of knowledge they produced. Early work struggled with questions of ideology, false consciousness, and the construction of true versus erroneous knowledge. (For a diverse sampling of early writings in the sociology of knowledge, see Curtis &amp; Petras, 1970.) </p> <p>The commonly cited watershed works in Anglo-American social constructionism are Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966). Kuhn dismissed the simplistic notion that scientific progress was merely a result of the accrual of discoveries and facts. Instead, following on the work of Ludwig Fleck (1979/1935) and Kuhn's own mentor, James Bryant Conant (1951), he argued that scientific research had always been conducted by the light of theoretical models coherent within a given paradigm. He also noted that, given the right circumstances (e.g., the accrual of a critical mass of paradigmatically incompliant findings), those paradigms could shift, thereby rendering previous theories incoherent and previous facts obsolete. Put crudely, what counted as scientific fact was contingent in part upon the vagaries of scientific discourse; scientific descriptions of reality were not only discovered but symbolically produced and confirmed by agreement within a scientific community. Berger and Luckmann's (1966) seminal work is not as well known among literacy researchers as is Kuhn's, so I will devote more attention to it. </p> <p>Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality </p> <p>Drawing on the aforementioned tradition in the sociology of knowledge, Berger and Luckmann (1966) attempted to broaden the scope of the discipline by extricating it from what they saw as cross-disciplinary confusions. They noted that the sociology of knowledge had become mired, at a theoretical level, in questions of ideology and epistemology, and, at the empirical level, in studies on the history of ideas. Taking their cue from the sociologist Werner Stark (1991), they sidestepped an ideological critique altogether on the grounds that the validity of social constructions was not at issue for a purely sociological analysis. Berger and Luckmann insisted that epistemological questions surrounding the methodology of the sociology of knowledge were matters to be resolved by philosophy, not sociology. As Berger and Luckmann put it, </p> <p>To include epistemological questions concerning the validity of sociological knowledge in the sociology of knowledge is somewhat like trying to push a bus in which one is riding.... these questions are not themselves part of the empirical discipline of sociology. (p. 13) </p> <p>Berger and Luckmann's (1966) second move was to insist that a proper sociology of knowledge cannot be interested only in the history of theoretical (academic) ideas, as these comprise but a small part of the knowledge construction in a society. Relying on theoretical justifications from their colleague, the social philosopher Alfred Schutz (Schutz &amp; Luckmann, 1973), Berger and Luckmann called for a focus not on ideas, but on the common sense knowledge of reality as it is understood by the general public--reality sui generis. As to how such a fabric of meanings could be empirically studied, Berger and Luckmann, integrating the perspectives of Durkheim and Weber, noted that, </p> <p>Society does indeed possess objective facticity. And society is indeed built up by activity that expresses subjective meaning.... The central question for sociological theory can then be put as follows: How is it possible that subjective meanings become objective facticities?... An adequate understanding of the "reality sui generis" of society requires an inquiry into the manner in which this reality is constructed. This inquiry, we maintain, is the task of the sociology of knowledge. (p. 18) </p> <p>Centrally important to Berger and Luckmann's framework is the use of language as a sign system that allows the objectification of subjective meanings as well as the internalization (and subjectification) of social meanings. Moreover, the capacity of language to signify themes that span, directly or analogically, various spatial, temporal, causal, and conceptual domains frees subjectivity from the immediacy of the embodied here and now to entertain more distant or abstract spheres of meaning. This detachability is what allows for externalization and the transference from subjective meanings to objective meanings and back again. Building upon this, The Social Construction of Reality argued that societies dialectically augment both objective reality, by way of institutionalization and legitimization, and subjective reality, through socialization and the development of identity, and that these two domains of reality constitute and are inextricably bound up in the discursive fabric of social meanings. </p> <p>Perhaps as important as what Berger and Luckmann (1966) argued on behalf of is what they explicitly did not claim. For one thing, Berger and Luckmann rejected both structural and process models of sociality, noting that </p> <p>a purely structural sociology is endemically in danger of reifying social phenomena. Even if it begins by modestly assigning to its constructs merely heuristic status, it all too frequently ends by confusing its own conceptualizations with the laws of the universe.... We cannot agree that sociology has as its object the alleged "dynamics" of social and psychological "systems," placed post hoc into a dubious relationship...." (pp. 186-187, emphasis in the original) </p> <p>What they argued for instead was a dialectical relationship between society and the individual and the interactive emergence of social constructions of both reality and identity. </p> <p>Identity is, of course, a key element of subjective reality, and like all subjective reality, stands in a dialectical relationship with society. Identity is formed by social processes. Once crystallized, it is maintained, modified, or even reshaped by social relations. The social processes involved in both the formation and the maintenance of identity are determined by the social structure. Conversely, the identities produced by the interplay of organism, individual consciousness and social structure react upon the given social structure, maintaining it, modifying it, or even reshaping it. Societies have histories...made by men (sic) with specific identities. (p. 173) </p> <p>It is also worth noting that Berger and Luckmann (1966) devoted a considerable amount of space to the crucial mediation of the biological aspects of the organism. Drawing from the work of European biologists, ethologists, and biologically informed anthropologists (e.g., Schefler, 1962), Berger and Luckmann noted, </p> <p>It is important to stress...that the organism continues to affect each phase of man's reality-constructing activity and that the organism, in turn, is itself affected by this activity. Put crudely, man's animality is transformed in socialization, but it is not abolished. (p. 180) </p> <p>Or, as cognitive ethologists and developmental psychobiologists might say today, human meaning-making is a species-specific activity and is both constrained and afforded by species-specific morphology and species-probable behavior, which develop transactively with their physical, social, and cultural surrounds. "Man is biologically predestined to construct and to inhabit a world with others. This world becomes for him the dominant and definite reality. Its limits are set by nature, but once constructed, this world acts back upon nature" (p. 183). </p> <p>As such allowances for the foundational and visceral might indicate, Berger and Luckmann's (1966) social constructionist focus is on the symbolic meanings constructed by society and the symbolic, behavioral, and technological reorganization of the environment (including cultural environment); they are not making an ontological claim about how society constructs a physical or biological reality. Thus, sociology of knowledge can remain an empirical form of inquiry. Finally, Berger and Luckmann were explicit that sociology of knowledge "does not imply that sociology is not a science, that its methods should be other than empirical, or that it cannot be 'value-free'" (p. 189, emphasis in the original). </p> <p>The legacy of The Social Construction of Reality </p> <p>Eagerly taken up in other branches of sociology, insights from the sociology of knowledge (now dubbed social constructionism, thanks to Berger and Luckmann's title) spread to inspire theoretical variants in historical, anthropological, linguistic, literary, and psychological research. With each leap of a disciplinary boundary, however, constructionism was recontextualized and thereby reconstructed. Thus, looking back over the 1970s, the scholar of rhetoric Gronbeck (1981) lamented: </p> <p>Constructionism currently encompasses a dizzying maelstrom of scholarly impulses. While its bible among rhetorical theorists and critics perhaps is Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality, its many different forms pledge allegiance to innumerable other fountainheads. The political symbolists... are strongly Burkean... the "legitimation" scholarship (these days) is driven past Berger and Luckmann, past even Weber, to continental critical sociologists, notably Jurgen Habermas; sociologists such as Duncan acknowledge their debt to Mead, while anthropologists are wont to go back even farther, to Durkheim or to linguists in Saussurian traditions. (pp. 250-251) </p> <p>In order to make the framework of the sociology of knowledge fit other disciplines, the concepts behind the framework were unfortunately translated into the intellectual lingua franca of philosophy--and thus back into the very epistemological quagmire from which Berger and Luckmann had hoped to extract it. According to some scholars (Coleman &amp; Sharrock, 1998; Greenwood, 1994), this translation was often done carelessly, as few taking up this new framework in the 1970s seemed to appreciate Berger and Luckmann's sidestepping of the epistemological question of what constitutes true knowledge. Instead, acolytes often mistook the empirical focus on the construction of what passes for knowledge in a society as an ontological claim that what passes for knowledge in a society is truth. According to Coleman and Sharrock (1998), this error paralleled a similar misappropriation of Kuhn's observation--that knowledge is authorized by the agreement of a scientific community--to claim that factual knowledge was nothing more than what a community of scientists agreed upon, an overdrawn conclusion that Kuhn disputed. Yet other examples of such misappropriation can be found in the frequent citations of Wittgenstein's (1990) work by second wave social constructionist scholars, at least according to their critics (Ellis, 1989; Greenwood, 1994). (For a second wave interpretation of this supposed misappropriation, see the next section.) </p> <p>If these critical observations are correct, one is prompted to ask the following question. If the work of Berger and Luckmann, Kuhn, and Wittgenstein (1990)--or, for that matter, Austin (Greenwood, 1994), Derrida (Olson, 1990), Quine (1969), or Rorty (Olson, 1989)--did not actually support the perspective that all is language and language is arbitrarily assigned meaning by social processes, with all its implicit relativism, why did this error so consistently accrue in the theoretical appropriation of social constructionism? I will suggest an answer to that question in the next segment of this article. But I close this segment with an assessment of Berger and Luckmann's work by Lynch (1998), who hinted in his genealogy of social constructionism that it was their failure to take their insights to more radical extremes that led to their work's eventual dismissal by many postmodern social constructionists. </p> <p>While the content of Berger and Luckmann's theory may have had little subsequent influence [on poststructural theory], their literary practice was exemplary. They succeeded in developing a plainly written account that integrated Schutz's (1964) social phenomenology with more mainstream lines of social theory. The word "construction" was pivotally important for introducing the concept of phenomenological "constitution" to a large social science readership that was, and remains, more familiar with causal and instrumental idioms.... Berger and Luckmann did not capitulate to the demands of positivist sociology, but they did successfully integrate Schutz's teachings with a Weberian programme of value-free interpretive sociology. (pp. 24-25) </p> <hd id="AN0004020883-6">Social constructionism's second wave</hd> <hd1 id="AN0004020883-7"> The postmodern turn in social psychology </hd1> <p>To define what constitutes second wave social constructionism, I will quote extensively from the work of Kenneth Gergen, arguably one of the most respected postmodern social constructionists. Gergen is a social psychologist (I would be tempted to say a social processes psychologist), and he has used the term social constructionism to refer to his own and others' related perspectives regularly since the 1970s. </p> <p>Gergen (1985, 1987) originally identified social constructionism by the following four salient themes: (a) understanding of the world is not derived by observation but by linguistic, cultural, and historical contingencies; (b) "understanding is not automatically driven by the forces of nature, but is the result of an active, cooperative enterprise of persons in relationship" (1985, p. 263); (c) "the degree to which a given form of understanding prevails... is not fundamentally dependent on the empirical validity of the perspective in question, but on the vicissitudes of social processes (e.g., communication, negotiation, conflict, rhetoric)" (1985, p. 268); and (d) negotiated understandings are a form of social action and as such are integrated with all other human activities, an idea with profound implications for the analysis of the metaphors and assessments used in psychology, and more generally in social science. Burr (1995) further augmented Gergen's four themes of social constructionism with six other characteristics as follows: (a) antiessentialism, (b) antirealism, (c) language as a precondition for thought, (d) language as a form of social action, (e) focus on interaction and social practices, and (f) focus on process. </p> <p>Elsewhere, Gergen (1995) has placed this discursively oriented conception of social construction in thematic terms: </p> <p>Constructionism is not so much a foundational theory of knowledge as an anti-foundational dialogue. Primary emphases of this dialogue are based on: the social-discursive matrix from which knowledge claims emerge and from which their justification is derived; the values/ideology implicit within knowledge posits; the modes of informal and institutional life sustained and replenished by ontological and epistemological commitments; and the distribution of power and privilege favoured by disciplinary beliefs. Much attention is also given to the creation and transformation of cultural constructions: the adjustment of belief/value systems: and the generation of new modes of pedagogy, scholarly expression and disciplinary relations. (p. 20) </p> <p>Gergen embraced the postmodernist divorce of linguistic descriptions from a foundational or essential reality. </p> <p>There seems good reason to view mental predicates as semantically free-floating. That is, the vocabulary of mind is not anchored in, defined by or ostensively grounded in real-world particulars in such a way that propositions about mental events are subject to correction through observation. (Gergen, 1989, p. 11) </p> <p>He also noted that "descriptive languages are not derived from observation; rather such languages operate as the lenses or filters through which we determine what counts as an object" (Gergen, 1987, p. 2). Hence, like Sapir (1921) and Whorf (Carroll, 1956), Gergen believed reality is constituted by the linguistic and discursive conventions we appropriate. He developed the implications of this insight far beyond anything put forth by Berger and Luckmann. </p> <p>This shift from an empirical sociology to a poststructural epistemology within social constructionism cannot be explained by appeal to factors entirely internal to the sociology of knowledge (e.g., the insights of Gergen and others; or the misinterpretation of the works of Kuhn, Wittgenstein, and other philosophers; or even the borrowing of sociological ideas and poststructural idioms into psychology). Rather, a sea change in social constructionism seemed to occur during the 1970s, an example of the very sort of paradigm shift hypothesized by Kuhn (1962). Taking a broader perspective, this disciplinary shift occurred in tandem with a metatheoretical shift across the social sciences and much of the academy overall. Philosophy, social history, literary criticism and theory, linguistics, media study, and the theoretical sciences were all beneficiaries of this new linguistic turn (Rorty, 1967). (For a comprehensive, if succinct, period overview of these metatheoretic developments, see Harland, 1987, but cf. Holton, 1993; as to their lasting structural effect on social constructionism, see Gergen, 1998b, upon whose account I base much of the following historical analysis.) </p> <p>Perhaps as a result of the prevailing academic milieu in the early 1970s, the conceptual liberation implied by relativist epistemology was too tempting to resist for many young scholars of the period. And if there was no legitimate, antecedent philosophical justification for introducing this liberatory relativism into academic scholarship, as critics have suggested, then the tenor of the times within which these scholars worked was such that they were prompted to construct such a justification, reading what they were determined to find into these foundational texts. As Gergen (1998b) noted, </p> <p>It is interesting to consider the alternative course that history might have taken if Thomas Kuhn had not entitled his 1962 volume, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The political climate into which this title was injected virtually ensured that its reading would be charged with far more energy than the specifics of the book could warrant (p. 40). </p> <p>This suggests that the misappropriation of ideas from Kuhn, Berger and Luckmann, or Wittgenstein might, with only modest irony, be considered case studies in the social construction of reality. </p> <p>In light of these historical circumstances, Gergen (1998a) has identified three strands in postmodern social constructionism: social (drawn largely from the sociological frame of the first wave, but with a greater political consciousness), literary-rhetorical (drawn from the linguistic turn in poststructural philosophy and literary theory), and ideological (drawn from the highly charged radical politics of the period). What all three of these perspectives had in common was a commitment to the central importance of language/discourse in the social construction of reality, and a matching commitment to a spectrum of liberatory political positions. Some of the most important work in this vein was done by early feminist scholars who were largely responsible for bringing the insights of poststructuralism to bear on social discourse theory (Burr, 1995; Gergen, 1998a). (It is probable that the inflections of social constructionist, discursive, and poststructural theory in literacy education over the past decade have also stemmed from this source.) </p> <p>Additionally, Derridian (Derrida, 1976), Foucaldian (Foucault, 1978), Lacanian (Smith, 1992), and Frankfurt school criticalities (Habermas, 1987; Horkheimer &amp; Adorno, 1944/1997) were interwoven with the above three themes, often tailored to the needs of feminist and anticolonial agendas. A heady combination, this; one fraught with emancipatory promise. (It should be understood that this is not a description of the development of poststructural philosophy or literary theory per se, but examples of how poststructural idioms were taken up by influential social constructionist theorists.) </p> <p>Trouble in Wonderland </p> <p>One striking characteristic of postmodern social constructionism is its unlikely combination of uncompromising social critique with unbounded epistemological relativism to arrive at an unqualified cultural determinism. An example of that determinism is provided by Burr (1995): </p> <p>For each "thread" of our identity, there is a limited (sometimes very limited) number of discourses on offer out of which we might fashion ourselves. For example, the discourses of sexuality on offer in our present society offer a restricted menu for the manufacture of sexual identity.... Given these representations...we have no choice but to fashion our identity out of them. Our sexual activities (or lack of them!) can have no form of representation to ourselves or to the people around us other than in the form of these discourses.... (p. 52, emphasis added) </p> <p>Such statements are indicative of the move in second wave social constructionism from a sociological analysis of knowledge production (including subjective knowledge production) to an epistemological (indeed, an ontological) claim that all knowledge is nothing but a social construct. Not only is subjective knowledge a social construct, according to this stronger formulation, but so are the subject and its subjectivity. The constraints presumably imposed by biology are in fact social constructions, as is the very notion of entities as biological organisms (DeLamater &amp; Hyde, 1998). In this fashion, distinctions between science and mythology dissolve into a miasma of social constructions (Gergen &amp; Davis, 1985). Simply put, everything is a social construct, including the concept of social construction (Burr, 1995). (This self-undermining paradox had already been raised against the sociology of knowledge earlier in the century by philosopher Karl Popper, 1970.) </p> <p>Such a restatement of social constructionism has given rise to startling titles, such as "Knowledge, consequences, and experience: The social construction of environmental problems" (Williams, 1998), and "Mass media and the death penalty: Social construction of three Nebraska executions" (Lipschultz &amp; Hilt, 1999). It also resulted in backlash ranging from theoretical retreat (Carrithers, 1992) to critical refutation (Zuriff, 1998) to Alan Sokal's notorious Social Text parody (1996a, 1996b). Given the potential, over time, for shifts in political commitments, research interests, and philosophical conceits, it is not surprising that tensions have arisen within this second wave of social constructionism. Burr (1998) described her own experience: </p> <p>When I first began to read about social constructionist ideas in the late 1980s, I was attracted, as I believe were many others, by the liberatory promise of its anti-essentialism...if what we take ourselves and others to be are constructions and not objective descriptions, and if it is human beings who have built these constructions, then it is (at least in principle) possible to reconstruct ourselves in ways which might be more facilitating for us, and social constructionism seemed to me to offer the same basic message but on a wider social scale. (pp. 13-14) </p> <p>However, the promise social constructionism held for intellectuals such as Burr was not without its limits. </p> <p>After a while I, like others, began to feel frustrated with constructionism and somewhat disillusioned. The extreme relativistic views that were often espoused under the banner of social constructionism seemed to lead down a road to social and personal paralysis, for at least two reasons. First, if we must abandon any notion of a reality which bears some relation, no matter how this relation is conceived, to our constructions, then we are left with a multiplicity of perspectives which become a bewildering array of... realities in themselves.... Secondly, the notion of "agency" slips between our fingers in the same way. (Burr, 1998, p. 14) </p> <p>Indeed, with the poststructural turn, cultural discourse seemed to take on a unilateral role in the production of not just social, but objective and subjective reality, obliterating any account of agency, identity, individual differences, or conflict. As Burr (1998) herself noted, how can one speak of oppressed groups if the concept of "groups" and "oppression" are but social "constructions which can have no greater claim to truth than any other?" (p. 14). </p> <p>Summary of the second wave </p> <p>Dissension has arisen within the ranks of postmodern constructionists as a result of this metaphysical solipsism. Critical researchers have grown increasingly disturbed by the way interpretive relativism undermines attempts at morally grounded political action. There is also some distress at the return to traditional modes of scientific inquiry by some researchers within the field and also with those who have attempted positive reassessments of capitalist liberal democracy (Shotter, 1993). The suggestion has even been made that the political sensibilities of many fair-weather social constructionists are confined to departmental hallways. (For a selection of these positions and arguments, and overviews of the situation, see Velody &amp; Williams, 1998; and Parker, 1998.) </p> <p>Dismayed at the current fractious condition of social constructionism and a perceived flight into realism, Gergen (1998b) noted, "How can we view this state as anything but unfortunate? It is not simply that we herald a condition of all against all. It is also a condition that deadens those within the contentious enclaves" (p. 149). Suggesting that constructionism and realism not be thought of as mutually exclusive forms of discourse, Gergen himself has appealed to the situational utility one discourse form may have over another (Gergen, 1998a). </p> <p>It is too soon to speak of a poststructural social constructionist legacy. Although interest in this line of inquiry may seem to have flagged in at least some fields, its promise for educational research has yet to be fully realized. This is particularly true in literacy education research, where the discursive orientation of second wave social constructionism could fit nicely with extant work in sociolinguistic and critical perspectives pertinent to classroom reality making (Alvermann, Commeyras, Young, Randall, &amp; Hinson, 1997; Davies, 1994; Gee, 1990; Harste &amp; Leland, 1998). To this end, an excellent introduction for literacy education scholars would be Jonathan Potter's (1996) Representing Reality. </p> <hd id="AN0004020883-8">A third wave for social constructionism?</hd> <hd1 id="AN0004020883-9"> The new realism(s) </hd1> <p>Recent developments in postmodern social constructionism have led to a reappraisal of alternative perspectives that, it is hoped, might avoid indiscriminate relativism. One cross-disciplinary response has been the move towards a revivified realism, pragmatism, or naturalism. (Realism's myriad definitions in philosophy are fair cause for confusion. For clarity, the term as used here does not refer to any ancient or medieval schools of philosophy, or to the dubious philosophical category of naive realism. For a quick reference on 20th-century realism, see Cunningham &amp; Fitzgerald, 1966. For a more extended review, see Putnam, 1987.) Naturalism is a similarly overly applied term. (For a review of the various arguments in the debate over naturalized epistemology stemming from the work of Willard Van Orman Quine, 1969, and others, see Block, Flanagan, &amp; GUzeldere, 1998, or, from a decidedly antagonistic perspective, see Almeder, 1998. I use these terms here loosely, and only because they are often used as self-descriptors by their various adherents.) </p> <p>As with the second wave before it, this move towards a new realism or naturalism is not confined to social constructionism alone, but is a motif at work in current Anglo-American philosophy of mind, the various neurosciences, artificial intelligence and robotics, psychology, anthropology, and other social sciences. Its proponents, drawing from the methodology and philosophy of the natural sciences, are a varied group who utilize somewhat idiosyncratic terminologies, and while many agree on some things, none agree on all. This feisty and voluble crowd includes researchers in scientific realism (Greenwood, 1994), Marxist critical realism (Collier, 1998), biological realism (Dennett, 1995; Milikan, 1984), philosophical naturalism (Dretske, 1995; Flanagan, 1992), socionaturalism (Sinha, 1988), restricted harmless naturalism (Almeder, 1998), coherence theory (Alcoff, 1996), moral realism (Farrell, 1996), pedestrian realism (Putnam, 1987); even work on the limitations of discourse theory (Harre &amp; Gillett, 1994; Hilton, 1988), supervenience (Drai, 1999), situated cognition (Clancey, 1997; Kirshner &amp; Whitson, 1997), ecological psychology (Reed, 1996), and, as recently evidenced in this publication, a positive reappraisal of pragmatism (Dillon, O'Brien, &amp; Heilman, 2000). (The following caricature of the new realisms is based chiefly on the work of Farrell, Flanagan, and Greenwood.) </p> <p>Many (though not all) of these scholars believe that there is a coherent and dependably consistent reality that is the basis for our sensations, even if our sensations do not resemble the causative phenomenal bases, or "onta" that prompt them, or demonstrate the same presumed cohesion or consistency. Moreover, both this ontological reality and the phenomenal experience (sensations and visceral associations) it generates are independent of our symbolic representations (i.e., reality precedes language, claim realists like John Greenwood (1994), who adds that there is a useful and important distinction to be made between epistemic objectivity and linguistic objectivity). Our symbolic representations of reality cannot therefore be said to resemble their cause, or even the reality of our experience, but do nonetheless reference the real, greater-than-human world. Thus, with respect to both empirical researchers and their poststructural critics, the true value of our models and theories can never be predicated on their seeming veridicality (the degree to which they seem to resemble the phenomenon under examination). Rather, the validity of our representations can only be determined by their pragmatic indexicality and the degree to which they allow us to make dependably accurate predictions about phenomena (a position also known as reliabilism). Such knowledge can demonstrably give us a greater or lesser capacity to negotiate the real constraints and affordances of our world, including our social world, and allow us to pursue a more fruitful and satisfying condition. </p> <p>That our grasp of reality is provisional and mediated by socially constructed descriptions is fully acknowledged by these new realists or neonaturalists. Yet they deny that this renders the empirical examination of theoretical models worthless, merely conceding to difficult. Some theories do allow us a better purchase on phenomenological tendencies than others, and this is usually demonstrable. While our representational models of reality are socially constructed and hence always provisional, the phenomenal bases these models seek to explain are generally not socially constructed. Some realists and empirical naturalists (Block, Flanagan, &amp; GUzeldere, 1998; Clancey, 1997; Dennett, 1995; Iran-Nejad, in press; Millikan, 1984) have insisted that our embodied nature requires that more attention be paid to biological and ecological systems if we are to understand human mentation; linguistic, cognitive, and social behaviors; and the meanings they articulate. This position is consistent with what has been embraced in mainstream anthropology over the past quarter century (Bates, 1998; Haviland, 2000; Konner, 1982). </p> <p>Other new realists (e.g., Collier, 1998; Farrell, 1996) underscore the moral dimension grounding human action. The undermining nature of relativism is thus "outed" as a strategy for preserving one's socioeconomic advantages while espousing liberatory criticality. All would seem to agree that utter relativism is neither agreeable nor unavoidable. All acknowledge the limitations of empiricism, positivism, and hypothetic-deductive inquiry. And while acknowledging the importance of language or culture, most would limit the extent to which either can be constitutive of all human experience or behavior. </p> <p>For these scholars, dyadic linguistics and similar semiotic frameworks that have heavily influenced current discourse theory seem to suggest an unending inter-referentiality that must ultimately prove closed and circular, which is to say static, or at least a developmental. This is of course counter to what we know about the continual development evidenced within language systems (Coulmas, 1997). In addition, such zero-sum models, say the naturalists, miss the ecological grounding of, and thus the value-added nature of, human behavior and ecobiologic functionality more generally, a significant aspect of language that purely analytic accounts have overlooked. For whatever else it may be described as, human language is most certainly a form of species-specific communication, the capacity for which is grounded in neurobiology (Hauser, 1996). Following Tinbergen (1963), language cannot be understood through analysis of structure or immediate function (linguistic pragmatics) alone. Developmental, evolutionary, and more general assessments of functionality must also be brought to bear. </p> <p>Relying on an ethological conception of sociality, the British sociologist and anthropologist Michael Carrithers (1992) has suggested that human behavior is underdetermined by social discourse alone. </p> <p>[I]ndividuals in relationships, and the interactive character of social life, are slightly more important, more real, than those things we designate as culture. According to the culture theory, people do things because of their culture; on the sociality theory, people do things with, to, and in respect of each other, using means that we can describe, if we wish to, as cultural. (p. 34) </p> <p>And, he continues, </p> <p>collective representations have significance in their use by people in relation to other people and none apart from such use...change [should] be thought of as natural, the setting of actual social life with all its fluidity, uncertainty, construals and misconstruals, its laboriously achieved continuity, its planned and its inadvertent innovations. So long as we think of humans simply as individuals subjected to a collectivity, or to disembodied cerebration, change of the sort human history so richly evidences becomes curiously distant and difficult to comprehend. A more thoroughly sociological view places change, not permanence, at the centre of our vision. (p. 36) </p> <p>Similarly, Minick, Stone, and Forman (1993) observed that there is a one-dimensional reductiveness to frameworks that make the activity of the community the sole unit of analysis. They suggest that this schema needs to be replaced by the study of </p> <p>real people who develop a variety of interpersonal relationships with one another in the course of their shared activity in a given institutional context. Within educational institutions, for example, the sometimes conflicting responsibilities of mentorship and evaluation can give rise to distinct interpersonal relationships between teacher and pupils that have important influences on learning. For example, appropriating the speech or actions of another person requires a degree of identification with that person and the cultural community he or she represents. (p. 6) In a parallel development, Wertsch (1998) has suggested reviving Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad as a means for conceptualizing the necessary elements of action and motivation studied in activity theory, in order to elude imposed reductivist or monadic models of causation. </p> <hd1 id="AN0004020883-10"> Summary </hd1> <p>It is certainly too soon to determine whether or not this move towards the new realisms is itself the next wave in social constructionism, or a bridge to something entirely different. (Of the scholars named previously, only some are formally participants in the current dialogues on social constructionism, though all are implicitly social constructionist in orientation.) Most second wave social constructionists would understandably argue that a new realism perspective is antithetical to (their concept of) social constructionism. But, of course, the same criticism could be made by the original empirical sociologists about what postmodern idioms have done to their conception of social constructionism. In any case, a critical mass and momentum does seem to have developed in this neonaturalist/realist vein, reminiscent of the rise of interest in poststructural and postmodern work that occurred in the humanities during the 1970s and in literacy education in the late 1980s and early 1990s. </p> <hd id="AN0004020883-11">Social constructionism and reading</hd> <p>I have described where social constructionism has been over the decades and where it may be going, and I have maintained that there have been three distinct waves: a sociological, a postmodern, and an emerging third wave grounded in new realism or neonaturalism. I believe each of these has a potential use for literacy education scholars, and in this final portion of the article I wish to briefly suggest what those uses could be. </p> <p>The central feature shared by all three waves of social constructionism, and related variants such as situated cognition (Kirshner &amp; Whitson, 1997) or activity theory (Wertsch, 1998), is a focus on how knowledge is socially constructed in communities. This stands in conceptual opposition to traditional work in reading education, informed by cognitive constructivist psychology, that attempted to explain text decoding and reading comprehension by way of models of mental operations. Leaving aside the question of how successful these interior models have been in promoting more effective classroom practice, we may well wonder how we can conceive of reading comprehension as external to the student in a fashion that could prove useful in promoting students' literacy development. </p> <p>This line of consideration must be entirely speculative because to date there has been little of methodological substance about reading education practice drawn explicitly from a social constructionist perspective. Still, work in literacy more generally has been implicitly informed by social constructionist themes, and there are teasing synchronicities between literacy research and social constructionism. Like social constructionism, literacy education has focused its research variously through developmental, psychological, and social lenses. It has similarly enjoyed a substantial amount of empirical and theoretical work and a certain amount of poststructural and ideological critique. </p> <p>Literacy education has not coupled these disciplinary motifs in the same way that social constructionism has. That is, it has never used a poststructural critique to produce a socially and discursively modified psychological lens with which to address reading processes. On the other hand, much cultural theory in reading, as elsewhere in education, may be too conceptually vague and reductive to be useful in state-of-the-art empirical studies (Schoenfeld, 1999). This is not to say that a thoroughly empirical sociological approach to literacy, or a poststructural psychology of reading, would be inconceivable. Examples from first and second wave social constructionism might prove to be fruitful fonts of inspiration. </p> <p>The usefulness of the third wave of social constructionism is more problematic. With its focus on subjective agency and the constraints and affordances of the organically constituted world, literacy might be reconceived as developmentally entwined with social structures and processes in a fashion far more subtle and complex than anything described to date. In such a naturalistic view, separating the mental from the actual, as the first two waves have done (the inside/outside the head dichotomy), misconceives the bioecological nature of neurologically endowed organisms in the living world (Abram, 1996; Bidell &amp; Fischer, 1998; Hendriks-Jansen, 1996). But the implications of psychological development for understanding language are unclear, and, for understanding literacy development, uncertain. </p> <hd1 id="AN0004020883-12"> Literacy researchers constructing social construction </hd1> <p>As noted at the beginning of this article, the verb construct and the adjective social are often used loosely in literacy education scholarship. Aside from the legitimate use of these terms in reference to social constructivist psychology (Sipe, 1998), or the less formal use of the terms to signify productive collective activity (Bean &amp; Valerio, 1997; Cairney, 2000), there are three quite distinct senses in which the term social construction is used. These senses are often used interchangeably, and, lest increased confusion confound our embrace of these notions, we would do well to try to clarify them. Readers should keep in mind that these three uses of the term social construction do not correlate to the three previously reviewed historical waves. </p> <p>The first sense of social construction is quite traditional, and can be found in literacy work borrowing theoretical justification from feminist scholarship on the social construction of gender (Lloyd, 1998). Gender as it is commonly understood is often confused with sexual designation, and hence given an essential, indeed biological, foundation. Social constructionist research would demonstrate not only how gender is constructed, but how we designate gender as a fundamental aspect of reality, thereby veiling its sociocultural origins. The social construction of identity through literacy is a similar example (Mahiri &amp; Godley, 1998; McCarthey,1998; Prentiss, 1998), as is the social construction of race (Hirschfeld, 1996). </p> <p>A second, more obvious sense of social construction can be found in analyses of the social construction of literacy (Gavelek &amp; Raphael, 1996). Here, the phenomenon, literacy, as with gender, is acknowledged by the general public. But unlike gender, literacy is not generally presumed to be a natural state. Rather, literacy requires schooling. Schools are social institutions. Hence, literacy is socially constructed. There is also a less obvious sense in which literacy is constructed, of course. How we define literacy, how we choose to teach it, and how we hope to assess it are all the result of both deliberate and tacit social negotiation. But, given the recent media-publicized debates over reading methods and testing, I believe it is likely that many would recognize this more subtle sense of literacy's social constitution. At the very least, the average person would have to acknowledge that these matters are far from settled. </p> <p>Finally, there is a rather paradoxical use of social construction, as in the social construction of power relations, sometimes interwoven with work on subjectivity or identity. Here we have a phenomenon, power relationships, that ostensibly foment identity, membership, agency, motivation, and ability. That differences in power or social standing exist is something most people would acknowledge, but that these relationships constitute our sense of self and motivate our behaviors and beliefs is perhaps generally doubted, at least within North America. Whether these power relations are indeed socially constructed is therefore moot. Critical pedagogues would likely insist that the average citizen's denial of the existence of such webs of power, dominance, and oppression, show that both the phenomenon and the process behind it have been constructively veiled. This is more commonly referred to as false consciousness. The conundrum here is that false consciousness implies a true consciousness, an awareness of how things really are. Social constructionist theories would insist that true consciousness is as socially constructed as is false consciousness (Berger &amp; Luckmann, 1966; Burr, 1998). There is no privileged position outside of the social processes that constitute our conception of reality. Indeed, 20th-century academics, engaged without irony in such critical assertions, might well provide a case study of social construction itself, or rather, of failed social construction. Such academics, after all, are members of a powerful social institution (most are now tenured) and are attempting to construct a theory of power relations that they would have taken as reality. But the average person seems not to be buying the idea, even though it promises freedom. Why not? This would be a fascinating topic to analyze by the lights of social construction theory. In any event, it gets us back to the very arguments over ideology and false consciousness that Mannheim (1991) and other scholars of the sociology of knowledge struggled with in the early decades of the 20th century. </p> <hd id="AN0004020883-13">Conclusion with a prefatory caution</hd> <p>I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that the foregoing historical review is a metanarrative, and therefore subject to interrogation. Metanarratives abound in every culture, community, and inner monologue. Even postmodernists spin them, their deconstructions a form of "renarrativization," but never "denarrativization." Their ubiquity is for good reason: Metanarratives are the indispensable result of the dialectic between the production of meaning and the maintenance of a productive sociality. Metanarratives are conceptual maps that locate us, or rather give us a sense of location and hence orientation. They are the result of our sense making, and they help us make sense. I hope I have managed that to some extent here, but I concede that there are other ways of spinning a metanarrative on the history of social constructionism. </p> <p>For instance, as previously noted, some scholars (Phillips, 2000; Spivey, 1997) describe similar historical developments in the history of ideas as forms of social constructivism. Chinn (1998), reading from a science education perspective, also preferred the term social constructivism, choosing to restrict the term constructionism only to that work which examines knowledge construction by scientists in laboratories. I find the narrowness of this usage unjustified (e.g., Chinn fails to cite Gergen, or most of the other postmodern social constructionists cited in this article). Other analysts (Greenwood, 1994; McCarty &amp; Schwandt, 2000) cite Gergen exclusively (and harshly) as the be-all and end-all of social constructionism and so offer a very different but equally truncated definition. Interestingly, Chinn (1998) identified three distinct perspectives in the social construction of knowledge similar to the three paradigmatic waves noted in this article. He termed these the traditional view, social constructivism (including social interest theory, social constructionism, and methodological constructivism), and integrated constructivism. This last, which coincides with what I call the new realism(s), is described by Chinn as a continuum between realist and antirealist positions, and he gives excellent examples of how this perspective can be related to research methodology. </p> <p>As acknowledged at the beginning of this article, distinguishing constructivism from constructionism is no simple matter. It would be erroneous and ironic to suggest that there are clear demarcations between the two that could be anything but contrivances of our own devising. Still, I believe there is use in constructing such a distinction, because if every attempt to explain understanding--from cognitive processes, to developmental transactions, to social dialectic, to deconstructions of discourse form---is labeled constructivism, then what is not? Serious differences in how we might describe human sociality and its inherent penchant for meaning-making require distinguishing terminology. Otherwise, we will not know precisely what we are talking about, as too often seems to be the case in the confused and confusing use of the terms constructionism and constructivism. </p> <p>In this article I have attempted a review of what I see as the three principle variants of social constructionism, hoping in the process to more clearly define what social constructionism has been, is now, and can be in the future. I believe the chief value of these three variants of social constructionism lies with their potential to increase our understanding of the social and interpersonal processes that order classroom learning. Work on these areas has tended to refer to sociality in an overly generalized and often vague fashion (Schoenfeld, 1999). The three formal variants of social constructionism reviewed here provide theoretical frameworks of knowledge development that would possibly give greater precision and focus to classroom inquiry. The better portion of this development is now located where the teacher can get at it: in the realm of the classroom, a boon for teacher researchers. As for academic researchers, current formulations of social constructionism rely on and build upon a rich vein of recent inquiry by developmental, cognitive, sociolinguistic, anthropological, and neuroendocrinological science. 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Scientific Studies of Reading, 2(<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref6">3</reflink>), Entire issue. </p> <p>Received February 1, 2000 Final revision received March 10, 2000 Accepted May 26, 2000 </p> <aug> <p>By George G. Hruby, University of Georgia, Athens, USA </p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib2" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib1" firstref="ref2"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib7" firstref="ref4"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib3" firstref="ref5"></nolink> |
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| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 15 StartPage: 48 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Educational History Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Research Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Theories Type: general – SubjectFull: Educational Trends Type: general – SubjectFull: Elementary Secondary Education Type: general – SubjectFull: Higher Education Type: general – SubjectFull: Literacy Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: Sociological, Postmodern, and New Realism Perspectives in Social Constructionism: Implications for Literacy Research. Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Hruby, George G. IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 01 Type: published Y: 2001 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 0034-0553 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 36 – Type: issue Value: 1 Titles: – TitleFull: Reading Research Quarterly Type: main |
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