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What is Social Constructivism, and Does it Really Support Kiwi Learners?

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The following is an essay I wrote as part of my studies in 2018. It was something I felt pretty strongly about, so I asked my lecturer if I could create my own essay question for one assignment. To his credit, he was very open-minded toward my suggestion. He also gave me some useful feedback and a good grade. So it's not all gloom and doom! It's quite a long read, but hopefully quite informative. I try and explain what constructivism is and then go ahead to summarize some of the best critiques for it, as well as describing the relevance of this issue to New Zealand educational practice. I did struggle somewhat to strike a healthy balance between breadth and depth whilst staying within the word limit (actually, I went a little over). So to any philosophers reading this: I apologise for the lack of rigour. ____ Constructivism and the Support Provided to Learners by Educational Psychologists in Aotearoa Educational psychology is neither straightforward nor boring. Le...
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Cultural competence and invisible culture - "I don't have a culture"

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Here's a reflection I shared with the class during my 2018 studies, about regarding cultural competence and "invisible culture." ___ So I've been trying to work on my cultural competence, for instance by reading the chapters on Maori and Pakeha culture in the Pro Practice textbook. Anyway, there's this idea (that I've come across before) that Pakeha, as members of a dominant culture, often say things like "I don't have a culture" or "I'm just a kiwi." This has been referred to as invisible culture . I'm a bit torn about this idea. On the one hand, it makes sense that members of the majority wouldn't feel defined by their ethnicity or culture, and might assume that aspects of their upbringing were "only natural", or universal to all people - when in fact some of them might vary from culture to culture. But on the other hand, I've often said in the past that I don't "identify" as ...
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Narrative assessment and the scientist-practitioner model

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This is the third of a series of posts going back over some of my notes from my postgraduate studies in educational psychology in 2018. As a part of our course, we were asked to engage in Online Learning Tasks (OLTs), which generally involved reading one or more particular article/book chapter(s), possibly doing a mini-literature review, and then responding to the material on the course's online forum, often in the form of a "reflection." One learning task asked us to provide a reflection on one of the various frameworks of practice within educational psychology, and also provide a summary of the famous Boulder (scientist-practitioner) model of psychological practice. However, I had already started having concerns about the amount of social constructivist material in our course content. This is an abridged version of the reflection I posted. ___ I'm not sure how to put this... During their study/reading, has anyone else noticed and/or been at least a litt...
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The way "moral dilemmas" are handled in ed psyc classes

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This is the second of a series of posts going back over some of my notes from my postgraduate studies in educational psychology in 2018. As a part of our course, we were asked to engage in Online Learning Tasks (OLTs), which generally involved reading one or more particular article/book chapter(s), possibly doing a mini-literature review, and then responding to the material on the course's online forum, often in the form of a "reflection." One early topic covered in one of my papers was ethical dilemmas, which can easily pop up during professional practice, but are often not so easy to negotiate. We were shown a video by Rush Kidder in which ethical dilemmas are framed as "right vs right" situations. That is, there's a difficult choice between two options, and both options have reasons counting in favour of them. Our lecturer elaborated by listing various independent domains of ethical considerations, including moral, legal, ethical and professional con...
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Why I want to be an educational psychologist

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This is the first of a series of posts going back over some of my notes from my postgraduate studies in educational psychology in 2018. As a part of our course, we were asked to engage in Online Learning Tasks (OLTs), which generally involved reading one or more particular article/book chapter(s), possibly doing a mini-literature review, and then responding to the material on the course's online forum, often in the form of a "reflection." The first OLT called for a personal introduction. I entitled mine "Why I want to be an educational psychologist." This is a snapshot of my attitude at the beginning of 2018 (1 year ago, almost to the day), and is still a fair summary but leaves some things unsaid. ___ Hi everybody, My name is Patrick and right now I'm very content to call Katikati - about half way between Waihi and Tauranga - home. That said, I was born in Christchurch and spent the second half of my formative years living on Waiheke Island. ...
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