Great Ideas from the Brain Sciences: Meaning-making
By: Mirela C. C. Ramacciotti
What makes you want to learn something? Answers may vary from necessity to curiosity, and all the many nuanced notions in between. But what makes one take action to learn something? Is it a provocation, as in a connection of stimulus and response, or an inner drive that gets constructed within one’s mind? What if it is something else, i.e., not only related to the self and the input, but rather to the context? What if discovery of what lay hidden is the real impulse that drives learning?
If your thoughts are telling you that you may have seen it before under the guise of sociocultural approaches, your prediction is close to what we will discuss here. But the center of our focus is on people, and today we will delve into the ideas of one of the greatest interdisciplinary minds of recent times: Jerome Bruner, a great thinker who taught us that learning is an active process.
Jerome Seymour Bruner, an American psychologist who lived over a 100 years (from 1915 to 2016), truly had a unique mind. Born blind (congenital cataracts), he started seeing at age two. Perhaps that’s linked to his notion that learning has a clear sequence. This is reflected in how Bruner referred to the ways information gets encoded. He laid them out in three stages:
- Enactive representation, understanding though physical actions, like riding a bike.
- Iconic representation, understanding through images, like pictures and charts.
- Symbolic representation, understanding through abstract symbols, like words.
To Bruner, scaffolding could be offered as progression through these representations, as in the way we teach math to children. We first start by counting the things a child observes while showing the quantity with our fingers. Then we point to the pictures of numbers or numbered items while showing our fingers. Finally, we move by things or number symbols and just say their number out loud.
He also taught us that learning requires us to revisit things we learned before and connect them to what we are learning now, much like a spiral. Thus, the spiral approach. Using this idea in a curriculum would mean teaching the basics first and then expanding that learning.
Importantly, at the basis of Bruner’s contributions to Education, lay his deeply rooted idea that sensation and perception require active construction. We do not just take in new information the way it is transmitted to us. We shape it, constructively, interacting with it and transforming it as we internalize it. To Bruner, action (learning included), taken in the course of active construction, was paramount, and it could only evolve if rooted in meaning, i.e., the internal interpretation of the response one gives to the stimulus they perceive. That interpretation, in turn, was grounded in values and needs—the basic ingredients of culture—or the context one lives in.
In fact, Bruner sided with Vygotsky in placing social interactions at the center of [language] development. In this approach, meaning making emerges from meaningful language, born out of meaningful interactions. As such, meaning becomes a co-construction where collaboration, via language, sustains a created social reality by means of shared meaning.
Indeed, when this happens, what we see is a narrative, where knowledge is a compound of thinking acts, or interpretations, that gets shaped as stories. To Bruner that was a form of thinking distinct from the way that science compounds knowledge, that is, as paradigmatic, putting new phenomena into classifications and categories.
Interestingly, Bruner maintained throughout his long career that what fuels human action is two-fold: culture and making meaning within a culture. There needs to be action to seek for meaning, thus it is neither innate nor created, but rather constructed laboriously in a social substrate (culture) mainly through language (a symbolic phenomenon). The narrative that makes you want to learn about yourself and the many things that make your world is also your construction, rendering Bruner’s words about us, humans, “incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture” (1990, p. 12) ever so meaningful. And Bruner’s contributions, like Vygotsky’s, though few people realize it, are a part of the narrative most of us create every single day in our classrooms.
Sources
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning: Four lectures on mind and culture (Vol. 3). Harvard University Press.
Mattingly, C., Lutkehaus, N. C., & Throop, C. J. (2008). Bruner’s search for meaning: A conversation between psychology and anthropology. Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, 36(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2008.00001.x
Myers, S. (2021). Constructing knowing: Paradigmatic and narrative modes of representation and the social context of meaning-making. In J. Bruner, Meaning making and education for conflict Resolution (pp. 15-30)., Emerald Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80071-074-020211002
NYU Law (2016, June 6). In memoriam: Jerome Bruner, 2015-2016. https://www.law.nyu.edu/news/in-memoriam-jerome-bruner
Shotter, J. (2001). Towards a third revolution in psychology: From inner mental representations to dialogically-structured social practices. In D. Bakhurst & S. G. Shanker. Jerome Bruner: Language, culture, self, (pp. 167-183). SAGE.
Mirela C. C. Ramacciotti is presently engaged as an external lecturer on the topic of Mind, Brain, and Education at the Graduate Level Course with the Psychology Department at the University of São Paulo. She holds a PhD in Neuroscience and Behavior and another in Human Communication Disorders.