Jerome_Bruner

Jerome Bruner was born October 15, 1915 in New York City, the youngest of four children in a "nominally observant" Jewish family. Bruner was educated at Duke University and Harvard (from which he was awarded a PhD in 1947). During World War II, Bruner worked as a social psychologist exploring propaganda public opinion and social attitudes for U.S. Army intelligence. After obtaining his PhD he became a member of faculty, serving as professor of psychology, as well as cofounder and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies.  Beginning in the 1940s, Jerome Bruner, along with Leo Postman, worked on the ways in which needs, motivations, and expectations (or 'mental sets') influence perception. Sometimes dubbed as the 'New Look', they explored perception from a functional orientation (as against a process to separate from the world around it). In addition to this work, Bruner began to look at the role of strategies in the process of human categorization, and more generally, the development of human cognition. This concern with cognitive psychology led to a particular interest in the cognitive development of children (and their modes of representation) and just what the appropriate forms of education might be. From the late 1950s on, Jerome Bruner became interested in schooling in the USA - and was invited to chair an influential ten day meeting of scholars and educators at Woods Hole on Cape Cod in 1959 (under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation). One result was Bruner's landmark book The Process of Education (1960). It developed some of the key themes of that meeting and was a crucial factor in the generation of a range of educational programs and experiments in the 1960s. Jerome Bruner subsequently joined a number of key panels and committees (including the President's Advisory Panel of Education). In 1963, he received the Distinguished Scientific Award from the American Psychological Association, and in 1965 he served as its president.  In the 1960s Jerome Bruner developed a theory of cognitive growth. His approach (in contrast to Piaget) looked to environmental and experiential factors.  Bruner suggested that intellectual ability developed in stages through step-by-step changes in how the mind is used. Bruner's thinking became increasingly influenced by writers like Lev Vygotsky and he began to be critical of the intrapersonal focus he had taken, and the lack of attention paid to social and political context. In the early 1970s, Bruner left Harvard to teach for several years at the University of Oxford. There he continued his research into questions of agency in infants and began a series of explorations of children's language.  He returned to Harvard as a visiting professor in 1979 and then, two years later, joined the faculty of the new School for Social Research in New York City. He became critical of the 'cognitive revolution' and began to argue for the building of a cultural psychology. This 'cultural turn' was then reflected in his work on education - most especially in his 1996 book: The Culture of Education. Bruner has been a strong proponent of the importance of culture in human development, including education as an aspect of that culture. Minds, he argues, have the properties they do not just because we are all humans, but because of the rules and rituals of child-rearing and formal education. Cultural rules and routines and the narrative forms people learn to use to interpret their own and others' lives are the themes of The Culture of Education (1996). Bruner's ideas are based on categorization. "To perceive is to categorize, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize." Bruner maintains people interpret the world in terms of its similarities and differences. Like Blooms Taxonomy, Bruner suggests a system of coding in which people form a hierarchical arrangement of related categories. Each successively higher level of categories becomes more specific, echoing Benjamin Bloom’s understanding of knowledge acquisition as well as the related idea of instructional scaffolding. For Wikipedias categorization projects, see Wikipedia:Categorization. ... In his book, “Child Talk,” Bruner carries out an investigation by video taping two baby boys from five months to 24 months. Bruner believes that language is learned by using it. He made observations of the babies playing games of peek-a-boo and hide-in-seek. The games provided scaffolding by the mother for the child until they could be removed and the child built up a “turn taking” and “attunement” with the mother. According to Bruner, “The child learns to concentrate in a sequentially ordered manner while keeping the overall “logical” structures of the games in mind. The constitutive reality is first accompanied by vocalizations and then anticipated by it. These vocalizations provide a skeletal or formal structure into which rich and more languagelike variants can later be introduced. They also provide a vehicle for practicing interchangeability of roles and for negotiating agency and other arguments of action. They provide the vehicle that makes possible their conventionalization and, finally, their transformation from formats into more flexible and movable speech acts.” Bruner’s, “mastery of linguistic reference” first steps take place early. The earliest and most primitive phase of joint attention is the establishment of sustained eye-to-eye contact. It is an important milestone for the mother. It provokes much vocalization from the mother and shortly after, from the child. The crucial next phase begins with the emergence of pointing by the child. The principal achievement during this phase is the child now becomes a giver of signals about objects desired and is not just involved in comprehending and decoding others’ efforts to direct his attention. It is in connection with pointing, that the concurrent appearance of phonetically consistent but nonstandard expressions by the child comes to indicate objects. At each step in the progression of language, the mother is establishing a placeholder at which more symbolic routines can be substituted later. Requesting is the next form of language use. Whether it is a request for goods or mere recognition, the object of request is to get somebody to deliver the goods. As with reference, requesting begins naturally, the child gesturing and vocalizing in a way that is interpretable. According to research, the mother is able to distinguish different kinds of cries- hunger, pain, etc. from three to four months. At about eight months the child begins to show the first referentially interpretable indication of what he is requesting. By this time, his demand signaling has become quite socialized. Bruner distinguished three main types of requests. The first is the request for an object. The second request is a type of invitation and the third is a request for supportive action, in which the child tries to recruit an adult’s skills or strength to help him achieve a desired goal. Bruner writes, “Requesting, like reference, goes through a negotiatory course towards socialization, and like reference, it is contextualized in conventional formats that conform as much to cultural as linguistic requirements.” On learning how to talk, Bruner’s believes that the only way to learn to talk to by using it communicatively. Language is a systematic way of communicating to others, of affecting their and our own behavior, of sharing attention, and of constituting realities to which we then adhere. Bruner concludes; “I have set forth a view of language acquisition that makes it continuous with and dependent on the child’s acquisition of his culture. Culture is constituted of symbolic procedures, concepts, and distinctions that can only be made in language. It is constituted for the child in the very act of mastering language. Language, in consequence, cannot be understood save in its cultural setting.” Sources: www.infed.org/thinkers/bruner.htm “Child Talk: Learning to Use Language”, Jerome Bruner, Norton & Co., Inc., Copyright 1983.