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I walked the Road to Nowhere in Iqaluit, Nunavut in the late 1980s as an embodied
female undergraduate. In the mid-2000s, I added wife and high school teacher to my identity,
and this time I walked the Road to Nowhere in the company of my yet unborn child. I initially
viewed the road as a destination to drink with friends, 15 years later the roads significance
changed to a healthy hike to appreciate tundra beauty. My view from Nowhere changed as my
situated experience of the world developed. My non-objective view from Road to Nowhere
challenges the empiricists agent who transcends subjectivity to allow a view from nowhere
(Cole, 1995; Harding, 2002). This composition explains my route to understanding the
intersection of knowledge, constructivism and learning.
Fosnot & Perry (2005) provided the constructivist perspective that knowledge is an
individual construction that cant be produced by another person (Fosnot & Perry, 2005, location
212 of 6917). This new information provided the disequilibrium (So, 2002) or cognitive
dissonance (Baviskar, Hartle, & Whitney, 2009) essential for building on my prior knowledge of
Prichards writing.
Learning can be hard and uncomfortable, having struggled through the disequilibrium of
new knowledge in this course, I will try as an instructor not to jump in with answers. I will try to
support and encourage my learners to develop their own mental map for understanding new
concepts. I have learnt from my own experience of learning about constructivism that presenting
learners with a deterministic lesson that does not provide opportunities for building their
knowledge.
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ETEC530-66A-Melanie Briar Jamieson, Assignment #1
From Iqaluit, NU, I was at the top of the world, but very much in and of the world. I deny
the premise that knowledge can be a view from nowhere because I believe that knowledge
must be situated with a sociocultural lens and the view has a someone, that is somewhere,
sometime, some culture, some gender, amongst some people.
References
Baviskar, S. N., Hartle, R. T., & Whitney, T. (2009). Essential criteria to characterize
constructivist teaching: Derived from a review of the literature and applied to five
constructivist teaching method articles. International Journal of Science Education, 31(4),
541-550. Retrieved from:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09500690701731121
Code, L. (1995). Taking Subjectivity into Account. In Ruitenberg, C. W., & Phillips, D. C.
(Eds.). (2012). Education, Culture and Epistemological Diversity: Mapping a Disputed
Terrain (Vol. 2). Springer. Retrieved from: http://resolve.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/catsearch?
bid=5824478
Harding, S. (2003). Representing reality: The critical realism project. Feminist Economics, 9(1),
151-159.
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ETEC530-66A-Melanie Briar Jamieson, Assignment #1
Jamieson, B. (2016, May 16). ETEC530 Weekly MeetUp. [Collaborative Notes]. Retrieved
from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ASebaExYTeXqtfPxFs_kVD1XU-
QL1q1BM0uxj-4dW4U/edit?usp=sharing
Jamieson, M.B. (2016, June 17). Thread: If there is no 'external world' then what is a 'real
world' task? [Online discussion group]. Retrieved from
https://connect.ubc.ca/webapps/discussionboard/do/message?
action=list_messages&forum_id=_325382_1&nav=discussion_board_entry&conf_id=_2
43562_1&course_id=_78783_1&message_id=_2616602_1#msg__2616602_1Id
Pritchard, D. (2013). What is this thing called knowledge?. New York: Routledge.
So, Winnie Wing-Mui. (2002). Constructivist Teaching in Primary Science. Asia-Pacific Forum
on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 3, Issue 1, Article 1. Retrieved from:
http://www.ied.edu.hk/apfslt/v3_issue1/sowm/sowm2.htm#two
Image
Illustration depicts stages of my situated learning through time and centered in the world and
intersecting with past constructs of the world. Baby, K-12, University, Career, ETEC530 (where
I briefly accepted a mind-independent world), and future self-understanding that there is a place
for emotion in situated learning and constructivism. These stages loosely reference Piagets
stages of cognitive development and Vygotskys zone of proximal readiness.
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ETEC530-66A-Melanie Briar Jamieson, Assignment #1