Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture, Self

Canadian Psychology, Feb 2003 by Leendert Mos

Bakhurst warns against assimilating Harre's causal and habitual behaviours to monitored performances. Although Bakhurst may be sympathetic to Shotter's sphere of joint action, he is uneasy that even these conversations may be too readily submitted to explanations of constructivist irrealism. In a similar vein, Edward Reed, in his essay, "Towards a Cultural Ecology of Instruction" (chap. 7), argues that although Bruner's cultural psychology has promise with regard to reworking his mid-century transmission theory of education, it requires an even more radical, ecological, concept of culture to revitalize his earlier insights. Reed sees even in Bruner's later writings a tendency to overemphasize symbolic learning at the expense of enactive and perceptual learning. "Worse still, Bruner tends to rest all meaning making on culturally regulated activities and interaction... one which I believe should be resisted" (p. 118). Reed, like Bakhurst, is concerned that meaning-making comes to dominate individual experience and activity, and in its place proposes an ecological account of perceiving and acting.

Following the Gibsons, Reed claims that meaning and values are available as structured information, as affordances in the environment, which "provides a basic biological constraint on meaning making" (p. 118). It is precisely such an ecological grounding of perceptual learning - that makes symbolic culture possible. The enculturation process is then not one of transmission of ideas, or the inculcation of ways of meaning making, but bringing the child into a shared environment wherein her actions and perceptions, while guided by shared meaning, are themselves embodied in ecological information as a function of information (meaning) and affordances (values) in the environment. On this interactive or ecological conception of the self it does make sense, according to Reed, to invoke Bruner's concept of "spiral education" wherein a curriculum of "unfilled meanings" can fulfill the promise of developing the child's "conception of his own powers ... and so helping each individual to a better conception of their selves" (p. 122). Reed's ecological approach to education implies a distinction between culture and environment wherein Bruner's growth of the self reposes on more than one "enabling culture" and where there is no single mode of self-growth.

Howard Gardner and David Bakhurst provide insightful commentaries on Reed's contribution to this book. Gardner writing of his over 30 years acquaintance with Bruner, cannot find his mentor in Reed's ecological critique, and proceeds to render a fitting tribute to Jerome Bruner as educator:

Few scholars of our time have so exemplified the permanent student and perennial teacher. For over 60 years, Bruner has pursued the study of psychology in its multitudinous facets.... Bruner's approach to teaching is vivid and unforgettable. His infectious curiosity provides the entry point.... In his own words, 'Intellectual activity is anywhere the same, whether at the frontier of knowledge or in a third-grade classroom ..... Bruner approaches education neither as an armchair philosopher, nor as a perennial inhabitant of the classroom. He has been an active psychological researcher as well as a reflective social scientist and humanist, and the fruits of his own never-ending research and learning have continued to inform his educational philosophy. (pp. 128-129)