Changing Minds

I wasn’t aware of the history of concept change research until reading diSessa’s article, A History of Conceptual Change Research: Threads and Fault Lines, and the idea certainly seems to get at one of the root occurrences in learning: educating not relatively unproblematic skills and facts but for the big ideas, the “concepts” that underpin knowledge. The “fault line” running through this scholarly tradition divides two opposing views. Student’s naïve ideas are either “1) coherent and strongly integrated, or 2) fragmented so as to allow disassembling, refining and reassembling” (diSessa, p. 267).

Some of the compelling threads that run through the history of conceptual change research include:

1.       Piaget’s notion of constructivism, that new ideas given way to old ones.

2.       Hume’s empiricist view that knowledge occurs through dispassionate observation.

3.       Descarte’s rationalist notion that knowledge is the product of thought.

4.       Susan Carey’s view that children’s views of science reflect the very history of science.

5.       The “theory theory” that claims that children have complete theories to explain the world like scientists to.

6.       The rational model that says that people hold onto misconceptions until they are convinced to replace them with another idea.

Another way of looking at the idea of concepts and how they might be replaced or evolved is to see the role of misconceptions in the broader culture instead of the individual child. Our culture is saturated with misconceptions. The misconception that celebrities’ views or actions are noteworthy, for example, crowds out the important issues. The misconception that consumer society is environmentally sustainable leads us all toward the cliff. One could even argue that there is a misconception that North Americans live in democracies, when the reality of corporate power actually muddies the democratic waters to such an extent that the word has lost much of its meanings.

How are cultural misconceptions eroded and replaced? How do the old false ideas that have sustained us through generations but that now threaten our survival get replaced? Perhaps the answer returns to the topic of the diSessa’s chapter … through the education of the individual.