Jerome Bruner

Jerome Seymour Bruner ( born October 1, 1915 in New York) is a psychologist with educational interests. He made important contributions to cognitive learning theory and was an initiator of the so-called cognitive revolution in psychology.

Life

Bruner was born as the youngest of four children in a suburb of New York. With 16 years Bruner bought together with friends a motorized racing boat to which they tinkered around. In 1932 she won so the race for Manhattan.

From the age of 18 Bruner studied at Duke University psychology. In 1937 he graduated from there graduated with the Bachelor and went to Harvard, where he received his doctorate four years later.

1972, at the age of 57 years, Bruner crossed with his wife and a few friends the Atlantic in a sailboat. In an autobiographical essay of 1983 Bruner writes: "I think I had a good life ... psychology has certainly helped here - to provide psychology as a kind, questions, and not as a source of wisdom."

Services

Bruner taught psychology professor at Harvard (1952-1972), Oxford (1972-1980) and at the School of Law at New York University ( since 1980). He was co-founder of the Center for Cognitive Research at Harvard and also its director. With its developmental psychological studies he has introduced ground-breaking as controversial theories on the development of thought and speech. He points to the importance of the environment for learning. He highlights the importance of the mother -child interaction in the game in the preverbal phase for the training of logical structures in thought as the subject-object distinction in his theory of language acquisition (1983). He expanded Noam Chomsky's approach of the innate language acquisition system (LAD: Language Acquisition Device) to the parents of a language learning support system ( LASS: Language Acquisition Support System). Bruner's work in the field of developmental psychology and language learning are strongly influenced by the reception of the Russian development and language psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Critics argue that the presented case examples are class-specific and can not be generalized as such.

The human form according to Bruner concepts to simplify the environment and figure out how to act in this. The concepts are also used for categorization of the world, making them easier and thus will be operationalized. As a result of this theory researched Bruner different kinds of concepts and strategies of concept acquisition. Although his results are sometimes difficult generalizable to everyday life, they are nevertheless of systematic relevance.

Bruner argues that to gain the "meaning" as a central psychological concept more tangible. The construction of meaning - this is the question meant, how people from the confusion of physical sensations develop a sense - to be explored reinforced by Bruner. The importance of the self in the context of the culture reaches Bruner in recent writings on as well. An explanation of the human condition can not make any sense, " if it is not interpreted in the light of the symbolic world, which is the basis of human culture ," writes Bruner 1990.

Become known in the school practice is Bruner's proposal to organize learning material in the form of a spiral curriculum. But the modes of representation ( enactive = acting, iconic = pictorially, symbolically = language ) can be attributed to him, the development of the adolescent toddler he describes as an addition. Effective was his advocacy of discovery learning as a path to knowledge acquisition. He is seen as a counterparty of David Ausubel, who evaluates the performance of a teacher in the form of instructions and explanations above ( as a teacher lecture ). Bruner's learning theory has points of contact on a constructivist learning theory.

Awards

Writings

  • A Study of Thinking ( Social Science Classical Series). Wiley, New York, 1956 ( along with Jacqueline J. Goodnow, and George A. Austin ).
  • The process of education ( " The Process of Education", 1960). 5th edition Berlin -Verlag, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-590-14104-2.
  • Learn how to speak the child ( " Child's Talk. Learning to use Language", 1975). Verlag Hans Huber, Bern 1987, ISBN 3-456-83891-3 ).
  • Design of a teaching theory ( "Toward a theory instruction" ). Berlin -Verlag, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-590-14105-0.
  • The unknown think. Autobiographical essay ( "In search of mind essays in autobiography", 1983). Klett- Cotta, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-608-95524-0.
  • Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1987, ISBN 0-674-00365-9.
  • The Culture of Education. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1996, ISBN 0-674-17952-8.
  • Sense, culture and self-identity. On the cultural psychology of meaning ( "Acts of Meaning", 1991). Carl -Auer -Verlag, Heidelberg 1997, ISBN 3-89670-013-8.
Spiral approach Constructivism (philosophy of education) Balzan Prize Integrated Authority File
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