Introducing Bruner

A Guide for Practitioners and Students in Early Years Education

Sandra Smidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415574204
• eBook ISBN: 9781136816697
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Sandra Smidt takes the reader on a journey through the key concepts of Jerome Bruner, a significant figure in the field of early education whose work has spanned almost a century. His wide-ranging and innovative principles of early learning and teaching are unpicked here using everyday language and the links between his ideas and those of other key thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are revealed.

Introducing Bruner is the companion volume to Introducing Vygotsky and is an invaluable work for anyone involved with children in the early years. The introduction of Bruner's key concepts is followed by discussion of the implications of these for teaching and learning. This accessible text is illustrated throughout with examples drawn from real-life early years settings and the concepts discussed include:

• how children acquire language
• how children come to make sense of their world through narrative
• the significance of play to learning
• the importance of culture and context
• the role of memory
• what should children be taught: the spiral curriculum
• how should children be taught: scaffolding and interaction.

The book also looks, crucially, at what those working or involved with young children can learn from Bruner, and includes a helpful glossary of terminology. This fascinating insight in to the life and work of a key figure in early years education is essential reading for anyone concerned with the learning and development of young children.

Chapter 1

The early life and times of Jerome Bruner

Introduction

In this opening chapter we look at what we know about the life and times of Bruner. We know a great deal, partly because he is still alive – aged ninety-four – and partly because he has written so much, including a book of auto-biographical essays. In a long and full and complex life he has influenced the thinking of many people, and his work has focused on aspects of perception, cognition and constructivism, the links between anthropology and psychology, mind, learning, language, culture, literature and curriculum. Although he spent most of his life working in his home country, he enjoyed nine years as Watts Professor of Psychology and Fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford University in the UK. It was here that his interest in cognitive development in infancy flourished and here that his reputation as a fighter for improved early childhood education developed.

Beginnings

Jerome Bruner was born in 1915 and grew up in a well-to-do middle-class family in New York. His parents, Herman and Rose, were Polish immigrants, and Jerome was the youngest of four. He was born blind, and it required two cataract operations when he was two years old to allow him to see. Yet he himself states in his wonderful autobiographical book In Search of Mind (Bruner 1983a) that his initial blindness had not ‘crippled’ him in any way, although he recognised that it may certainly have shaped him in some way. He says that the lack of peripheral vision which was the effect of the cataract operations made him continually have to move his head to see properly, and this, he says, ‘gave me a specious air of great alertness’ (Bruner 1983a: 14), and he relates this to the James-Lange theory which states that if we are sad because we cry then perhaps he, Bruner, was more alert because he had to move his head to keep up with life around him. This is our first encounter with Bruner’s sense of humour.

After his sight had been restored, the family lived in what was then a somewhat remote suburb of New York: Far Rockaway. They lived in a substantial comfortable house with a field of meadow grass behind it. It was a large and extended family. Apart from his parents there was Uncle Simon and Aunt Sarah. Then, in descending order of age, came his older sister Min, his half-brother Adolf and two cousins, all roughly ten or fifteen years older than Jerome. Then came Jerome himself, his sister Alice (two years older) and two more cousins, Marvin and Julia. Alice, born when Min was already fourteen, was ‘a mistake’, says Bruner, but he was ‘conceived out of my mother’s conviction that it is better to raise children in pairs’, and he jokes that he was ‘the child of a theory’ (Bruner 1983a: 10).

It was a traditionally Jewish family, and Bruner says that being a Jew has been a constant, if a sometimes problematic feature of his life, as constant a feature as being regarded as being ‘bright’ (Bruner 1983a: 7). The neighbourhood was a mixed one, and the family attended the local orthodox synagogue, but his father left that after a while and moved on to join the reform movement and a more modern synagogue.

Bruner’s description of his parents is unsentimental. He saw his father as rather a remote figure, someone who travelled for business and who was often absent from the family. To Bruner he seemed a somewhat adventurous figure. But he was a good storyteller (and this is significant as you will see as you read on) and a man of strong principles. Bruner illustrates this with the story of how, on one occasion, when he had been sent to buy a newspaper for his father he brought home a copy of Hearst’s paper Journal. His father was furious and scolded the child, telling him that Hearst was a wicked man who would do anything, even start a war, to sell his paper. For Bruner this was not a scolding but a tutorial. Bruner’s father was a reader, a music lover, a conversationalist, a conservative in politics, a snob and a social climber. He had a taste for lovely things. So he was a complex man, and his youngest son followed in his footsteps in many ways.

His mother was a woman who displayed little joyfulness or playfulness in her relationships with her children. When it emerges that she had fled from a ghetto in Poland where she had witnessed people fleeing and houses set on fire it is easy to understand her apparent lack of joyfulness. But for the young Jerome this lack of joyfulness marked his early years. It was she who first made him aware of what it meant, at that time, to be Jewish. He says that she never told him a story other than that of her early traumatic experiences in Poland. He shared nothing with her or she with him, and she showed little affection to her children. She also avoided ever praising them. He believed that this was linked to a sense of not wanting her children to become arrogant or to believe that they were special. Her own life experiences had shown her the dangers of this.

When Bruner was about six years old, the family moved to a new neighbourhood, and he went to school and started to make friendships away from the earlier ones with siblings and cousins. He was able to walk to school with his friends, and his views on his early education are interesting and certainly contribute to the passions he developed when he became a psychologist, a researcher and a writer. For him, school was dull and puzzling. He was eager to please and tried hard to do what he was told to do but was not always successful because he was never quite clear about what he had been asked to do. It is interesting that this man who has influenced the education of generations of children showed no evident intellectual curiosity. His family took little interest in school, and there was nothing in his early academic record that revealed the promise of an academic career. The only intellectual experience he remembered was what he calls his encounter with light years, through his reading of The Book of Knowledge, a children’s encyclopaedia. He found out that some stars were many million light years away – so far that they would travel for millions of years after they were extinguished. He found this such an astounding thought that it brought tears to his eyes as he looked at the night sky. He was eleven years old.

There was one teacher in his early schooling who impressed him. Her name was Miss Orcutt, and she talked to him of magical things such as molecules and Brownian motion. It was at this time that his father fell ill. Bruner, as a child, pleased to have his father at home more often, did not know that his father was dying of cancer. In the last months of his father’s life, Bruner had two nightmares. They are worth recording for what they tell us about the trauma of this early loss. They also illustrate how this young boy perceived many things in terms of problems to be solved. In the first nightmare, the young Jerome dreamed that everybody in the world had died. He was the sole survivor until a new generation appeared. The dilemma posed in the dream was how he could possibly tell them everything that had been known before. Perhaps this explains why to this day Bruner still has his father’s bound copy of the encyclopaedia, The Book of Knowledge. In the second dream Bruner is in a wasteland where there are no tracks. He is in some sort of wheeled vehicle. The problem he must solve is choosing a direction in which to go. This, says Bruner, was a choice that was ‘appalling and would wake me terrified’ (Bruner 1983a: 16).

In what he calls the last year of childhood he faced severe and tragic losses in his life, in addition to the loss of his father. His sister Min got married and left the home, and there was a fierce family dispute which caused Bruner to lose touch with his beloved cousins. In the months that followed he had two more disturbing dreams. In the first, an egg in a plain white egg cup cracks as he looks at it, and he is filled with terror. In the other he holds the secret knowledge of where he has hidden his father’s body.

Through his ambivalent relationship with his father, which he analysed later in life when he became a psychologist, Bruner took on a set of values as an adolescent communist and what he called a premature anti-fascist, denouncing the world of money and business although pragmatically never refusing the benefits bestowed on him by the trust fund his father had left to see him through college.

Adolescence

After the death of his father Bruner’s life became marked by movement and transition. He noted that his mother seemed to have come to life after the loss of her husband. Startlingly, her clothing became more colourful and bright. But she could not settle anywhere, and the effect of this was that Bruner attended six different high schools in four years. He discovered the pleasures of living close to the water. He explored canals and the harbour, took up fishing and acquired a boat with an outboard motor. Despite what he calls his ‘appalling secondary schooling’, his scholastic record was good, and he attempted many things, including running. But he felt it was a period of becoming self-conscious and ashamed of being Jewish. He talks of being a loner, someone who did not fit into any of the categories. He began to read widely: novels, travel books and poetry. He began to meet girls. In 1933 he went to college, to become a freshman at Duke University. He was seventeen, and Hitler had just come to power. Roosevelt had been elected. The country was deep into the Depression. Bruner’s life was about to change.

In the chapter in his autobiography describing his transition to adulthood he writes about the role of play in childhood. He was thinking about how the kind of commitment and the depth of commitment come about through socialisation within a community as young people and children begin modelling themselves on others or on the roles that are defined by their group. It is worth quoting here exactly what he says:

I suppose one of the distinctive things about play in childhood is that it buffers the player against too literal a commitment to whatever it is one is playing at, while at the same time giving the player a chance to explore possibilities. Many societies, indeed, are said to be highly permissive about play (and commitment?) in childhood and then mark by strict ceremony the ‘passing out’ into adulthood, at which point the child becomes a man or woman with strict limitations on what remains possible.

(Bruner 1983a: 20)

Bruner felt that there was little within his family that led him to seek deep commitment to anything. When he emerged from childhood he felt that he had become part of a world he did not understand. His father was dead; his family were scattered; his schooling had been disrupted; and it appeared to him that going to college offered him his first home after childhood. It was there, in this ‘home’, that he began to feel deeply and learned to commit himself politically, intellectually and academically.

Becoming a freshman at college

Bruner became a freshman at Duke and said that his first months were social, tribal, perfect – he calls this ‘an easy entry to the anteroom of grown-up society’ (1983a: 22). After that semester, however, things started to change, and for the first time in his life he encountered anti-Semitism when he was refused entry to a particular fraternity that did not accept Jews. At this time he drifted into a set which he described as being ‘brainy’. He developed a sense of identity and community and his choice for further study was psychology. After completing his undergraduate studies he moved on to graduate work. The times – the late 1930s – created something of a pressure-cooker atmosphere with intense political and intellectual discussion taking place everywhere. It was the time of the New Deal, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia. Hitler was lurking in the wings and the restlessness created by these significant and frightening events on the world stage was evident even in the smug and isolated atmosphere of Duke.

Bruner began to be aware of his own ideas and to become something of a rebel. He refused to attend chapel (a college requirement), wrote to the college paper and was labelled as a troublemaker. It was a label he liked, and he remains delighted that it sometimes applies to him to this day. Academically, within his chosen discipline of psychology, things were also polarised and politicised. The debate was about ‘whether learning was passive, incremental and a mirror, or whether it was stepwise, discontinuous and driven by hypothesis’ (Bruner 1983a: 27). In other words, was learning just taking in knowledge primarily through imitation or was it an uneven process involving the learner actively asking questions and seeking to find answers. Those who were opposed to the first, the continuity view, said it made man appear just a creature of his environment. They proposed the opposite view, that learning was driven by internally generated hypotheses either confirmed or refuted by events. We will return to this throughout the book. It was at this time that Bruner was introduced to the work of anthropologists, through the work of his friend Leonard Broom. This was to be one of the most important threads in his academic life.

His last year at Duke was 1938, marked by the bitter winding down of the Spanish Civil War. Bruner was invited to become a member of a Marxist study group, which he did, and he even played at being part of a communist cell for a while. After much thought and consideration, he moved on to Harvard.

Moving on to Harvard

Bruner spent the summer before starting at Harvard reading so when he arrived he was ‘full of psychology’ (Bruner 1983a: 32) although not quite knowing what to expect of his future studies in the field. In Harvard, at that time, the dominant strand within the psychology faculty was that of psychophysics, which involved a study of the senses and how they respond to external physical energies or stimuli. Bruner revolted against this and later, together with Leo Postman, set out on a series of experiments that resulted in what became known as the ‘New Look’, a revolutionary theory of perception. This held that perception is not something that occurs immediately but is a way of processing information involving selection and integration. This is a view of psychology that emphasises how people go beyond responding to stimuli to viewing and interpreting the world. It takes a more constructivist approach to perception and learning, seeing the learner as active and not passive. It is important in the analysis of his work, as will emerge throughout the book.

His time at Harvard was productive: he found the teaching style of the master–student relationship (an academic apprenticeship, perhaps) pleasing, and he became involved with fellow students, some of whom became lifelong friends. Bruner found that experimental psychology was where his interests lay, and he greatly enjoyed the topics covered – many of which became dominant themes of his own thinking and research, such as memory, perception, learning, motivation, neuro-psychology and animal behaviour. He greatly enjoyed the seminars where each of the graduate students presented a topic which was then followed by a free-for-all discussion. You can see how his awareness of not only what he was learning but also about how he was learning became an essential strand of his thinking.

All this took place to the backdrop of events in far-off Europe. Bruner described himself as being both a leftist and an interventionist in his feelings, wanting America to throw its weight behind Europe and to emerge from isolation. He developed a visceral and lifelong hatred of Hitler. By the time he got to the stage of writing his thesis he was so involved in the war that he chose as his topic the nature of the propaganda broadcasting of belligerent nations. He had visited Europe in the summer of 1939 as it veered towards war and had also met and married his first wife, Katherine.

The war years

Bruner worked initially at the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service in Washington, and his job was to monitor ‘enemy’ broadcasts although the USA was not yet at war. Later he was offered and accepted a job at Princeton, as Associate Director of the Office of Public Opinion Research, and he moved there with his wife and young son Whitley. It was during this phase that he first met Robert Oppenheimer and was fascinated by his brilliant mind, although he did not know in what work Oppenheimer was engaged at that time. But the bond of a love of psychology and the philosophy of physics was the basis for a firm and lasting friendship. Bruner grew restive and wanted to be more directly involved in what was happening in Europe and moved first to London and then to France, working for the Office of War Information. Still later his project became what was called ‘cultural relations with the French university world’, and whilst he was engaged in this he was in the privileged position of meeting and forming friendships with some of the great thinkers of the time. One of these was Sartre, who dominated the post-war Parisian cultural and intellectual scene. Eventually, despite the glamorous setting of Paris and the access to famous thinkers and artists, he began to miss university life and returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remained for the next twenty-seven years. It was here that his daughter was born and where his children grew up, went to school and eventually left to live independent lives. His son Whitley went on to be what Bruner calls an ‘Arabist diplomat’ and his daughter Jane a photographer.

Looking back, looking ahead

In this opening chapter we have looked at aspects of Bruner’s childhood and his early life, up till the end of the Second World War. We have learnt something about his early childhood, the possible effects of his early blindness and the loss of his father, and the impact of the war in Europe into which America was eventually drawn. In the next chapter we turn our attention to his work post-war, paying particular attention to the people whom he met who influenced his thinking. We are moving from the young student to the mature man.

Chapter 2

The life of the mind of Jerome Bruner

Introduction

In this second chapter we turn our attention to a brief outline of the main themes of Bruner’s professional life and to those who influenced him on the way. This is a scene-setting chapter and offers the reader an idea of some of the things we will be going into in more detail in the chapters that follow. The chapter draws on Bruner’s autobiographical essays In Search of Mind where the title itself tells us that he wanted to write more than a simple autobiography: rather, he had decided to write the history of the development of his own mind. He set the scene like this:

There is a way that things are different when one gets to the life of mind. You discover as an ‘intellectual’ that you have walked on stage into a drama already well scripted by others, a drama that has been going on for centuries before you made your entry. Your own intentions and thoughts become linked to ideas, issues and institutions that have long had a reality of their own. Karl Popper calls this world where ideas and paradigms and truths live independently of their origins World Three, a world of ‘objective knowledge’.

(Bruner 1983a: 56)

It is obvious that we are all influenced by others in our thinking, our learning and our work. Bruner charted some of the people who influenced him in the early years of being a psychologist as he worked on perception and learning and in his later work. We have already seen how he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The early life and times of Jerome Bruner
• 2 The life of the mind of Jerome Bruner
• 3 Mind and meaning
• 4 Brilliant babies
• 5 From communicating to talking
• 6 Learning to name and reference
• 7 Learning to ask and to question
• 8 Pedagogy: teaching and learning
• 9 Narrative: the making of stories
• A final word
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index