Jerome Bruner

David R. Olson, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441193872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Jerome Bruner is the vanguard of "the cognitive revolution" in psychology and the predominant spokesman for the role of culture and education in the making of the modern mind. In this text Olson encourages the reader to think about children as Bruner did, not as bundles of traits and dispositions to be diagnosed and remediated, but as thoughtful, keenly interested, agentive persons who are willing and indeed able to play an important role in their own learning and development. Through the unique approach of combining commentary and conversation with Bruner, the author provides an insight into what it is like to engage with one of the intellectual masters of our time and highlights the relevance and importance of his contribution to educational thinking today.

Part 1

Intellectual Biography

Chapter 1

The Making of St Jerome

Our pedagogical objective . . . is to accustom teachers to thinking in more general terms about the intellectual life of children. (J. S. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction, 1966c, p. 100)

If you have even a remote interest in education, no doubt you have at least a name-recognition-level acquaintance with Jerome Bruner. In this chapter I shall try to explain how Jerome Bruner became, if not a household name, at least a rallying point for the educationally informed, the group that, Bruner would graciously insist, includes you, the reader.

Let me acknowledge that you do not really need me to tell you what Bruner has written about education. Bruner is an eloquent exponent of his own views on psychology and education and you will be amply rewarded by reading him, and if possible, catching one of his lectures, for yourself. Indeed, have a look at his The Process of Education (Bruner 1960) and you will be hooked, or look through his In Search of Pedagogy (Bruner 2006), his two volumes of collected papers on education and their helpful introductions. But if you stick with me, I will help you to pick up the main points and, in addition, tell you why I think they are important and where they lead. I’ll also suggest ways that I think those ideas could be expanded so as to increase their chances of playing as definitive a role in educational thought in our generation, as John Dewey’s were to play in his.

But first let me introduce Bruner to you. From a distance, for example if you are fortunate enough to see him on a platform addressing an audience, often of a thousand, you would be tempted to perceive him as an impossibly remote higher-up insider. He is routinely introduced to audiences as ‘America’s most distinguished living psychologist’1 and hearing him speak you have no reason to doubt it. His deep, sonorous voice, his erudition coupled with intellectual modesty, and most importantly his way of capturing the big ideas of the time are completely captivating to both highly specialized and more general audiences. On hearing him speak one could be forgiven for thinking that we are at a turning point in our understanding of the world; he is a saint leading a lost people to the Promised Land.

Bruner has earned the lofty regard with which he is held by his colleagues, disciples and generations of students. He has had an astonishingly productive career: 30 books, over 400 articles. In one particularly productive two-year period, 1956–58, when he was 40 years old, he published ‘22 papers and a book’ (Bruner 1980, p. 115). Most of us would do well to read that much in a two-year period. But he became a celebrity in educational circles with the publication in 1960 of The Process of Education, which insiders came to refer to as ‘St Jerome’s gospel’.

Not only has he been extraordinarily productive, but also he has been similarly influential. His original perspective on the psychology of perception brought him into a close personal friendship with Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb, who reinforced Bruner’s view by saying: ‘Perception as you psychologists study it can’t, after all, be different from observation in physics, can it?’ (Bruner 1983a, p. 95). Similarly, his work on child development led to a long friendship with the Kennedy family, John, Robert and Sargent Shriver, as well as Lyndon Johnson. He became an advisor to government, leading to such initiatives as Head Start and to the formation of educational research laboratories and institutions, including my own, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

But unlike most higher-ups, Bruner maintained, maintains, and demonstrates a remarkable intimacy with colleagues, students, and friends. In conversation as well as in his writing he treats both listeners and readers as ‘confidants’, that is, as close personal friends with whom he is sharing a particular and personal understanding. One becomes an ‘insider’ along with him. As a result one benefits not only from Bruner’s interesting and original ideas but also from participation in a community of thinkers and scholars. If you take up my suggestion to read some of Bruner’s books you will discover for yourself the directness of his discourse that leaves you with the feeling that he is talking to you about ideas, ideas that you share with him; you become an ersatz intellectual. If you keep it up you become a real one, a member of an intellectual community, in which you are invited to advance and explore your own ideas in the safety of comradeship. So Bruner’s network is not limited to those who know him well but to all those who join him in the intellectual quests he undertakes in his books.

No doubt you would like to know something of how one born Jerome Seymour Bruner came to be the Jerome S. Bruner who stands before us, revered and decorated. He was born in New York on 1 October 1915 into a well-off Reform Jewish family. He was born blind, an infirmity corrected only when he was two, and that left him with the thick glasses that, he says, made him feel self-conscious as a child, but which most of us these days take as the trademark of his erudition. Of his own schooling he wrote ‘[my] formal “secondary” schooling was appalling, though my scholastic record was satisfactory enough’ (1983a, pp. 17–18). He had a French teacher that he adored and from whom he quickly learned a second language. He was good at mathematics, enjoyed history, read widely, learned to sail, and in his final year attended a ‘tutoring’ prep school that prepared him for the college entrance Regents’ Examinations and he did well enough to get into a premier college, Duke University, from which he graduated in 1937, and later Harvard University from which he graduated with a Ph.D. in 1941.

He was fortunate in both of these institutions. At Duke he was introduced to psychology by William McDougall, the social psychologist who had recently arrived from Britain, and by Donald Adams and Karl Zener, fresh from Berlin, who taught Gestalt Psychology. At Harvard he found himself surrounded by the luminaries of the field: Gordon Allport, Edwin Boring, Karl Lashley, Henry A. Murray (of TAT fame), Talcott Parsons, and many others. And although he was captivated by Tolman’s idea that even the lowly rat possessed knowledge of its environment in the form of a ‘cognitive map’, he never became anyone’s disciple but, ever the avid student, captured ideas from many sources and turned them to serve his own hunches.

Two critical ideas were dominant in his thinking. One was that the basic cognitive processes involved ‘hypothesis testing’ and the other was that these hypotheses were produced from a mental model. Although we shall discuss these ideas more fully presently, I mention them here because they influenced very much the development of his career, our concern in this chapter. First, as mentioned, they led to his relationship with Robert Oppenheimer, who was then at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies (Einstein’s famed domicile), a relationship that helped to inspire radically new work on the psychology of thinking. Bruner wrote:

Robert Oppenheimer and John von Neumann had argued the year before that any efficient system of information seeking could be characterized by a ‘strategy’ that specified . . . not only what information would be taken up, but how that information would be searched for. This was the germ of the idea that started us off on the experiments that went into A Study of Thinking [1956]. (Bruner 1980, p. 112)

Now, to most of us even today, and certainly to almost everyone in the mid-twentieth century, hypothesis testing was something that scientists did; the rest of us just learned stuff. But that was why Bruner’s idea was revolutionary. He suggested that everyone, even young children, did not just respond to the stimuli presented to them but were already in fact busy trying to make sense of the world and to bring it under control. Not just ‘seeing’ but actually ‘looking’. In Bruner’s hand the mind came to be seen not as a receptacle for impressions but an active, as we say ‘agentive’, strategic, idea forming, indeed, thinking organ. Apparently Oppenheimer, a physicist, knew this fact from his attempts to build control systems for nuclear weapons; Bruner saw that it was true of the mind generally.

You cannot form and test a hypothesis unless you already know something. So, out had to go John Locke’s famous ‘tabula rasa’, the mind as a blank slate that experience wrote on. Rather, the mind had a ‘structure’. A structure is little more than what others had called a cognitive map, or what would later be called ‘mental representations’, but Bruner came to think of the contents of the mind as ‘mental models’. He wrote:

I was becoming much more attracted to studies of the ‘models’ we use for sorting out the world perceptually and conceptually. George Miller was probably as responsible as anyone for my choice. He is such enormous fun to talk to that one is lured into studying whatever he is interested in. (Bruner 1980, p. 110)

Mental models and hypothesis testing are core to everything that comes up later in our discussion of educational ideas, but I mention them here because Miller, and later Roger Brown, together with Bruner are largely responsible for what is widely known as the ‘Cognitive Revolution’, the turn in psychological research and theory from associationism and behaviorism to the study of mind ‘as a scientific object’ (Erneling and Johnson 2005). Bruner and Miller organized the first ‘Center for Cognitive Studies’ at Harvard where Fellows and Visitors rallied together to remake psychology2 by changing the very idea of mind from that of a passive record of what happened into that of an ongoing, dynamic information gathering and hypothesis testing system. It was the cognitive revolution that was to suggest to Bruner that he may, after all, have something to contribute to education.

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the Center for Cognitive Studies on the development of modern psychology. Not only did it draw a fleet of young, energetic scholars including Don Norman, Janellen Huttenlocher, Molly Potter, Jerry Fodor, Tom Bever, Noam Chomsky, and Pim Levelt, but also such distinguished visitors from around the world as Ernst Gombrich, Marx Wartofsky, Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky, I. A. Richards, Roman Jakobson, Ragnar Rommetveit, and Bärbel Inhelder. Here ideas about language and mental representation took shape and inspired everyone involved with the enthusiasm that comes from the perception that one is at the cutting edge of science.

Moreover, Thomas Kuhn (1962), a frequent visitor to the Center, had just published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which not only made the concepts of normal science and paradigm shifts part of everyone’s vocabulary but also, more importantly, instilled in cognitive psychologists and cognitive developmentalists the certainty that they had just lived through such a shift and were indeed the vanguard of the new paradigm! In fact they were; Kuhn had used some of Bruner’s work on perception and thinking as exemplary of how scientific breakthroughs occur. Scientific revolutions involve a shift to new frames of reference rather than simply adding more information to existing one. ‘Cognitive’ became what psychology was all about.

At the Center Bruner added three new dimensions to his work on cognition. One was through a relationship with Jean Piaget and his distinguished collaborator Barbel Inhelder. This link was what allowed him to think of mental models as not only growing in complexity with age and experience but also actually undergoing shifts in ‘modes’ of representation, an idea he found importantly applicable to education. Second, he established a relationship with Alexander Luria, a student of the renowned Lev Vygotsky, that led him to write an important introduction to Vygotsky’s book Thought and Language when it was first translated into English. Vygotsky’s insistence on the role of culture in human development became one of Bruner’s foundational ideas.

And third, Bruner began a series of research projects on infancy. As I mentioned, it is all very well to talk about models or cognitive maps in the mind but surely, one would have thought, such models are not innate. They must be learned through perception and action. Bruner suspected that even infants may be predisposed to form models, to ‘go beyond the information given’, and he began experiments which largely justified his expectations. Even infants do not passively perceive what is given by the stimulus, but work to bring any stimulation into some complete or graspable model. One of his experiments illustrated this nicely. He showed 3-month-old infants a picture on a screen that was slightly out of focus but which could be brought into focus by sucking on a pacifier. Sure enough, even these infants modified the stimulus to make it comprehensible rather than just storing or reacting to the incomprehensible stimulus. Furthermore, that when 2 or 3-month-old infants were shown a screen with a face on it they looked attentively; when it was out of focus they looked elsewhere. Thus, even infants try to make sense of the world or, as it came to be said, infants are active processors of information not passive recipients. If a stimulus remains uninterpretable, infants just look away. This observation resonates with any educator’s experience; if students don’t ‘get it’, their eyes cloud over or they just look away.

In 1972 Bruner gave up his position at Harvard to become the Watts Professor of Psychology at Wolfson College, Oxford University where he continued his infancy work and his work on child language, and in the process gave an enormous boost to Developmental Psychology in Britain. In 1980 he returned to America, taking up a post first at the New School and then at New York University where he is now University Professor.

A list of accomplishments, however enormous, gives an inadequate picture of a scholar like Bruner. Not only is he widely honored by a grateful public through numerous honorary degrees3 and awards such as the Bolzan Prize, Europe’s major intellectual award, he is venerated by his students who benefit from his encouragement and support as well as his often penetrating insights and advice. But even his peers and colleagues have found Bruner a source of information and inspiration. Fully half of the dozen eminent psychologists of his generation that were invited to contribute to the History of Psychology in Autobiography (Lindzey 1980), including Barbel Inhelder, Lee Cronbach, and Roger Brown, commented on the influence of Bruner on their work and on their discipline. Roger Brown, for example, wrote:

Jerome Bruner, then as now, had the gift of providing great intellectual stimulus, but also the rarer gift of giving his colleagues the strong sense that psychological problems of great antiquity were on the verge of solution that afternoon by the group there assembled. (Brown 1989...