Jerome Seymore Bruner (1915- )
Melissa Cowles
Personal History
Jerome Bruner was born October 1, 1915 to Herman and Rose Bruner, polish immigrants. Jerome was born with cataracts and was blind at birth. After two successful cataract surgeries as an infant, he gained his sight. Jerome Bruner married Kathryn Frost on November 10, 1940. They had one daughter, Jane, before they divorced in 1956. He married his second wife, Blanche Marshall McLane in 1960. He later married Carol Fleisher Feldman, who is his research partner and a fellow faculty member at NYU.
Education and Career
Jerome Bruner graduated from high school in 1933, and then from Duke University in 1937, with an A.B. degree. He received his A.M. and Ph. D. from Harvard in 1939, and 1941 respectively. After completed his studies, Dr. Bruner went immediately into military service, working in the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Europe, until 1944 when he became an Associate Professor at Harvard University. He served as lecturer at Salzburg Seminar and was a Visiting Member at the Princeton Institute for Advanced study until 1952. In 1952, he became a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and in 1961 became the Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. He worked in both capacities until 1972. During that time he was distinguished as Bacon Professor at the University of Aixen-Provence, and served as Master of Currier House, Harvard-Radcliffe College. In 1972, Warner was named Watts Professor of Psychology, Oxford University. He was a at G.H. Mead University Professor from 1980-1988 at the New School for Social Research. He 1991 he began working as both a research professor of Psychology and an adjunct professor of law at New York University. Dr. Bruner is still alive and continues to work at NYU. He shares a research lab with his wife, Carol Fleisher Feldman and his faculty page directs the reader to her website to learn more about current research.
Constructivist Theory
Bruner started as an adherent to the Constructivist Theory and his research and writing focused on how the individual student generates knowledge out of personal experiences. This theory is based on the idea that learners use existing knowledge as a base for constructing new knowledge. It emphasizes the importance of categorizations to learning. Bruner introduced the idea of a spiral curriculum and readiness for learning. As part of the readiness of learning, in The Process of Education (1960), Bruner included the idea of a spiral curriculum and described the process by saying, “A curriculum as it develops should revisit these basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them” (p. 13). The spiral curriculum includes the action stage (physical), iconic stage (imaginative), and the symbolic stage (abstract ideas lead to the generation of new ideas). Effective sequencing will facilitate learning, while poor ordering will interfere with the acquisition of knowledge. He was opposed to externals motivators such as grades and ranks.
Howard Gardner was greatly influenced by Bruner during the time they worked together on MACOS: Man a course of study, and through Bruner’s book, The Process of Education (1960). MACOS was a fifth grade curriculum that uses biological and anthropological approaches to answer the questions: What makes human beings human? How did they get that way? How can they become more so? It was used extensively in the sixties, but banned in the seventies as a casualty of the Soviet’s successful launching of Sputnik, and the resulting questions of what was America was doing incorrectly in schools that allowed the Soviets to claim this success (Beaudet, François T., n.d.).
Social Constructivist Theory
Learning does not happen in a vacuum. The social context affects the learner and the learning. The student is an inquirer. The teacher is an enabler. Bruner was influenced by this realization as he In the 60’s, Bruner began to be influenced by the work of Vygotsky, in the 1960’s, which was due in part to the formers work with Alexander Lurria (Bruner, 1996). As a result, Bruner embraced the more social and political perspectives of learning instead of the intrapersonal mode, which had been his focus. Learning does not happen in a vacuum. The social context affects the learner and the learning. The student is an inquirer. The teacher is an enabler.
Bruner was influenced by the Darwinian concept of evolution and how it was necessary to understand this concept in order to understand growth and development. He differed in that he felt that each learner had an individual pace of development. He saw that culture was a shaping force to the mind and self-concept.
In 1966, Bruner offered his Theory of Instruction in his book The Culture of Education. It is based on these four tenets: predisposition to learn, structure of knowledge, modes of representation, and effective sequencing. Predisposition to learn, states that learners are moved towards a love of learning, both general and specific, by their experiences and their motivational, cultural, and personal factors. Parents and teachers are highly influential to this predisposition to learn. The structure of knowledge should occur in such a way that it is most easily grasped. Categorization is extremely important to the structure of knowledge. Knowledge must be in a simple form that is recognizable to the student based on his or her experiences.
J. Foley, 1994, expounds on Bruner’s idea of scaffolding, which is providing an appropriate social context in which the child can learn, and in which the caregiver or teacher can gradually expect more from the child, with less assistance. It is a process that moves from macro / global to micro / individual, and speaks of the more distinct types of scaffolding that have grown out of Bruner’s original idea. Cazden later differentiated between vertical and sequential scaffolding in 1983, while Applebee and Langer focused on the idea of instructional scaffolding and developed the following criteria for successful instructional scaffolding: student ownership of the learning event, appropriateness of the instructional task, structured learning environment, shared responsibility and transfer of control.
Current Research
On the NYU faculty page, Bruner describes his current research interest by saying, I'm interested in the various institutional forms by which culture is passed on -- most particularly in school practices and in legal codes and legal praxis. In both examples, my concern is with how canonical forms create a dialectic with the "possible worlds" of imaginative art forms. My preferred method of work in both instances is the anthropological-interpretive. (2011)
Selected Publications
Mandate of the People, 1944, was published just after Bruner retuned from his military service in the Psychological Warfare Division. Five years later, he published On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm, which states,
Through a process of trial-and-check, to borrow a phrase from Professor Woodworth (8), the organism operates to discover whether any given expectancy will "pay off." It is a very sick organism, an overly motivated one, or one deprived of the opportunity to "try-and-check" which will not give up an expectancy in the face of a contradicting environment.
The Process of Education and Toward a Theory of Education were published in 1960 and 1966, respectively. It wasn’t until 1987 that Bruner wrote Actual Minds, Possible Words. In 1991, Acts of Meaning was published, followed by the Culture of Education, 1996,where he writes,
For you cannot understand mental activity unless you take into account the cultural setting and its resources, the very things that give mind its shape and scope. Learning, remembering, talking, imagining, all of them are all made possible by participating in a culture. (pp. x-xi)
Bruner’s more recent works include Minding the Law, 2000 and Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life, 2003.
References
Beaudet, F.T. (n.d.). Man: A course of study (MACOS). Retrieved from http://www.anthro.umontreal.ca/personnel/beaudetf/MACOS/MACOS.html
Bruner, J.S. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner J. S. (1960). The process of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. S. & Postman, L. (1949). On the perception of incongruity: A paradigm. Journal of Personality. 28(2), 206-223. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1949.tb01241.x
Foley, J., (1994). Key concepts in ELT: Scaffolding. ELT Journal, 48(1), 101-102.
JS Bruner. (2011, May 16). Re: Research [Web comment]. Retrieved from http://www.psych.nyu.edu/bruner/
Melissa Cowles
Personal History
Jerome Bruner was born October 1, 1915 to Herman and Rose Bruner, polish immigrants. Jerome was born with cataracts and was blind at birth. After two successful cataract surgeries as an infant, he gained his sight. Jerome Bruner married Kathryn Frost on November 10, 1940. They had one daughter, Jane, before they divorced in 1956. He married his second wife, Blanche Marshall McLane in 1960. He later married Carol Fleisher Feldman, who is his research partner and a fellow faculty member at NYU.
Education and Career
Jerome Bruner graduated from high school in 1933, and then from Duke University in 1937, with an A.B. degree. He received his A.M. and Ph. D. from Harvard in 1939, and 1941 respectively. After completed his studies, Dr. Bruner went immediately into military service, working in the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Europe, until 1944 when he became an Associate Professor at Harvard University. He served as lecturer at Salzburg Seminar and was a Visiting Member at the Princeton Institute for Advanced study until 1952. In 1952, he became a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and in 1961 became the Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. He worked in both capacities until 1972. During that time he was distinguished as Bacon Professor at the University of Aixen-Provence, and served as Master of Currier House, Harvard-Radcliffe College. In 1972, Warner was named Watts Professor of Psychology, Oxford University. He was a at G.H. Mead University Professor from 1980-1988 at the New School for Social Research. He 1991 he began working as both a research professor of Psychology and an adjunct professor of law at New York University. Dr. Bruner is still alive and continues to work at NYU. He shares a research lab with his wife, Carol Fleisher Feldman and his faculty page directs the reader to her website to learn more about current research.
Constructivist Theory
Bruner started as an adherent to the Constructivist Theory and his research and writing focused on how the individual student generates knowledge out of personal experiences. This theory is based on the idea that learners use existing knowledge as a base for constructing new knowledge. It emphasizes the importance of categorizations to learning. Bruner introduced the idea of a spiral curriculum and readiness for learning. As part of the readiness of learning, in The Process of Education (1960), Bruner included the idea of a spiral curriculum and described the process by saying, “A curriculum as it develops should revisit these basic ideas repeatedly, building upon them until the student has grasped the full formal apparatus that goes with them” (p. 13). The spiral curriculum includes the action stage (physical), iconic stage (imaginative), and the symbolic stage (abstract ideas lead to the generation of new ideas). Effective sequencing will facilitate learning, while poor ordering will interfere with the acquisition of knowledge. He was opposed to externals motivators such as grades and ranks.
Howard Gardner was greatly influenced by Bruner during the time they worked together on MACOS: Man a course of study, and through Bruner’s book, The Process of Education (1960). MACOS was a fifth grade curriculum that uses biological and anthropological approaches to answer the questions: What makes human beings human? How did they get that way? How can they become more so? It was used extensively in the sixties, but banned in the seventies as a casualty of the Soviet’s successful launching of Sputnik, and the resulting questions of what was America was doing incorrectly in schools that allowed the Soviets to claim this success (Beaudet, François T., n.d.).
Social Constructivist Theory
Learning does not happen in a vacuum. The social context affects the learner and the learning. The student is an inquirer. The teacher is an enabler. Bruner was influenced by this realization as he In the 60’s, Bruner began to be influenced by the work of Vygotsky, in the 1960’s, which was due in part to the formers work with Alexander Lurria (Bruner, 1996). As a result, Bruner embraced the more social and political perspectives of learning instead of the intrapersonal mode, which had been his focus. Learning does not happen in a vacuum. The social context affects the learner and the learning. The student is an inquirer. The teacher is an enabler.
Bruner was influenced by the Darwinian concept of evolution and how it was necessary to understand this concept in order to understand growth and development. He differed in that he felt that each learner had an individual pace of development. He saw that culture was a shaping force to the mind and self-concept.
In 1966, Bruner offered his Theory of Instruction in his book The Culture of Education. It is based on these four tenets: predisposition to learn, structure of knowledge, modes of representation, and effective sequencing. Predisposition to learn, states that learners are moved towards a love of learning, both general and specific, by their experiences and their motivational, cultural, and personal factors. Parents and teachers are highly influential to this predisposition to learn. The structure of knowledge should occur in such a way that it is most easily grasped. Categorization is extremely important to the structure of knowledge. Knowledge must be in a simple form that is recognizable to the student based on his or her experiences.
J. Foley, 1994, expounds on Bruner’s idea of scaffolding, which is providing an appropriate social context in which the child can learn, and in which the caregiver or teacher can gradually expect more from the child, with less assistance. It is a process that moves from macro / global to micro / individual, and speaks of the more distinct types of scaffolding that have grown out of Bruner’s original idea. Cazden later differentiated between vertical and sequential scaffolding in 1983, while Applebee and Langer focused on the idea of instructional scaffolding and developed the following criteria for successful instructional scaffolding: student ownership of the learning event, appropriateness of the instructional task, structured learning environment, shared responsibility and transfer of control.
Current Research
On the NYU faculty page, Bruner describes his current research interest by saying, I'm interested in the various institutional forms by which culture is passed on -- most particularly in school practices and in legal codes and legal praxis. In both examples, my concern is with how canonical forms create a dialectic with the "possible worlds" of imaginative art forms. My preferred method of work in both instances is the anthropological-interpretive. (2011)
Selected Publications
Mandate of the People, 1944, was published just after Bruner retuned from his military service in the Psychological Warfare Division. Five years later, he published On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm, which states,
Through a process of trial-and-check, to borrow a phrase from Professor Woodworth (8), the organism operates to discover whether any given expectancy will "pay off." It is a very sick organism, an overly motivated one, or one deprived of the opportunity to "try-and-check" which will not give up an expectancy in the face of a contradicting environment.
The Process of Education and Toward a Theory of Education were published in 1960 and 1966, respectively. It wasn’t until 1987 that Bruner wrote Actual Minds, Possible Words. In 1991, Acts of Meaning was published, followed by the Culture of Education, 1996,where he writes,
For you cannot understand mental activity unless you take into account the cultural setting and its resources, the very things that give mind its shape and scope. Learning, remembering, talking, imagining, all of them are all made possible by participating in a culture. (pp. x-xi)
Bruner’s more recent works include Minding the Law, 2000 and Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life, 2003.
References
Beaudet, F.T. (n.d.). Man: A course of study (MACOS). Retrieved from http://www.anthro.umontreal.ca/personnel/beaudetf/MACOS/MACOS.html
Bruner, J.S. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner J. S. (1960). The process of education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. S. & Postman, L. (1949). On the perception of incongruity: A paradigm. Journal of Personality. 28(2), 206-223. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1949.tb01241.x
Foley, J., (1994). Key concepts in ELT: Scaffolding. ELT Journal, 48(1), 101-102.
JS Bruner. (2011, May 16). Re: Research [Web comment]. Retrieved from http://www.psych.nyu.edu/bruner/