Jean Piaget

From Geography

The from origin Psychologist Jean Piaget was born in 1896 in Switzerland. Although he studied biology he became famous with his concepts about the through him related terms learning and structuralism. Especially the stadia of learning from children. Rather than being interested in a child's ability to give correct response to direct questions, he sought to understand the reasoning process that led children to give incorrect answers to the broader tasks he set before them to solve (US state university, 2007). According to Piaget there are 3 mechanics to gain knowledge. These are assimilation, accomodation and equilibration. Assimiliation is the ability to see an environment in relation to structures you made in your life. For example, you call a place a city according to your structures and knowledge about cities you made when you where a child. At that moment, you rely on your imagination (created through structures) about cities you have been build in your life. Second, accomodation is about the change of a structure in your imagination as a consequence of assimilation. In other words every day the structures about all kind of things in your environment are changing through assimilation. A reasonable and healthy midway between these two concepts is called equilibration. So through concepts and mechanics as assimilation and accomodation the structures are becoming more complex, you learn (Vervaet, 1990).

Example

These concepts are important, for example, for map reading. Since the map provides the basic tool for reporting spatial interactions, the ability to read maps meaningfully is a primary objective of instruction. Map reading, in contrast, requires the reader to develop meanings for a wide variety of symbols, some conventional print but others of varying degrees of abstraction, all arranged through conceived space in a relational two-dimensional environment (US state university, 2007). So the structures people built in their lives are important to understand as well as create different forms of maps.

References:

US State University (2007). Teaching of Geography - Effectiveness of Instruction, Maps and Spatial Concepts, Evaluating Geographic Learning.

Vervaet, E. (1990). Genetische epistemologie. Struktuur en genese, 1990, vol.3, p.3-29.

Published by Luuk Robers & Paul Leemans