BRUNER

Jerome Bruner’s theory of education emphasises three main aspects of a child’s learning, beginning with Enactive, then Iconic and finally, Symbolic. As outlined below, each one of the three is another step along the road of learning. His work is solidly based on Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.

ENACTIVE: This term relates to physical learning, to be able touch something and learn through feeling and doing is the first stage.

ICONIC: This stage is about learning pictorially, looking to internal imagery to help you understand something. This stage relies on your memory of visual or other sensory association with the concept.

SYMBOLIC: Learning through symbols, abstract concepts, for example words and numbers. This stage is about being able to think about things that may or may not happen. This symbolic understanding of the world is very important in reflective thinking.

Bruner believes students should be encouraged to learn through their own actions and experiences. Teachers should be keen make these experiences interesting and exciting, to keep the children’s curiosity alive.

One key concept that Brunner brought forward is that of the spiral curriculum. This states that students can learn anything at any age, provided that it’s appropriate to their stage of development, and not used in a negative way. By using this concept of the spiral we can see that we are constantly revisiting what we have learnt, but at a higher level.
For example, when we teach a child to read, we cannot show them words and expect them to comprehend the information immediately, we first need to teach them letters and the specific qualities of each letter. Only when they understand the alphabet can we begin to show them how the sounds are used together to make words. From this example we can see that when learning words, children are constantly revisiting the alphabet, and reminding themselves of how each letter sounds. Each topic is progressively reinforced at every stage of development so the child is constantly revising in order to build up their knowledge and understanding.