APPENDICES
3.3 Theoretical approaches to the study
promoting schools can only be successfully implemented if it is accompanied by the allocation of adequate resources in the form of finances, person power and skills. Achieving this would pave the way for providing a healthier future for South African children. Vergnani et al., (ibid) maintain that in order to develop health promoting schools, inter-sectoral collaboration is essential. This should be understood as collaboration of people from different disciplines, sectors and government departments – as ‘partners’ in education. Health promotion resulted in schools operating in a holistic manner in addressing the needs of the learners. Together with educators, social workers, counsellors and school community, school health services should ensure that orphans and other vulnerable children are identified and referred appropriately to psycho-social support services (Departments of Health & Basic Education, 2012). This would combat the prevalent fragmentation, territoriality and duplication of services, which, among other things, impact on the delivery of School Psychological Services.
3.3.1. Constructivism and social constructivism
Constructivism is relevant to this study because it sheds some light into how young people – with support from significant others – make sense of the myriad of challenges and opportunities around them. Hence, the study is anchored in a constructivist (that is post-modernist) paradigm according to which reality is socially constructed. Rather than a single objective reality, there are multiple realities, each related to the complexity of naturally occurring behaviour, characterized by the perspectives of the participants (McMillan, 2000). The reality that is spoken about in this case is experiential reality, the anecdotal experience of subjects. Reality, according to the constructivist point of view, is presented as an array of possibilities, choices and consequences.
Gautama Buddha, a constructivist, emphasized the role we play in who we are and how we find our world. “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world” (Mahoney, 2005). According to Mazzotti (2008) “constructivism refers to the notion according to which knowledge results from a process based on mental operations or judgements, or the capacity of judgement”. This ideology grants the mind an active role in giving form to experience. The mind is not merely appropriative; it is also assimilative and constructive.
Donald et al., (1997) emphasise that knowledge is a social construction which is developed and learned through social interaction. As Donald et al., (2002) state, people are seen as shaped by – and as active shapers of – their social context. Importantly, School Psychological Services are all about helping young people construct their world and be able to handle issues and challenges confronting them.
The constructivist perspective, as Mahoney and Lyddon (1988) put it, is founded on the idea that humans actively create and construe their personal realities. Its basic assertion is that each individual creates his/her own representational model of the world. This experiential scaffolding of structural relations in turn becomes a framework from which the individual orders and assigns meaning to the new experience. Central to the constructivist formulations is the idea that, rather than being a sort of template through which on-going experience is filtered, the representational model actively creates and constrains new experience and thus determines what the individual will perceive as “reality” (Mahoney & Lyddon, 1988, p. 200). According to Creswell and Miller (2000) constructivists believe in pluralistic, interpretive, open-ended and contextualised (e.g., sensitive to place and situation) perspectives toward reality. Learners, through School Psychological Services, are given the tools to create their own reality and personalise their own experiences, with support from specialists.
Constructivism views the living system (that is: human being) as a proactive agent that participates in its own life dynamics, not a passive conduit of energies, forces, and masses that are moved or modified only by being impacted by other external entities. “An active and motivated organism is one that remains engaged with the challenges of life and the developmental opportunities that those challenges present. Learned optimism, learned resourcefulness, and hope, for example, are expressions of such engagement” (Mahoney, 2005, p. 747). The paradigm is relevant in the sense that Psychological Services are needed to support young people as they navigate through life, grapple with reality (that is: subjective reality) in their journey to self-discovery, and in the process help them shape their identities. It is meant to equip youth with skills to engage actively with life and its challenges and participate in active
and interactive self-organizing processes. Constructivism is about the way people search for meaning, truth and untruths and make sense of it all. According to Donald et al. (1997, p. 41) “as human beings, learners cannot be understood as objects which are passively influenced by the forces around them, they are active agents who are constantly making meaning of their lives within and through their social context”. Hence the nature of the study is primarily qualitative, looking at how learners grapple with challenges and make sense of the world around them utilising various aspects of Psychological Services, with support from counsellors, educators and parents.
Dixon-Krause (1996) posit that “the constructivist movement has grown essentially from dissatisfaction with educational methods where rote memorisation, regurgitation of facts and the division of knowledge into different subjects, led to a situation where learners were not necessarily able to apply what they have learned in real life”. Knowledge should influence behavioural changes and an individual’s capacity to handle real life problems, which is the basis for School Psychological Services. Constructivism is the philosophy or point of view that
“people actively construct new knowledge as they interact with their environment”
(MoodleDocs, 2008, p. 1). According to Slezak (2007) the main underlying assumption of constructivism is that individuals are actively involved right from birth in constructing personal meaning that is their own personal understanding from their experiences.
Constructivism maintains that human self-organizing activities are embedded in social and symbolic contexts. According to Roeser et al., (1998), learners’ construction of meaning within different learning environments is the key mediator between the actual context and their beliefs,