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that I wanted the status of being a college professor; I recognized that I envied this
position of power. At the same time, I could feel my own inner conflict if power meant
disempowering the students and I resented the way the teacher taught. I knew that the
way this teacher of Child Development was teaching was not meeting my needs as a
learner. I wondered if I could do better.
I recognized that I first needed to understand content in order to pursue my goals.
I was easily distracted during lectures and troubled by my inability to grasp complex
terminology. When terms such as accommodation, assimilation, and cognitive dissonance
seemed incomprehensible, I questioned my capabilities. I was hearing but not really
learning about Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s (1978) theory of cognitive development.
However, it was not until I was further into the labyrinth of teaching and learning that I
was able to fully comprehend its meaning, linking his theory to my practice.
I was experiencing what Piaget would call cognitive dissonance; the discomfort
felt when a discrepancy occurs between what is already known and new information, or a
new interpretation of what one already knows. There is a need to accommodate new ideas
to resolve cognitive dissonance (Santrock, 2001). In terms of my own cognitive
structures, accommodation of an altered image would be the key to enable me to progress
through the labyrinth.
Piaget espoused a constructivist pedagogy that stands in contrast to more deeplyrooted
ways of teaching. Traditionally, learning has been thought to be a mimetic activity,
a process that involves students repeating or miming newly presented information
(Jackson, 1986). Constructivist teaching practices, on the other hand, help learners to
internalize and reshape or transform new information. When new information is added to