Piaget and Dabrowski?

Could they be on the same track?

Working on the beginnings of my dissertation proposal, I felt that I needed to ask a more basic question than the involved process in what will be my proposed research questions. Part of the dissertation is referencing Dabrowski and the Theory of Positive Disintegration as impacts on gifted and 2e behavior.

In turn, I went back to my roots as a math educator and started searching on text about constructivism. I fell in love with the theories all over again. Constructivism is the backbone to how I teach math and communicate with other people. As I read through these articles again, I realize how far I fall short of doing all of it, while also making connections to other areas that are important to me.

Safe learning spaces has been important to how I teach math and how I have learned to be a leader in my non-profit work. Yet, in the world of cognitive diversity, creating safe space has such a broader meaning. The intensity of individuals who tend to be more overexcitable presents additional challenges.

Dabrowski discusses two main areas of importance here that refer to gifted people: 1) overexcitablities and 2) the challenges of integration for these people. Of interest to me here is that TPD gets at an intense reintegration as a result of many different factors that cause conflict.

In contrast, here is an explanation of the self-regulatory process for learning in the constructivist model. Does this discussion share a similar process for self-regulation and positive disintegration.

A self-regulatory process of struggling with the conflict between existing personal models of the world and discrepant new insights, constructing new representations and models of reality as human meaning-making venture with culturally developed tools and symbols, and further negotiating such meaning through cooperative social activity, discourse, and debate, (p. ix)”

(Kaya Yilmaz, 2008, p. p. 166)

To me, in both cases, the individual is seen as going through a struggle to make sense of the world, by constructing new schema to accommodate discordance in perception of reality.

When we are in the classroom of gifted and 2e, as well as other cognitively diverse learners, how difficult is it for an educator trained on basic pedagogy and even the use of tools needed for their populations to understand what is happening with the learner during moments of struggle, intellectual conflict, or even the various stage of disintegration?