Piagetian Concepts and Tasks
For the first subject: a woman, age 28, who actually works in the mental health field, a disequilibrating event was the divorce of her parents. For most of us, this would likely be a traumatic event, but not disequilibrating. In the case of this subject, though, she knew nobody: no friends, no relatives, and not even any acquaintances that were divorced. She was 13 years of age at the time, had a younger brother and younger sister, and was dealing with a new world in which married couples are not always in love, conflict in the home resulted in a split, and where 13 year old might be used as a go-between in disputes. She explained that the situation completely changed the way she looked at her social world.
Piaget distinguishes between assimilation and accommodation by essentially describing assimilation as an adjustment in known understandings versus accommodation as a method of developing entirely new understandings. In this situation, the subject was forced to do both things. She describes many instances where, as the divorce was developing, her brother and sister would come to her trying to understand what was going on. She began to act more as parent to them and less as sibling. In her old world, she understood the need to love siblings, but in this new world she had to nurture and care for them. It was assimilation where she adjusted the schema of familial love from sibling love and care to parental nurturing.
Her grades fell, she explained, as her parents’ divorce was finalized. In her old world, grades and social interaction with friends were the main functions of a 13-year-old girl. In this new world, priorities were different and she was more concerned with “fixing” her family and caring for her siblings than in pursuing grades. This is another case of assimilation.
As for accommodation, she explained that in her new world, she had to learn to be careful not to defend one parent over another as they each went to her to complain about the other. In her old world where parents love each other and stay married, her instinct would be to always defend her parents to other people, but in the new world she had to listen and offer no opinion whenever possible.
Piaget explains that the goal of this accommodation and assimilation is to eventually reach a state of equilibrium. This is when one reaches a balance and their world again “makes sense.” The strategy this subject used was actually put on her by the very people who shifted her world. As her grades dropped and it was apparent she was struggling to adjust, they put her in counseling. She explained that it was there she began to understand that this shift in her world was not her fault, not her responsibility to fix, and that it was likely the best situation for everyone involved. Not everyone would have this aid to reach equilibrium, but she attributes much of hers to the counseling.
The second situation, mine, is vastly different to the one from my subject. When I was a junior in college, my roommates and I were awarded a grant to perform a study overseas in Malawi, Africa in a small village called Kamsolo. I, or more specifically we, were in disequilibrium from the moment we landed in the country through at least the first few days. Coming from an economically stable, western, white, and frankly, big, society and then being thrown into a third world village in central Africa felt like putting on a muddy shirt after a nice shower. I was uncomfortable, awkward, and completely unsure of pretty much everything.
There were not longer any givens. At home, I shook hands with people I was meeting no matter the age. In Malawi, I was expected to greet elders from my knees, bow to those who ranked higher, and understand certain phrases in a language I had never heard before. We were using money that was worth less than our American money, looked nothing like it, and was constantly changing. When we had to purchase anything it was on not only a negotiation system, but also a bartering system (I traded a shirt for a table at one point). Water had to be boiled before drinking, food was unfamiliar to me, and cultural error was a pitfall at every turn. In addition, we were taller by nearly a foot, than most everyone else, were in better health, had more education, and were exponentially wealthier than anyone we were around.
Obviously, since I was there for two weeks, assimilation and accommodation were needed at nearly every turn. Assimilation was especially apparent when we hosted a village head and three of his advisors for tea. Now I had served and drunk tea before, but this required a shift in how I thought of it. Serving tea in Malawi was more of a ritual in that we had to serve people in a certain order, and the head we had to serve from our knees. In addition, the tea was loose leaf and had to be made in a pot with which none of us were familiar. We had to change the way we thought of tea as a whole, thought of making tea, and though of serving tea.
Accommodations were actually as common as assimilations because we had to make sense of a world where the culture, language, climate, and even economy was different. I was raised in a world, even if the entire world is not the same, where women were equals to me. In this culture, they were not only subservient to us, but they also washed our hands for us before meals, served us, and still did not eat with us. Though my instinct was to object or invite them, I had to change my thinking so that this world would make more sense to me.
Working with two other people helped a great deal. We were able to vocalize our assimilations and accommodations to one another. In addition, I was not forced to sort through ideas in my own head for adjusting. Instead, we were able to talk about it together and make a group assimilation or accommodation in many cases.
So how does looking at situations such as these two help me as a teacher? Simply put, students are constantly seeing a new world. Whether it is changes in their familial or social environment like with the first subject, or it is a culture shock change as it may be for an immigrant or even a student moving from another region of the country. I have a desire to teach middle school. At that age, if you think in terms of the ideas of not only Piaget, but also Kohlberg and Gilligan, students are constantly in flux. They are living almost entirely on assimilating and accommodating skills.
As teachers, we should help them nurture these instincts and skills. Belonging and having someone to share the experience with, whether it is the counselor in the first example or friends in the second, is what can help students make the shift more smoothly. The idea is to allow student to adjust to their world as it changes without totally disconnecting from it. I know I was lost and that only through the help of missionaries, translators and my friends was I able to keep myself conscious enough of my surroundings to make the necessary assimilations and accommodations.
