Video Upload Options

Social constructivism is a theoretical perspective that views knowledge, meanings, and aspects of social reality as being constructed and maintained through social interaction, communication, and shared practices ^[1]. It emphasizes that people develop understandings of the world through participation in historically and culturally situated social processes rather than acquiring knowledge independently of their social environment ^[2]. Language, social interaction, institutions, and shared systems of meaning contribute to the formation of concepts and categories that can come to be experienced as established or objective features of social reality ^[1]. Social constructivism also recognizes that these constructions are not necessarily fixed; they can be reproduced, negotiated, challenged, and transformed as social relations and contexts change ^[3]. The perspective has been applied to the study of knowledge, identity, institutions, norms, social categories, and other phenomena whose meanings depend partly on collective processes of interpretation and interaction ^[2][3]. It therefore emphasizes the role of social processes in shaping how people understand and organize their social world.