ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some of the vibrancy of the current debate in relation to organicism. Generally, the organismic worldview highlights the directional movement of the organism towards ever-increasing integration against the background of a dynamic, evolving context. All phenomena are interdependent. In this situation the child is an active constructor of reality and not merely responding passively. As an active individual, the child constructs interpretations of environmental events, and continually acts and interacts with his or her environment in order to construct and reconstruct experience. In continuing the presentation of theories associated with organicism one can introduce the field of thinking broadly referred to as constructivism. Then it can be addressed in particular to the theoretical contributions of Jean Piaget, Eleanor Maccoby and Jerome Bruner, and also consider the significant contributions that connectionism and theory of mind are making to our theorizing about human development.
