Describe the role of culture or the social world in the transmission of knowledge for Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner.

The role of culture and the social world has a direct relationship with the transmission of knowledge. How humans learn is immensely influenced vicariously. The three predominant learning theorists; Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget would all agree that the social world impacts learning, though Vygotsky is the strongest advocate.

Vygotsky believes that culture and interactions with other people are the greatest contributing factors to cognitive development. His theory supports reciprocal teaching, collaborative learning and capacity building activities all of which are interactive strategies. He advocates that children need opportunities to engage in socially shared cognition and dialectical change to learn best. The Sociocultural Theory emphasizes the crucial nature of the interactions between learners and adults/more able peers in an apprentice-style transmission of knowledge. He views the child as a social creature who is able to appropriate new patterns of thinking when learning alongside a more competent individual.
Bruner actually altered his original views of learning being an autonomous process to incorporate some of Vygotsky’s views: knowledge building is most effective in a social context, not in isolation. He believes that learning is a social enterprise because children are social beings who thrive when provided with a variety of choices, including mentors. He accounts for differences and notes that people from different cultures make sense of events and concepts in different ways.
Alternatively, Jean Piaget believed that learning happened in four invariant stages- where learners acquire knowledge through a balanced approach of practice and feedback. He believed that active discovery activities would lead to the most authentic learning and that teachers are the facilitators of knowledge. Although Piaget emphasizes that development of cognitive structures occurs when children interact with their environment (through assimilation, accommodation and disequilibrium), he also postulates that that cooperating with other students heightens cognitive development. These social interactions encourage learners to re-evaluate their own notions, thereby increasing learning potential.

References
Cole M. and Wersch, J. V. (1996). Beyond the Individual-Social Antimony in Discussions of Piaget and Vygotsky Available online at: http://www.massey.ac.nz/%7Ealock/virtual/project2.htm
Davydov, V. V. (1995). The influence of L. S. Vygotsky on education theory, research, and practice. Educational Researcher, 24, 12-21.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-189X%28199504%2924%3A3%3C12%3ATIOLSV%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2
Driscoll. M.P. (2005). Psychology of Learning for Instruction (pp. 227-244; Ch. 7 – Interactional Theories of Cognitive Development). Toronto, ON: Pearson.
Vygotsky, Piaget, and Bruner- http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/instrctn/in5lk2-4.htm
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