Autumn 2007

Early childhood education & care

Swings and roundabouts

Jenni Connor ponders current practices and perceptions of what young children know and can do and asks: ‘What can we take from the past into an uncertain future that will support the best learning outcomes for young children?’

The vulnerable child

There is an unstated assumption in the field of ‘early childhood’ that a young child is innocent and vulnerable. If we trace this view back through history, I think we will find that it derives from the work of Freud, Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi, and later, Bowlby.

Freud, of course, influenced our views of social and emotional development. Rousseau, Froebel and Pestalozzi introduced us to notions of ‘naturalistic learning’ and asserted the ‘essential goodness’ of the child. These were valuable contributions, but the views of these men were also paternalistic. Early nursery schools developed out of this urge to help young women to ‘be better mothers’ and the focus on ‘observing the developing child’ is with us in our practice today. John Bowlby’s Child Care and the Growth of Love (1965) was, for many of us, a seminal work. Bowlby presented convincing evidence of the effects on children of lack of personal attention. Being a man of his times, Bowlby’s work has chapters which might now cause us to blush, such as ‘Illegitimacy and deprivation’ and ‘Why families fail’.

In the past decade, Bowlby’s attachment theory has been expanded to encompass the notion of ‘attachment networks’, validating an important role for those who work closely with young children, and recognising that secure attachment relationships may be demonstrated differently in different cultural groups (National Research Council, 2001).

We need to recognise the power, for good and for ill, of these theorists on our daily work. We need to ask: Why is child care and early education still essentially seen as ‘women’s business?’ Does our practice genuinely take account of the reality of many children’s everyday lives?

The thinking child

Jean Piaget’s fundamental precepts of stage theory had a huge influence on early childhood education and care. He did not insist on fixing ages to stages, but he did assert that the sequence of ‘development’ is fixed, invariant and universal.

These tenets have now been seriously challenged. Cross-cultural studies have revealed that Piaget’s four discrete stages are not reflected in all cultures. Subsequent replications of Piaget’s experiments indicate that the thinking of young children is very similar to adults and that young children’s ability to reason and abstract had been underestimated (Lambert & Clyde, 2000).

To Piaget, we owe the notion of the thinking child, actively constructing theories about how the world works. This has encouraged us to provide stimulating learning environments with challenging problems to be solved. However, the domination of developmental theory in educational settings has also resulted in dangerous notions of ‘readiness’—we have often said: ‘that child is not ready for …’ From Piaget’s emphasis on logic, we have discounted other ways of demonstrating understanding and held deficit views of some children as ‘not measuring up’ to their peers in terms of ‘progress’. We have assumed, wrongly, that all children learn in a ‘Piagetian way’, through play and exploration. Our provision has often limited what children can show they know and understand.

The social child

We have moved, in the last 15 years, from Piaget’s tradition of ‘symbolic cognition’, in which the individual is in the foreground, to one of ‘situated cognition’, deriving from the work of Vygotsky, in which the ‘social’ is in the foreground.

This emphasises the social and cultural features of the learning context, and the power of interaction with more experienced learners to extend and challenge children’s existing theories about the world. In this model, the adult mentor does not stand back, waiting for learning to occur naturally, but intervenes to move the child to higher levels of understanding.

However, inevitably, given his historical context, some aspects of Vygotsky’s instructional model do not sit comfortably with early childhood practitioners operating in a democratic context. Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) can be a useful tool for instructional intervention; it can also be a rigid, didactic mode of interaction.

We can thank Vygotsky for highlighting the role of the educator in promoting learning and the significance of language in the social construction of knowledge.

But it is subsequent theorists (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976; Bickard, 1992; Rogoff, 1993) who offer models of ‘scaffolding’ and ‘guided participation’ which respect the child’s right to initiate and lead learning and to question established knowledge. Current perspectives also recognise that children’s spontaneous concepts provide a valuable foundation for developing more ‘scientific’ conceptual understandings. We now know that creating a resource-rich environment is not sufficient and that the dialogue between adult and child has to be intellectually stimulating to take children onto higher levels of thought and understanding (Fleer, 1992).

The complex learner

Over the past ten years, ‘brain research’ taught that early experiences are critical to an infant’s development. ‘Brain research’ changed our view of babies as ‘passive’ to ‘active and interactive’. As child care professionals, we are conscious of the need to provide contact, language and sensory stimulation to babies from the earliest time we are responsible for them.

The positive effect of these insights has been a new respect for the importance of childhood and investment in the early years. The downside has been a dangerous enthusiasm for making children ‘smarter’ earlier. There is a risk that adult-directed activities will fill up children’s days, leaving them little space just ‘to be’.

‘Intelligence’ was once regarded as ‘fixed’ for life and the western tradition of linguistic and logico-mathematical-scientific knowledge was most valued.

In 1983, however, Howard Gardner proposed a theory of ‘Multiple Intelligences’. This recognised that people have different and equally valuable cognitive strengths and contrasting learning styles. This acknowledges children’s strengths rather than focusing on ‘deficits’ and enables us to help each child think of themselves as a capable learner.

In recent years, there is also a recognition that social and emotional factors impact powerfully on the learning process. Collaborative and cooperative strategies are now often used to enhance children’s engagement with authentic, real-life problems and ideas. Early childhood education is paying more attention to developing children’s ‘dispositions’ to learn—persistence, curiosity and open mindedness—and recognising the benefits of involving young children in reflection on their own learning.

Where to from here?

Children have less life experience than adults and deserve our protection from obvious dangers. But, children also need the opportunity to take risks in a secure environment, to make mistakes and to learn from them. In many cultures, young children are responsible for themselves and siblings from an early age. In many cultures, young children contribute to the welfare and survival of their household and community. No child should live with poverty and exploitation, but we should respect the young child’s capacity to have power and agency in their everyday lives and learning.

Children are ‘thinkers’ from the earliest age. But they are not all ‘little scientists’ systematically solving problems through discovery. In many cultures, younger members of the group learn through imitation, practice and explicit feedback.

Children are social learners, but they do not always need adult mediation to learn. Solitary, reflective, intuitive and peer-mediated learning are also powerful.

Neuroscience has given us useful insights, but it may never tell us exactly what to do as educators. We need to give children a voice and learn to listen to parents so we can pick up on what works for them and their children, valuing collectivism and interdependence in our learning settings (Cannella, 1997), and we will need to use critical reflection on the range of educational research and our own long experience as our guide.

References

Bickhard, M (1992). ‘Scaffolding and self scaffolding: central aspects of development’. In L Winega & L Valsiner (eds). Children’s development within social context: Vol. 2 Research and methodology, (pp. 33–51), Erlbaum, Hillsdale NJ.

Bowlby, J (1965). Child Care and the Growth of Love, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Cannella, G (1997). Deconstructing Early Childhood Education, Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York.

Fleer, M (1992). ‘From Piaget to Vygotsky’ in Australian Journal of Early Childhood, Vol. 16, No. 3

Lambert, E & Clyde, M (2000). Re-thinking Early Childhood: Theory and Practice, Social Science Press, Katoomba, NSW.

National Research Council (2001). Eager to Learn: Educating our preschoolers, National Academy of Sciences, USA.

Rogoff, B (1993). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context, Oxford University Press, New York.

Wood, D, Bruner, J & Ross, G (1976). ‘The role of tutoring in problem solving’. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89–100.

Yelland, N (ed) (2005). Critical Issues in Early Childhood Education, Open University Press, UK.

Jenni Connor is a researcher and writer in early childhood theory and practice, based in Tasmania.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au