Questions and Answers: Childhood Education
Friday, April 10th, 2009
What does curriculum mean in early childhood education?
Today, we have an impressive body of knowledge about child development, learning theory and principles of pedagogy. Decades of research confirm the value and long-term, positive effects of early childhood programs that emphasize active learning and social competence. I believe that an early childhood curriculum should offer educators a vision of what an age-appropriate program looks like and a framework for making decisions about how to achieve that vision.
Why would people who work with infants and toddlers need a curriculum?
Caring for babies should occur in a safe and healthy environment. It should also take advantage of the unique learning opportunities that occur during this period. The brain development that takes place in the first 3 years of life is astounding. Infants and toddlers are discovering whether the world is a place they can trust and whether they can assert their independence and feel capable. They develop trust and autonomy in the context of relationships. A curriculum framework for programs serving infants and toddlers must reinforce relationships as the focus of decision making.
When children play, why do parents always complain that they are not learning in school?
Some parents need to learn that the appearance of children actively engaged in play may mask the reality of their learning. Extensive research indicates that children who engage in pretend and socio-dramatic play increase their literacy skills, cognitive development, particularly problem solving; social competence and capacity to generate new connections in a creative way. Some ways to let parents know what children are learning in a class are the following: (a) save the children’s drawing and writing samples to show progress over time, (b) with photographic slides, document learning experiences that are active and show the uses of different materials and thematic props at parents’ meetings, (c) save language experience charts for display, (d) four-for-the-day: send four one- or two-line notes each day to four different parents informing them of something that their children participated, and (e) consider creating a collaborative newsletter with other teachers that records children’s comments about their school activities.
What are the differences between work exploration and play?
Children usually define a particular activity as play if they autonomously chose to do it; they might define the same activity as work if the teacher asks them to do it. Philosopher John Dewey suggested a continuum of drudgery:…. work…. play…. fooling and proposed that a balance between work and play is appropriate for schools. Exploration is when we find out what something or someone can do, and play is when we see what we can do with it or another. Work, exploration and play can be satisfying or challenging but exploration and play are typically self-motivated and pleasurable, even when serious.
Do Piaget’s explanation of the stages of children’s intellectual development mean that parents will have to wait until the child is ready to learn something?
Children are active learners who continuously ask questions and seek answers to those questions, which in turn raise new questions. While their questions and answers differ from adult ways of thinking about the same experience, children’s thinking follows predictable sequences that arise out of spontaneous convictions. Their convictions about what is true or right are not learned from adults and are quite uniform across all children at a certain level of reasoning. For example, when children of 4 or 5 years of age are asked who is older, their father or their grandmother, they will generally respond that their father is older. They based this spontaneous conviction on the idea that their father is taller than their grandmother, so he must be older. We can observe these early spontaneous convictions in children’s ideas about written and spoken language and in their ideas about what is real, what is alive and the origins of things that exist in the physical world. This helps us understand that young children are always ready to learn and to think about things that interest them. However, they will build their ideas on what they already know and will not come to know something in the same way that an adult knows.
Are all children of the same age at the same developmental level?
This is not the case. There will be a wide range of development across domains of knowledge in any child. Thus, a child may exhibit a sophisticated understanding of how to solve a math problem but have a great deal of difficulty with reading. Or, at an earlier age, a child may have a sophisticated understanding of walking but have difficulty with talking. According to Piaget, the differences in the rates of development are attributed to for factors: maturation - the factor most closely linked to age, disequilibration - the conflict created in the child’s mind when new information does not fit into the child’s existing knowledge and social interaction and experience - the kinds of interactions the child has with people and things in the world. Differences in development are the result of the different kinds of experiences each child has.
Do I have to prevent children from engaging in conflicts in order to create a peaceful environment?
Conflicts occur naturally among young children. Some may be surprised to know that children actually learn important social and cognitive skills as they engage in conflicts with peers and siblings. During these interactions, they develop logical thinking, perspective taking and problem solving and they practice rich and often complex language. When parents begin to think of conflicts as a natural phenomenon and of children’s ability to manage conflict as a developing capability, they will approach this area just as they do other areas of children’s development, such as language and motor ability. The adults’ goals, then is to support children’s learning as they work through conflict situations.
Won’t conflicts lead to aggressive behaviour?
Conflict is an interaction in which children object to each other’s actions; in other words, a mutual opposition or disagreement. Generally, children engaged in a conflict are trying to resolve the issue at hand. Most conflicts do not involve aggressive behaviours. However, aggression, which is defined as an unprovoked attack, can precipitate retaliation. Conflicts, too, can develop in different ways. As adults observe children’s conflicts, they will decide whether the interaction is a constructive conflict, through which children learn, or a destructive conflict, which escalates in intensity as tempers flare and frustration rises.
How can adults create a peaceful environment and help children resolve conflicts?
It has been pointed out that “peace is not the absence of conflict” (Wichert, 1989, p.xi). a peaceful environment depends on two conditions: first, that children want to resolve conflicts; and second, that they have the ability to do so. The first condition can occur in an environment that is a caring community where adults and children value and demonstrate cooperation, kindness, respect and concern for others. Adults can create the second condition by providing children with words to use in conflict situations.
