Supporting Children's Learning in the Early Years

Linda Miller, Jane Devereux, Carrie Cable, Gill Goodliff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317479802
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Supporting Children's Learning in the Early Years is aimed at early years practitioners who are developing their knowledge and understanding of professional practice through studying at undergraduate level. The book encourages readers to consider their professional development as reflective practitioners, building on and supporting the government agenda to provide quality provision for young children and their families.

Combining theory and practice, and bringing together current research and thinking in a broad range of areas, the book covers:

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• Learning environments: young children as learners, assessment of learning, well being and children's rights, diversity and inclusion.

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• Learning and development: children's development including social and emotional development, literacy and mathematical development, the potential of ICT, fostering creativity, musical development and knowledge and understanding of the world.

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• Reflective practice: the learning environment, safeguarding and wellbeing, the reflective practitioner.

Throughout, the contributions in this book encourage the reader to consider the diverse range of experiences which young children bring to early years and early primary settings and suggest ways in which they can be supported. The book will also be a valuable and unique resource for training providers of a range of courses at further and higher education level that prepare people to work with, and lead in, early years settings in the UK.

Part 1
Supporting learning

Linda Miller

Introduction

At the heart of all that practitioners in the early years do on a daily basis is children’s development, learning and wellbeing. However, in order to successfully plan for children’s learning, practitioners need to be prepared to reflect on why they do things and whether they are truly considering the needs, backgrounds and aspirations of all the children and parents with whom they work. The chapters in this part represent a holistic view of learning, teaching and assessment. Themes which run through the chapters include: developing an understanding of children’s rights and promoting the welfare of children; the importance of developing practice underpinned by an understanding of diversity and equal opportunities; the significant part that listening to children and watching them engaged in experiences and activities plays in assessing and planning for their learning, and especially in supporting them in developing the disposition to learn; and the role of responsive relationships between children and adults and between practitioners and parents and carers in supporting learning.

Recent thinking about learning suggests that the ‘what, who and how’ of learning are crucially interlinked. In Chapter 1 Angela Anning and Anne Edwards explore the importance of relationships in enabling children to develop the disposition to learn. They set out four key features of a socio-cultural approach to understanding learning, illustrated by case studies, which exemplify these features and in which the role of responsive relationships between adults and children is seen as crucial to successful learning.

Promoting children’s welfare and wellbeing is a fundamental aspect of early learning and is the responsibility of all those who work in the early years. In Chapter 2 Gerison Lansdown reviews the history, and considers the limitations, of an approach that has focused on the views of adults rather than children and the consequences of this for children. She argues that we need to reconsider our current understanding and how this relates to children’s rights, how we enable children’s voices to be heard and how we take these voices into account in decisions that affect them. In Chapter 3 Iram Siraj-Blatchford and Priscilla Clarke explore the complexities of identity formation, the factors that influence the way children see and feel about themselves and the implications for their learning and achievement. The authors explore differences in practice and provide useful suggestions as to how practitioners and settings may move forward in developing effective practice to promote children’s self-esteem and wellbeing through an approach which foregrounds diversity, equality and learning.

Early years practitioners know the important role that parents and carers play in children’s learning and development and how important it is to work in partnership Working closely with families of children with learning difficulties or disabilities is especially important but can be challenging for both practitioners and the families concerned. In Chapter 4 Alice Paige-Smith considers this experience from the perspective of parents and how the rights of parents to be fully involved in decisions relating to and provision for their children, are interpreted. Chapter 5 focuses on one particular parent, Claire Young, who has home-educated her three sons. In the chapter she draws on her diary entries over some eight years to reflect on what she and her three children have learned together. She provides important insights into the process of learning, and particularly the importance of tuning in to children’s interests and motivation, which as a parent she is in a unique position to do.

In Chapter 6 Margaret Carr explores the transformation of her personal and professional thinking about models for assessment of children’s development and learning. She discusses how she moved from a ‘deficit’ model to an alternative ‘credit’ model of assessment which values children’s participation in the process and enhances their disposition to learn. Children’s participation in their own learning is the focus of Chapter 7, where Alison Clark draws on a study which explored ways of listening to the views of young children. The Mosaic approach utilises a range of methods: observation, child-conferencing, cameras, tours and mapping to gain perspectives on children’s daily lives in a setting. The author suggests that this approach can be used as a tool to help children reflect on their own lives and enable them to develop new skills and competencies and increase their ability to communicate with adults. She suggests it can also provide a context for communication between the adults involved in the children’s lives. In the final chapter in this part of the book, Chapter 8, Jane Devereux provides a rationale for observing children and offers suggestions as to ways of observing that have direct implications for practice. She discusses how information gathered by watching children at play or involved in other activities, provides insight into their current interests and ways of learning, their next steps and also possible concerns.

Chapter 1
Young children as learners

Angela Anning and Anne Edwards

Recent thinking about learning suggests that the ‘what, who and how’ of learning are crucially interlinked. In this chapter Angela Anning and Anne Edwards set out four key features of a socio-cultural approach to understanding learning, illustrated by case studies which exemplify these features and in which the role of responsive relationships between adults and children is seen as crucial to successful learning.

The what, who and how of learning

Decisions about curricula for young children are often gambles. We simply can’t predict exactly what knowledge and kinds of expertise will be needed 20 years from now. However, we can be pretty certain that the very young children of today need to become adults who are able to adapt to work practices that will change throughout their working lives and able to cope with the changing demands coming from families and communities. Those of us who are involved in the education of young children therefore need to focus on helping children to become resilient learners, to enjoy learning and to feel that they are people who are able to learn. This is no small challenge but it is a safe bet that investment in children’s dispositions to learn will pay dividends.

This point is made clearly by Schweinhart and Weikart (1993: 4) when they discuss the lasting change that occurred as a result of High Scope interventions with disadvantaged children in the USA in the 1970s:

The essential process connecting early childhood experience to patterns of improved success in school and community seemed to be the development of habits, traits and dispositions that allowed the child to interact positively with other people and with tasks. This process was based neither on permanently improved intellectual performance nor on academic knowledge.

Schweinhart and Weikart are pointing to dispositions. We can see dispositions as orientations towards the world around us. We therefore need to support children’s orientations or dispositions so that they approach activities in ways that allow them to be open to the learning opportunities to be found in them. Schweinhart and Weikart’s emphasis is on helping children to see themselves as people who can learn. Their focus is on creating learners. An emphasis on disposition was also central to New Zealand early years curriculum (MoE 1993) where they referred to dispositions as ‘habits of mind’ and ‘patterns of learning’ which provide the foundation for future independent learning.

We know that these habits of mind are shaped in young children’s interactions with others and in the opportunities for being a learner that are available to them, particularly in their families and in early childhood settings. We can think about dispositions as learnt competences and within-person characteristics that orient behaviour. It seems that is the view taken by Schweinhart and Weikart. However, seeing disposition as only within the child does not explain how a child may be oriented to think and act as a competent mathematical thinker in one setting but not in another. Therefore it may help to think about dispositions as within person propensities which are brought into play when they are supported by the situation. These pathways, the opportunities for participation or action, and dispositions to engage may vary between settings.

One advantage of that view is that it allows us to see how important it is to strive for some alignment between the support children receive in early childhood education and the other settings in which they are able to learn. This is an argument for multi-professional collaboration and for strong reciprocal links between home and early education settings. These collaborations can help children to be seen as learners in all settings so that dispositions to engage are supported across settings.

Focusing on pathways of participation does not mean that we can overlook what is being learnt. Participation is not only about behaviour. It involves developing an increasingly rich set of concepts to be used when we try to make sense of the world, and it highlights children’s use of the concepts that they encounter in these socially sustained pathways. Early educators therefore have a difficult task. They need to attend to what children are learning, how they become people who are learners and how children learn and how that learning is supported.

Traditionally, early education has been based on a developmental view of how children learn. Important as this is, recent thinking about learning suggests that the what, who and hows of learning are crucially interlinked. For example, a disposition to seek out the patterns in a striped shirt is nurtured by previous success as a mathematical thinker. This success is, in turn, connected to a developing capacity to deal with mathematical concepts and the ways that the setting is oriented to mathematical actions, through the resources available and the actions of adults and other learners.
[…]

A sociocultural view of learning: learning and context

There has been a lot written about sociocultural approaches to learning which focuses on participation as behaviour and underplays Vygotsky’s original emphasis on learning as a change in how a child understands and acts. One of the major contributions of Vygotsky, the forefather of sociocultural approaches, was to help us see that how we think is revealed in how we use material and conceptual tools. He was interested in behaviour, but only to the extent that it revealed how we think so that he could then work on enhancing that thinking.

A quick example. If a 4-year-old is doing a jigsaw puzzle she may approach it randomly, or she may look at the picture on the box and start to sort pieces by colour, or she may identify the flat-sided pieces and start to build the frame. What she does reveals the concepts she is bringing into play as she completes the puzzle. She will, of course, have learnt those concepts while doing puzzles with others who know how to approach them and who shared that knowledge with her in their actions and language. She will have learnt a lot in those interactions. As well as how to set about doing a puzzle she will have learnt persistence, the care of resources, that puzzles are a worthwhile activity and that working with others involves sensitivity and turn-taking.

Because they are concerned, at least in part, with thinking and the use of knowledge, sociocultural approaches do have aspects in common with Piagetian ideas about learning. They acknowledge that learning occurs as a result of active involvement with the environment; and that children construct, that is build up, increasingly complex understandings over time. So it is likely that very young children will operate, at times, with misconceptions about the world. However, sociocultural approaches are more clearly rooted in analyses of culture and context. They tell us that children learn what is important in their culture through interactions in and with that culture. They focus on how language carries the meanings and values of a particular culture. Also they remind us how opportunities for learning can vary from setting to setting.

Let us, therefore, look at four of the key features of a sociocultural approach to understanding learning: […]

1. the impact of cultural expectations (i.e. we learn to do what we think the context demands of us);
2. the relationship between our sense of who we are and what we do (i.e. between our identities, dispositions and our actions);
3. an understanding that learning occurs through interaction with others (i.e. through language and imitation);
4. an understanding that learning occurs through and in the use of resources that are valued in our cultures (i.e. through using resources in the same way as others do).

Cultural expectations

Sociocultural psychology tells us that learning is a process of being able to participate increasingly effectively in the world in which we find ourselves. At birth, that world is fairly straightforward, albeit heavily emotionally charged, consisting of the presence or absence of sources of food and comfort. It soon becomes more complicated so that, for example, young children learn that although rowdy behaviour might be fine in the garden it is not appropriate in the supermarket.

By the time children are ready to enter compulsory schooling it is usually expected that they know how to participate as pupils, rather than members of a family, when at school. There is also the expectation that they have begun to acquire particular ways of thinking, such as how to be someone who can solve a puzzle or handle a book. These expectations are, of course, more likely to be fulfilled by children from some backgrounds than from others, simply because different families will provide different pathways of participation with different resources and opportunities for sense-making, with the result that different cultural expectations will have started to shape children’s thinking.

These are important ideas for early educators. They help us understand two important issues. First, children who arrive at early education settings from different cultural backgrounds are likely to bring different ways of making sense and engaging. It is therefore necessary to try to understand what these are and to value them as important and valued prior learning. Second, they remind practitioners of how complex, yet crucial, the learning environment is and how it is worth investing time...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General introduction
• Part 1: Supporting learning
• Part 2: Learning and development
• Part 8: Learning environments – children and adults
• Index