Key Issues in Early Years Education

A Guide for Students and Practitioners

Sandra Smidt, Sandra Smidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135271053
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Key Issues in Early Years Education is the second edition of The Early Years: A Reader. This essential text for students and professionals is unique in its range of voices and topics and in its determination to see the child as central to learning and development. As in the first edition it not only has chapters written by key figures in the field of early childhood education and care but also by students on a range of early childhood programmes. Notable key figures from the first edition have been addedincluding Helen Penn, Henrietta Dombey, Hilary Faust and Charmian Kenner. Rosemary Nalden, who is involved in significant work with children in South Africa, has added her voice to give us examples of children acting both as learners and teachers.

This fully revised collection is a comprehensive investigation into the key issues in early years education which:

• provides a blend of real life examples and theory, drawn from a diversity of early childhood settings and classes

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• is written in an accessible voice

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• brings theory to life by linking it with practice

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• examines how children explore, express and represent their worlds.

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Many of the original sections have been revised and updated to take account of changes to the education system over the last decade. Two new sections in this edition are Children as Thinkers and Problem-Solvers and Learning: A Second Chance, which looks at adults learning something new and considers the similarities and differences that might exist between them and children.

This fascinating and highly readable book will be of interest to teachers, practitioners, students and anyone concerned with the care and education of our youngest children.

Chapter 1
What is basic for young children?

Lilian G. Katz

Lilian G. Katz is Professor Emerita of Elementary and Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and is currently Co-Director of the Clearinghouse on Early Education and Parenting (CEEP) at the University of Illinois. Professor Katz is the author of more than 100 publications, including articles, chapters and books about early childhood education, teacher education, child development and parenting of young children. She and her late husband Boris Katz have three grown children, five grandsons and one grand-daughter.

A group of young college students were discussing their reactions to their teaching practice experiences. One described her experience in deeply disappointed tones. Among her complaints was that the programme director refused to let the children have small animals in the nursery. I listened appreciatively for a while to the righteous indignation only the young and inexperienced can enjoy. I then asked her as gently as I could: ‘What are the chances that a child can develop into a competent adult without having had animals to play with in the nursery?’ ‘In other words’, I said ‘what do you believe is really basic for young children?’ A lively discussion followed, leading all of us to search our own assumptions for answers to the question: What does each child have to have for optimum development? My answer to this question is outlined below by offering six interrelated propositions that I hope will be helpful to you as you inspect your own answers to the same question.

All six propositions below rest on the assumption that whatever is good for children is only good for them in the ‘right’ proportions. In other words, just because something is good for children, more of it is not necessarily better for them. This generalisation applies to so many influences on children’s development that I refer to it as the ‘principle of optimum effects’. Among the many examples are attention, affection, stimulation, independence, novelty, choices of activities and so on. All of these can be thought to be good for children, but only in optimum amounts, frequencies or intensities. Furthermore, what might be optimal for one child might not be for another; that is why it is so important to get to know each child, as well as to know about them. With this principle as backdrop, here is my list of what every child has to have for healthy development.

A sense of safety

The young child has to have a deep sense of safety. I am referring here to psychological safety, which we usually speak of in terms of feeling secure, that is the subjective feeling of being strongly connected and deeply attached to one or more others. Experiencing oneself as attached, connected – safe – comes not just from being loved, but from feeling loved, feeling wanted, feeling significant, to an optimum (not maximum) degree. Note that the emphasis is more on feeling loved and wanted than on being loved and wanted. There are, no doubt, many children who are loved, but for a wide variety of reasons, do not necessarily feel loved.

As I understand early development, feeling strongly attached comes not just from the warmth and kindness of parents and caregivers. The feelings are a consequence of children perceiving that what they do or do not do really matters to others – matters so much that others will pick them up, comfort them, get angry and even scold them. Safety, then, grows out of being able to trust people to respond not just warmly but authentically, intensely and honestly.

Optimum self-esteem

This proposition applies to all children, whether they live in wealthy or poor environments, whether they are at home or at school, whether they have special needs or typical needs, whatever their age, gender, race, ethnic group or nationality. Every child has to have optimal – not excessive – self-esteem.

One does not acquire self-esteem at a certain moment in childhood and then have it forever. Self-esteem is nurtured by and responsive to significant others: adults, siblings and other children, throughout the growing years. Even more important to keep in mind here is that one cannot have self-esteem in a vacuum. Self-esteem is the effect of our evaluations of ourselves against criteria that we acquire very early in life. We acquire these criteria from our families, neighbourhoods, cultures, ethnic groups and later on from peer groups and the larger community. These criteria against which we come to evaluate ourselves as acceptable and worthwhile, and against which we evaluate and experience ourselves as lovable may vary from family to family. In some families, beauty is an important criterion for esteem; in others, neatness or athletic ability or toughness are the criteria against which one’s worth is evaluated or estimated. Consider for a moment that such personal attributes as being dainty, quiet, garrulous, pious, well-mannered or academically precocious, might constitute the criteria against which the young children we serve are evaluated as being estimable.

It is, of course, the right, if not the duty, of each family to establish what it considers to be the criteria against which each member is judged acceptable and upon which esteem is based. The processes and the patterns by which these judgements are implemented are not likely to occur at a conscious level in either formulation or expression.

One of our responsibilities as educators is to be sensitive to the criteria of self-esteem that children bring with them to the early childhood setting. We may not agree with the family’s definition of the ‘good boy’ or the ‘good girl’, but we would be very unwise to downgrade, undermine, or in other ways violate the self-esteem criteria that children bring with them to the early childhood setting. At the same time, we must also help children acquire criteria in the setting that serves to protect the welfare of the whole group of children for whom we are responsible. I cannot think of any way in which it could be helpful to children to undermine their respect for their own families.

Feeling that life is worth living

Every child has to feel that life is worth living, reasonably satisfying and interesting most of the time, and authentic. This proposition suggests that we involve children in activities and interactions about activities which are real and significant to them, and which are intriguing and absorbing to them. I have in mind here the potential hazard inherent in modern industrialised societies of creating environments and experiences for young children which are superficial, phony, frivolous and trivial. I suggest also that we resist the temptation to settle for activities that merely amuse and titillate children. Thus, criteria for selecting activities might include that they (a) give children opportunities to examine their own experiences and to reconstruct their own environments and that they (b) give adults opportunities to help children learn what meanings to assign to their own experiences.

Visits to early childhood programmes around the world often provoke me to wonder whether we have taken our longstanding emphasis on warmth and kindness, acceptance and love to mean simply ‘Let’s be nice to children’. As I watch adults being nice and kind and gentle, I wonder also whether if I were a child in such pleasant environments I would look at the adults and ask myself something like ‘Everybody is kind and sweet, but inside them is there anybody home?’

Children should be able to experience their lives throughout their growing years as real and satisfying, whether they are at home, in childcare centres, in playgroups, or in schools.

Help with making sense of experience

Young children need adults and others who help them make sense of their own experiences. By the time we meet the young children in our care, they have already constructed some understandings of their experiences. Many of their understandings or constructions are likely to be inaccurate or incorrect, though developmentally appropriate. As I see it, our major responsibility is to help the young to improve, extend, refine, develop and deepen their own understandings or constructions of their own worlds. As they grow older and reach primary school age, it is our responsibility to help them develop understandings of other people’s experiences, people who are distant in both time and place. Indeed, increasing refinement and deepening of understandings is, ideally, a lifelong process.

We might ask: ‘What do young children need or want to make sense of?’ Certainly of people, of what they do, and why they do it, of what and how they feel; and of themselves and other living things around them, how they themselves and other living things grow; where people and things come from, and how things are made and how they work, and so forth.

If we are to help young children improve and develop their understandings of their experiences, we must uncover what those understandings are. The uncovering that we do, and that occurs as children engage in the activities we provide, helps us to make good decisions about what to ‘cover’ next and what follow-up activities to plan. Keep in mind that one of our responsibilities as teachers is to educate children’s interests.

Authoritative adults

Young children have to be around adults who accept the authority that is theirs by virtue of their greater experience, knowledge and wisdom. This proposition is based on the assumption that neither parents nor educators are caught between the extremes of authoritarianism or permissiveness (Baumrind 1971). Authoritarianism may be defined as the exercise of power without warmth, encouragement or explanation. Permissiveness may be seen as the abdication of adult authority and power, although it may offer children warmth, encouragement and support as they seem to need it. I am suggesting that instead of the extremes of authoritarianism and permissiveness, young children have to have around them adults who are authoritative – adults who exercise their very considerable power over the lives of young children with warmth, support, encouragement and adequate explanations of the limits they impose upon them. The concept of authoritativeness also includes treating children with respect – treating their opinions, feelings, wishes and ideas as valid even when we disagree with them. To respect people we agree with is not a great problem; respecting those whose ideas, wishes and feelings are different from ours or troubling to us, may be a mark of wisdom in parents and of genuine professionalism in teachers and childcare workers.

Desirable role models

Young children need optimum association with adults and older children who exemplify the personal qualities we want them to acquire. Make your own list of the qualities you want the young children for whom you are responsible to acquire. There may be some differences among us, but it is very likely that there are some qualities we can agree that we want all children to have: the capacity to care for and about others, the disposition to be honest, kind, accepting of those who are different from ourselves, to love learning, and so forth.

This proposition suggests that we inspect children’s environments and ask: To what extent do our children have contact with people who exhibit these qualities?’ To what extent do our children observe people who are counter-examples of the qualities we want to foster, but who are also presented as glamorous and attractive?’ It seems to me that children need neighbourhoods and communities (as well as the media) which take the steps necessary to protect them from excessive exposure to violence and crime during the early years while their characters are still in formation.

Children need relationships and experience with adults who are willing to take a stand on what is worth doing, worth having, worth knowing and worth caring about. This proposition seems to belabour the obvious. But in an age of increasing emphasis on pluralism, multiculturalism and community participation, professionals are increasingly hesitant and apologetic about their own values. It seems to me that such hesitancy to take a stand on what is worthwhile may cause us to give children unclear signals about what is worth knowing and doing and what is expected.

Taking a stand on what we value does not guarantee that our children will accept or agree with us. Nor does it imply that we reject others’ versions of the ‘good life’. We must, in fact, cultivate our capacities to respect alternative definitions of the ‘good life’. My point is that when we take a stand, with quiet conviction and courage, we help the young to see us as thinking and caring individuals who have enough self-respect to act on our own values and to give clear signals about what those values are.

In summary, these six propositions are related to our responsibilities for the quality of the daily lives of all our children – wherever they spend those days, throughout the years of growth and development. We must come to see that the wellbeing of our children, of each and every child, is intimately and inextricably linked to the wellbeing of all children. When one of our own children needs lifesaving surgery, someone else’s child will perform it. When one of our own children is struck down by violence, someone else’s child will have inflicted it. The wellbeing of our own children can be secured only when the wellbeing of other people’s children is also secure. But to care for and about others’ children is not just practical; it is also right.

Reference

Baumrind, D. (1971) ‘Current patterns of parental authority’, Developmental Psychology Monographs 4: 1–102.

Part I
How young children learn

Much has been written about how young children learn. Piaget believed that young children learn through two processes which he called assimilation and accommodation. He saw young children not as empty vessels waiting to be filled up with knowledge, but actively seeking to understand the world in which they live. Through exploring their world using their movements and their senses, they begin to find patterns which allow them to categorise and classify things. Piaget believed that the role of adults in supporting learning was to provide children with a rich and stimulating environment, full of things they could explore. For him the interaction between child and adult was not essential. Vygotsky and Bruner, by contrast, believed that talk and interaction were essential for learning. For them, the role of the adult was more complex and learning more social than for Piaget. Over the past 12 years, we might argue that there have been two competing strands of development. One is a recognition of the importance of adopting a sociocultural and sociohistorical view of learning and development which sees the child as coming with a unique history and culture, which is his or her foundation for learning. The other is seeing the child as a potential consumer and educating the child to fulfil this role.

Nothing, however, disproves the evidence of how complex early learning is. The work of researchers, such as Colwyn Trevarthen (1988) has demonstrated that the connections between brain cells are laid down most rapidly in the early years and that the development of these connections – the very essence of learning and thinking – depends on stimulation. In some sectors of society, this has been misinterpreted to imply that learning requires expensive and specially produced equipment. Margaret Donaldson (1978) has shown how hard children work to bring their previous experience to bear on new situations and how important it is for children to consolidate their new learning in situations which allow this. Donaldson and others have shown how young children, exposed at too early an age to formal decontextualised learning, learn failure. Donaldson argues powerfully that young children, in order to be able to build on what they already know and can do, need to be in situations which make ‘human sense’ to them.

There are three key chapters in this part and it opens with one arguing the importance of play as a mode of learning and written by Lilian Katz. You may remember it from the first edition. Since the first edition, some people have started to question whether this emphasis on ‘play’ is very ‘Western’ and so, to redress the balance, we have invited Helen Penn to add her views. There is then an updated chapter on play by Janet Moyles.

Chapter 2
A developmental approach to the curriculum in the early years

Lilian G. Katz

In this chapter, Lilian argues that what is learned, and how it is best learned, depends on the age of the child. She goes on to say that how something is learned depends on what the something is as well as on the particular developmental characteristics of the learner. In essence, she poses three questions:

1. What do we think young children should be learning?
2. When should they be learning it?
3. How will it best be learned?

These questions are pivotal and are themes which are addressed throughout many of the pieces in this book.

Everyone responsible for planning a curriculum must address the following three questions:

1. What should be learned?
2. When should it be learned?
3. How is it best learned?

Responses to the first question provide the goals of the programme for which pedagogical practices are to be adopted. The second question is developmental, in that it draws upon what is known about the development of the learner. In other words, child development helps to address the questions of programme design. The third question turns specifically to matters of appropriate pedagogy itself; it includes consideration of all aspects of implementing a programme by which the programme’s goals can be achieved, depending on what is to be learned, and when it is to be learned. In other words, responses to one of the three questions are inextricably linked to res...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 What is basic for young children?
• PART I How young children learn
• PART II Understanding children
• PART III All our children
• PART IV Children as thinkers and problem-solvers
• PART V Understanding the written world
• PART VI Representing thoughts and feelings
• PART VII Learning: A second chance