Participatory Learning in the Early Years

Research and Pedagogy

Donna Berthelsen, Jo Brownlee, Eva Johansson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135857097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The early years are an important period for learning, but the questions surrounding participatory learning amongst toddlers remain under-examined. This book presents the latest theoretical and research perspectives about how ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) contexts promote democracy and citizenship through participatory learning approaches. The contributors provide insight into national policies, provisions, and practices and advance our understandings of theory and research on toddlers' experiences for democratic participation across a number of countries, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Norway.

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Participatory Learning

Issues for Research and Practice

Donna Berthelsen

A goal of this book is to present research about participatory learning with very young children in group care settings, as well as to understand, through that research, how participatory learning can be understood across cultures. The purpose of this particular chapter is to review key issues that inform this area of research. Across cultures, within the broad sociocultural tradition focused on children’s learning, there is no clear set of theoretical principles nor a related set of methodologies associated with such research. The chapters in this book provide a range of studies informed by different theoretical perspectives in the sociocultural tradition and different research methodologies. While the chapters represent diverse standpoints, there is a common view that individuals and their contexts are intricately linked and that children’s learning is a socially and culturally mediated process.

The diversity of views presented in this book indicates that, across cultures, there are different understandings about children’s participatory learning and early childhood practice. While we recognize that there will be social and cultural diversity in the ideas that will inform practice with young children in group care settings, a case for cross-cultural research can also be made. Researchers and practitioners in early childhood education learn from looking across cultures to understand both the manner in which others’ understand their world as well as to surface our own taken-for-granted assumptions about young children. When beliefs and practices from other cultures and national contexts are considered then one’s own assumptions become more apparent.

Assumptions about how social and cultural experiences influence young children’s learning have been largely ignored in the early childhood education literature until quite recently. Theory stemming from Euro-American academic research presented a view that understanding of young children’s development could be generalized across societies. A shift in emphasis that has given more attention to culture and social contexts has replaced the previous reliance on normative theories. These theories described child development “as occurring in linear and universal stages” and had informed early childhood education practice for several decades (Lee & Johnson, 2007, p. 234). Sociocultural perspectives have now become prominent drawing particularly on the theories of Vygotsky (1978, 1986) and Rogoff (1990, 2003). In these theories, culture becomes the most important system in which human development occurs. Children participate within their cultural context and, from an early age, they are agents of their own learning and active makers of meaning.

In a number of chapters in this book, there is a focus on relationships as an important learning context. Children’s learning is influenced by their relationships with others, both peers and adults, as well as through the relationships between adults within children’s life spheres. Relationships are formed when two partners accumulate a history of interactions that bring expectancies from past experiences into their future interactions with each other. The issue for adults working with young children is to understand that these relationships are contexts for learning through which the child can be afforded agency and power. Learning is influenced by the child’s interest in, and responsiveness to, the behavior and feelings of others in that context. Learning is sustained by social and affective engagement with others. Through communication and collaboration in relationships, learning occurs because activities have embedded meanings about values and traditions in that cultural context (Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff, Paradise, Arauz, Correa-Chavez, & Angelillo, 2004).

A major focus in this book is the experiences of children aged less than three years who participate in group care settings. In theory and research in early education, there has been less focus on participatory learning and democratic approaches to practice with very young children. However, many young children across national contexts now participate in group programs from a very early age. Their experiences deserve greater attention. Increasing evidence indicates the importance of this period to children’s development and learning (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2004). Across the chapters in this book, the experiences of very young children in group settings are explored. Those settings are variously termed, across national contexts, child care, nursery, kindergarten, or preschool. In the following sections of this chapter, four themes are explored. These sections focus on culture and context and young children’s learning; sociocultural theorizing and learning; participation as a right; and learning as participation.

CULTURE, CONTEXT AND YOUNG CHILDREN’S LEARNING

Culture can be understood as the complex set of separable but related contextual factors experienced by a social group over time. Culture is not a static entity but a dynamic system that is constantly in the process of reconstruction. It is “history in the present” (Cole, 2005a, p. 3). Culture can also be understood in a more abstract way as the systems of shared meanings transmitted within and across generations through social interaction (Miller, 1999). Culture as a concept is more complex than merely considering it as an entity with clear-cut boundaries, such as nationality and ethnicity, because essentially these are merely social addresses or identity categories that underestimate the complexity in the meaning of culture (Rogoff, 2003).

Understanding the conceptual complexity in the idea of culture is a necessary precondition in exploring how individuals learn from a sociocultural perspective (Pein & Hodkinson, 2007). The manner in which culture is often discussed implies some hierarchical properties. There is a complicated and intertwined relationship between the culture of any specific context (e.g., a child care center) and the culture at large. There is the culture that prevails and is created within a child care classroom, within the child care center, and within the organization that manages that center. There is also culture in the wider sense that influences the manner in which any local, specific practice may be, in one way or another, an expression of the culture at large; although it must be recognized that this is a dialectical and reciprocal process since individuals also have an influence on the expression of the wider culture. The larger idea of culture may refer to any number of dimensions. It can be the traditions in a way of life or the beliefs and practices of a group. However, it can also be used, as formerly described, to refer to institutions and to smaller units of social space within those institutions. Research that takes account of culture must inevitably address the complicated interplay between the wider cultural context and the local context of practice.

Significant cultural meanings are embedded and constructed in the everyday settings in which children participate. To understand the experiences of children, a close look at these contexts that are most proximal to children’s lives is important. Research on children’s learning is most often conducted within these proximal contexts to examine the practices that constrain or support children’s agency and influence. The cultural practices within those proximal contexts, such as a child’s early education program, are likely to instantiate cultural themes from both the institutional culture in which the program may be embedded as well as the wider culture. Thus, local practices within the social and physical space of the program are likely to be characterized by common themes and values from the broader cultural context expressed in a variety of ways to children through activities and interactions. For example, children’s independence may be highly valued in the wider culture and practices within a child care program may reflect that theme. Thus, the child learns valued behaviors associated with independence. In another cultural context, interdependence may be more strongly emphasized and practices to learn about cooperation will be embedded in the everyday experiences of the children. Children’s learning is therefore framed by such themes which are valued in the wider culture and, consequently, will be expressed through adults’ actions and interactions with children in a specific local context, an ecological niche (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1986).

Bronfenbrenner argued that every child’s ecological niche is unique because each child experiences and takes part in different relationships and processes of interactions across proximal contexts, such as home and the out-of-home care setting. While the relationships and experiences within an ecological niche are influenced by values and practices within the wider culture, nevertheless, within many national contexts, there is increasingly greater social heterogeneity by social and economic circumstances and diversity of the ethnic composition in societies. There may not be common values and beliefs about children and childhood. Differences in the beliefs and values of families and in how dominant and minority views in the wider culture are represented in out-of-home care contexts remains a key issue for practice in early education. Penn (1999) drew attention to these critical issues in early childhood practice with very young children, babies, and toddlers. She emphasized the importance of recognizing the diversity and complexities in the lives of children and their families; as well as the contradictory values and expectations that children experience across family and out-of-home care settings. Teachers’ own values and beliefs also infuse their practices and these may often be at odds with those of the families with whom they work. Thus, it is important to examine how wider and local cultures may have mutual influences on children’s learning.

SOCIOCULTURAL THEORIZING AND CHILDREN’S LEARNING

Over the last two decades, paradigm shifts from positivist to interpretative theoretical perspectives in sociology, as well as epistemological changes in developmental psychology have occurred. There have been ontological shifts to understanding the lives of young children that embrace both sociological and interdisciplinary studies. Contemporary sociology and developmental psychology independently have constructed models of socialization based on a number of assumptions that include ideas about equal agency between adults and children, about the bidirectional nature of influence in adult-child relationships, and about interdependent power (Kuczynski, Harach, & Bernardin...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Education
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• 1 Participatory Learning
• 2 International Perspectives on Participatory Learning
• 3 The Guiding Principles of Participation
• 4 ‘Doing the Right Thing’
• 5 The Desirable Toddler in Preschool
• 6 Friendships and Participation among Young Children in a Norwegian Kindergarten
• 7 Beliefs About Toddlers’ Learning in Child Care Programs in Australia
• 8 In Support of a Relationship-Based Approach to Practice with Infants and Toddlers in the United States
• 9 Looking and Listening for Participatory Practice in an English Day Nursery
• 10 Dialogue, Listening and Discernment in Professional Practice with Parents and their Children in an Infant Program
• 11 “If You Think They Can Do It—Then They Can”
• 12 Fairness in Participation in Preschool1
• 13 Contexts, Pedagogy and Participatory Learning
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index