Theories of Early Childhood Education

Developmental, Behaviorist, and Critical

Lynn E. Cohen, Sandra Waite-Stupiansky, Lynn E. Cohen, Sandra Waite-Stupiansky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317280385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Theories of Early Childhood Education provides a comprehensive introduction to the various theoretical perspectives influential in early childhood education, from developmental psychology to critical studies, Piaget to Freire. Expert chapter authors examine assumptions underpinning the use of theory in the early years and concisely explore the implications of these questions for policy and practice. Every chapter includes applications to practice that will assist students and professionals in seeing the relevance of the theoretical perspective for their teaching.

Part I

DEVELOPMENTAL
THEORIES

1

JEAN PIAGET’S CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORY OF LEARNING

Sandra Waite-Stupiansky

Jean Piaget revolutionalized the way educators, psychologists, and researchers view children’s learning and development (Beilin, 1992). This chapter aims to give a brief history of his ideas and theory as they evolved over his lifetime and beyond, then apply many of Piaget’s concepts to the contemporary early childhood classroom. As research on all areas of child development, from brain research to social and moral research, has informed theory and practice, the strength of Piaget’s theory is how it has adapted and evolved over the last seven decades in a way that can incorporate these new findings. The first section of the chapter will introduce Piaget as a person and a theorist. An overview of key concepts of his theory will follow, with implications for practice at the end. The challenge is to capture Piaget’s theory and implications in one chapter when his work filled approximately 100 books and 600 papers, many of which have not been translated from French into English, and have multiplied exponentially by others who have written about his ideas and theories (Muller, Carpendale, & Smith, 2009). This chapter aims to present the elements of Piaget’s theory that are most informative for early childhood educators, and is by no means exhaustive in its coverage of the breadth and depth of Piagetian theory as a whole.

Born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Jean Piaget was the oldest child and only son of Arthur Piaget (Swiss), a university history professor, and Rebecca Jackson Piaget (French), a school commissioner and political activist. Jean was a serious and precocious student whose interest in biology started young and led to publications on birds and mollusks starting at the age of 10 (Hall, 1987) and a job at the local Natural History Museum (Muller et al., 2009). His lifelong love of biology influenced his ideas for the rest of his life.

In 1918, Piaget graduated from college with a degree in the natural sciences, followed soon after by a Ph.D. with a specialty in mollusks, both from Neuchâtel University. He was offered a faculty position at the same university in 1925. His path to this point was rapid but interspersed with periods of intense questioning of the emerging ideas in philosophy, religion, and evolution, and how these ideas fit into Piaget’s unquenchable interest in epistemology, the study of knowledge. Throughout his life, Piaget was adept at studying contrasting views within disciplines and finding a third alternate view or “tertium quid” that transcended the opposing views without contradicting either (Bennour & Voneche, 2009, p. 50). Furthermore, he was a gifted writer who published his ideas regularly for others to consider and debate, which he welcomed.

During his course of study at the university, Piaget spent a semester in Zurich working at a psychological laboratory specializing in psychiatry. He became interested in the ideas of Jung, Freud, and Adler, writing a paper and giving lectures on the relationships among these theories, marking the beginning of his interest in mental development.

Piaget’s interest in psychology took him to Paris, where he worked with Theodore Simon on standardizing intelligence tests for children. It was here that Piaget developed his method of questioning children about how they arrived at their answers to the questions on the test, which were often wrong but formed a consistent pattern with other children of the same age range. He developed the method that he called the “clinical interview” that allowed him to follow the child’s answers with further questions to try to illuminate the child’s reasoning. Piaget continued to use this method throughout his long career.

Another important connection occurred during this period of Piaget’s life. He met and married a member of his research team, Valentine Chatenay, with whom he had three children, Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent, between 1925 and 1931. All three of his children’s early development was well documented in several books on infant cognitive development (Piaget, 1952/1963; 1954/1971/1986) and instrumental in the formulation of his ideas.

In 1929, Piaget was offered a faculty position at the University of Geneva, which is where he spent most of the rest of his career until his death in 1980. As evidenced in an interview conducted by Elizabeth Hall, he continued to work well into his 70s, experimenting, teaching, and revising his own theories (Hall, 1987). In his last published interview, six months before his death in 1980, Piaget reiterated his roots in biology and the parallels between scientific discoveries and a child’s developmental progression (Voyat, 1980/2011). This theme influenced his thinking throughout his lifetime as it appeared again and again as he theorized about children’s intellectual, social, and moral development for over 50 years.

Piaget’s Theory: Key Concepts

Constructivism is the name Piaget gave to his theory because it represents his idea about how learning occurs. He used the term “constructivism” to convey that people construct their knowledge as a result of constant active interactions between the environment and the structures within the brains of the organism; in other words, the constant balancing and re-balancing between the mental structures of the learner is the result of active engagement with the environment and results in the construction of knowledge for that individual, who can then act upon the environment in light of the new structures. Thus, the learner is an agent of change of both the internal and external realities. Learning proceeds in predictable vectors and patterns, but it is not linear nor lock-step, as stage theory would suggest. There are stops and starts, progressions and regressions, and sudden surges and regressions are expected as an individual moves in the direction of higher levels of functioning. Piaget captured this nonlinear progression profoundly: “There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult” (1932/1965, p. 78).

Most overviews of Piaget’s theory emphasize the series of stages through which children proceed, starting with sensorimotor and progressing to preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational thinking. Unfortunately, these ages and stages make up most of what many educators know about Piaget’s theory. Over the years, many researchers, including Piaget himself, challenged the lock-step nature of the stages. Piaget even argued against the notion of homogeneous stages. “This renders arbitrary any attempt to cut mental reality up into stages” (1932/1965, p. 78). Rather, he described “successive phases of regular processes recurring like a rhythm,” traces of earlier ways of thinking reappearing at later ages when new problems or experiences confronted an individual. Human development is like the evolutionary processes of a species. The earlier structures give way to more sophisticated ways of adapting, but they do not disappear completely. Through this process intelligence evolves, which, according to Piaget, is “a generic term to indicate the superior forms of organization or equilibrium of cognitive structures” (1947/1950, p. 7).

As this chapter will demonstrate, there is so much more to understanding Piagetian theory beyond the stage components. For the purposes here, the emphasis is on how children learn about their worlds and themselves. They start with coordinating their motor responses from reflexive, involuntary movements to coordinated movements that show premeditation. This occurs in the first two years of life for most infants when children are not fluent in language. Piaget and Inhelder (1969) called this the “sensorimotor period” (p. 3). Then, preoperational thinking, or pre-logical reasoning, starts to include children’s budding sense of logic and exploding use of oral language. As children begin to apply logical reasoning, they start with here-and-now interactions with the environment, mostly “on the concrete plane of action. … until the age of seven or eight, when coordinated actions are converted into operations, admitting of the logical construction of verbal thought and its application to a coherent structure” (Piaget, 1952/1963, pp. ii–iii), leading to the term “concrete operational thinkers” being used to describe children in the primary grades. As their reasoning continues to develop in complexity, accuracy, and application, the learners become more abstract thinkers, which has come to be known as formal operational thinking (Piaget, 1947/1950). The learner is no longer tied to the present, concrete plane, but can think in metaphors and abstractions. He or she moves from “symbolic behavior and memory” to “higher operations of reasoning and formal thoughts” (1947/1950, p. 9). Reference to these planes of development will occur throughout this chapter as the different concepts and ideas of Piaget are presented.

Active Learning and the Nature of Knowledge

Piaget was well aware of theorists in early childhood education who preceded him, such as Maria Montessori and Freidrich Froebel, and their arguments that children are active agents in their learning. Piaget’s interest in the nature of knowledge and epistemology led him to theorize that children not only construct their own knowledge, but the types of knowledge they are constructing are not equal, and different knowledge demands different means of construction. Kamii (2014), who studied with Piaget and translated his theory into practice, classified knowledge into three distinguishable but overlapping types: physical knowledge, logico-mathematical knowledge, and social-conventional knowledge.

Physical knowledge emanates from the source or object itself. The child acquires physical knowledge from interacting with the object and taking in the knowledge through his or her senses. When children feel the coldness of an ice cube or the smoothness of a rabbit’s fur, they are experiencing knowledge of the physical properties of cold and smooth. Experiencing the brightness of the sun or the smell of chocolate leads to knowledge of the physical attributes of the sun and chocolate. Importantly, the child must discover the physical knowledge directly through his or her senses, not from alternative means such as someone describing the attributes to the child or watching a video about ice or chocolate without having first-hand experience with the objects previously.

Logico-mathematical knowledge is constructed within a learner’s mind (Kamii, 2014). It is the logic that a learner constructs from interactions with the external (and later internal) world. Logico-mathematical knowledge involves relationships between and among objects, ideas, and people (Waite-Stupiansky, 1997). So when a child compares the brightness of the sun to the brightness of the moon, the physical knowledge taken in through the direct senses is put into a relationship of greater or lesser brightness (logico-mathematical knowledge). When a child drops a glass bottle on the concrete sidewalk, the resultant shattering of the glass helps the child create an “if … then” relationship: If I drop my bottle on the hard concrete sidewalk, then it will shatter and make a shrill sound. When items are put into relationships, such as cause/effect relationships, they are internalized as logico-mathematical knowledge. The source of this type of knowledge is the child’s mind and must be constructed through active experiences.

Social-conventional knowledge comes from the collectively agreed upon social conventions of a child’s culture. The child memorizes this knowledge from people around him or her who already have the knowledge. Language is a prime example of social-conventional knowledge. The words a child learns are determined by his or her culture and experiences speaking with representatives from that culture. If the child had been born into a culture that speaks a different language, the social-conventional knowledge acquired would be quite different. Another example of social-conventional knowledge are rules of conduct that vary from culture to culture, such as when it is appropriate to wear a hat (outside but not at the dinner table). The source of social-conventional knowledge is a child’s social surroundings because it is learned from people who already have the knowledge and it must be memorized by the child.

The reason why the types of knowledge are important for early childhood educators to know is because the way in which children learn each type of knowledge differs, which means that teachers are most effective when they differ the instruction according to the type of knowledge being addressed. If a teacher is addressing physical knowledge, direct sensory experiences are the best modality for instruction. Introducing the concept of cold would be done best with physical objects that have cold attributes (ice cubes, snow). If the knowledge is logico-mathematical, such as arranging items by their temperature from cold to hot, having a variety of objects of different temperatures that can be put into a logical order from cold to hot would be the most effective approach. If learning the names of objects (social-conventional knowledge) such as ice, snow, hot, cold is the goal of instruction, then introducing the new vocabulary as the objects are explored would be in order.

The three types of knowledge overlap and are often hard to separate in the real world. Yet the implications for instruction, which will be addressed later in this chapter, are far reaching and important. If the instruction fits the type of knowledge, the child’s learning will be optimized and meaningful.

Operations and Logic

The core of Piaget’s theory when addressing all types of development, social, moral, cognitive, or motor, is the notion of operations. In Piaget’s (1962) words, operations are “active schemas constructed by the mind” (p. 161). Operations are reversible applications of logic that start with children’s explorations of their bodies during the earliest years when sensorimotor operations are prime, leading eventually to formal, abstract applications of logic at the highest levels of reasoning, a process that takes a decade or more of development. As children operate on their environment, they form schemes that can be repeated, varied, tested, and refined. In doing so, children begin to form mental structures that influence future interactions with their environment (Voyat, 1980/2011). In the first few weeks of life, the infant is governed by reflexes such as sucking, but soon thereafter the child starts to explore his or her body, then starts to include objects within reach and people with whom she or he has contact, and progressively moves away from primarily exploring his or her own body and immediate surroundings. These explorations lead to schemes or patterns that move from fortuitous or accidental to exhibiting repetition based on previous experiences and/or imitation of how others have acted in his or her presence. Evidence of the formation of mental structures starts to appear when a child can hold a thought or image in his or her head, such as the presence of an object even when it is out of sight. This appears in the second half of the first year of life and constitutes what Piaget and Inhelder (1969) called the “permanent object” (p. 48), or the more popularized term, “object permanence,” as it has come to be known more recently. Piaget argued that when the child continues to look for objects moved out of sight, the first signs of intelligence appear because the child “knows” that the object is still there, even though it is out of sensory range. Thus, the child is holding the image or thought of the object in his or her mind. This was an important milestone for Piaget since it was evidence of the child’s thinking.

As a child continues to operate on the environment and construct mental structures, other evidence appears, such as the first symbolic play. A child pretends to start a car with a set of keys or to drink from an empty tea cup. This type of pretending usually appears between the first and second birthdays. Piagetian theory argues that the child is using his or her body and actions to represent a person starting a car or drinking a cup of tea. The important point is that the child is not actually doing these actions, but is pretending to do so. He or she is acting out an activity that he or she has never done, but has witnessed others doing. This is a milestone in cognitive development again because it represents the presence of mental structures upon which the child is acting. The child is using real objects as he or she symbolizes actions or activities experienced or witnessed previously in life. Piaget argued that this type of play is based on assimilation of reality for the child and has a ludic, or playful, quality (Piaget, 1962).

Operations and logic continue to develop, first with objects and people in the immediate environment, but as the child acquires language, he or she can talk about items and people outside of the immediate surroundings in time and space (Piaget, 1962). A child can talk about events that occurred in the past or events that are planned for the future. A child can discuss a grandparent he or she hasn’t seen for several weeks. The child is moving forward, propelled by various and multiple concrete experiences in order to construct knowledge arising from these experiences. This knowledge forms the foundation upon which future thinking will be based.

As a child grows more sophisticated and can move beyond concrete experiences and start to experience ways of representing objects and ideas in symbols and s...