Children's Learning in Early Childhood

Learning Theories in Practice 0-7 Years

Sean MacBlain

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781529758917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Everything you need to know about Learning Theories in Early Childhood practice.

This book explores the key theorists and theories that form the foundation of learning and development in early childhood. Building your own understanding and knowledge of children's learning, it then helps you develop the skills of translating theory into practice.

How does this book support you?

·The structure of the book mirrors your student learning journey, to compliment your course and seminar reading.

·Parts 1 and 2help you develop your reflective and analytical skills through critical questions, photographs and discussion points.

·Part3 gives real life case studies to help you understand how the theories can be practically applied in settings to improve your own practice.

Part One The Early Pioneers

• 1: Recognising the Concept of Child

In earlier times, such as those of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, childhood was not viewed as a distinct stage of development; children were instead seen as ‘adults-in-waiting’. With the growth of industrialisation in the UK and the employment of children in factories, new legislation was needed to prevent their exploitation. It remains the case, however, that across the globe large numbers of children continue to be exploited as cheap labour. A report by the International Labour Organisation in 2015 noted, for example, how around 168 million children across the globe were trapped in child labour, which accounted for almost 11 per cent of the overall child population. Many children continue to be exposed to types of labour that cause irreversible physical and mental damage, and even risks to their life, and that impact hugely on their learning and cognitive development.

Whilst the popularised notion of ‘childhood’ as a time of freedom and fun is widely accepted, it remains the case that for many what it means to be a ‘child’ – and therefore what it means to learn in childhood – is sadly very different (MacBlain et al., 2017). This is not a recent phenomenon; the challenges in understanding and recognising what it means to be a child have been acknowledged for generations, as evidenced centuries ago when the celebrated philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed that ‘Childhood is unknown. Starting from the false idea one has of it, the further one goes, the more one loses one’s way…’ (Rousseau, 1762/1911). It is with this in mind that the first chapter of this text explores what it means to be a ‘child’. Part One now looks at the contributions made by a number of key figures over previous generations who challenged the thinking of their times and who brought about significant and positive change for children and their learning, much of which remains relevant even today.

1 Recognising the Concept of Child

By the end of this chapter you should:

• know why it is important to articulate what it means to be a ‘child’
• understand how successive philosophers, theorists and educators have contributed to our knowledge of children’s learning and how this continues to inform practice today
• be clear about the value that early pioneers and theorists gave to play as a pedagogy
• fully embrace the importance of viewing learning in early childhood as a unique and individual process in each child

Adults create the experiences that build every young child’s view of the world

The Emergence of Childhood

The concept of ‘child’ has not always been well understood, and children in past centuries were all too often forced to endure conditions and expectations of them that were born largely out of ignorance and a gross lack of understanding of their emotional, social and intellectual development. Sadly, it remains the case that the concept of what it means to be a child is poorly understood in many parts of the world, and across the globe countless numbers of young children continue to endure harsh and uncompromising conditions that would have been more familiar to children living in past centuries in the UK. Just over a decade ago, Hicks (2004) drew attention to the need for all of us to acknowledge the increasingly global context within which children now grow up, a view that has been so starkly accentuated by the recent and devastating COVID-19 pandemic:

We can only understand life today in our own communities if it is set in the wider global context. What happens elsewhere in the world constantly impacts on our daily lives even if we have not been aware of it… (p. 19)

Fortunately, there have been those in past generations who, in challenging the thinking of their time, have left us with a legacy that has at its core a strong sense of valuing what it means to be a ‘child’.

John Locke (1632–1704)

Locke emphasised the importance of seeing childhood as that most special time in the lives of individuals; children, he pronounced, should not be ‘hindered’ from being children. This was indeed a radical view when one considers that at the time the very idea of childhood as a distinct stage in the lives of young people was given little if any thought by most adults, and the majority of children received little if any formal learning. Locke understood the importance of adults refraining from exercising too much control over learning in childhood, which he believed ‘should not be a burden’ and should not ‘be imposed… with tasks that might become ‘irksome’ and ‘inhibit learning’ (MacBlain, 2018a: 13). Locke believed that as children grow, they need to apply reason to how they understand and interpret their worlds and, significantly, that they learn to question what they are told. This was important given the levels of superstition that existed at the time. Locke suggested that children begin life as if they were a ‘blank slate’, sometimes referred to as tabula rasa, and it is on this blank slate that all their experiences, which are gained through the senses, are written.

A key aspect of Locke’s approach that continues to define thinking and practice even today was that of empiricism. Central to empiricism is the notion of ‘empirical thinking’, which lies very much at the heart of the ‘sciences’ whereby phenomena are observed from which data are gathered and then quantified. It was this approach that came to underpin the behaviourist tradition, offering them a methodology, key to which was the observation, recording and measurement of behaviours, and therefore learning (Gross, 1992; Smith et al., 2003). It needs to be recognised that the empiricist view of children’s learning is different to that of the nativist view where it is argued children inherit their abilities. In the decades that followed John Locke, the celebrated pioneer Rousseau developed the concept of what it means to be a child and how learning in childhood needed to be understood as being different.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)

Like Locke, Rousseau embraced the concept of ‘child’ and saw the importance of emotional and social development for children’s learning; he was in this respect ahead of his time. Rousseau presented his ideas on children’s education in a much-celebrated book, Emile (1762/1911), in which he introduced his readers to the life events of a boy named Emile as he progresses through infancy and childhood, and into adulthood. A dominant feature in the thinking of Rousseau’s time was that children were born with ‘original sin’, and that a primary function of education was to purge children of this sin and the associated guilt that came with it. It was also popularly believed that children were born with impulses, which if not addressed would lead to ‘wickedness’. Rousseau, in contrast, proposed that all children were born ‘good’ and, importantly, that what they inherit at birth is what makes up most of their individual potential. He believed a key purpose of education to be the channelling of these impulses in a positive direction, thereby giving children a clearer sense of purpose. He also recognised that society played a substantial role in influencing learning, and that it could be a potential cause for harm as well as good. Children’s education, he proposed, should follow the natural growth of the child and pass through stages, the first being from birth to 12 when they are influenced predominantly by impulses, and the second being up to the age of 16, when reason takes over. He saw the role of the tutor as central to developing positive and meaningful environments for learning, as it was through this process that children would come to understand the worlds in which they lived, gain respect for themselves and others, and learn the consequences of their actions, the difference between right and wrong, and honesty and humility.

Seeing Nature in Children’s Learning

Johann Pestalozzi (1746–1827)

Today, we take for granted the place of nature in early learning, but this was not always so. Sadly, it remains the case that too many children across the world grow up in urbanised environments where the natural world plays little if any part in their education. Like Locke and Rousseau, Pestalozzi recognised the concept of ‘child’ and saw nature as a key element in the learning of young children; this is illustrated in his belief that the primary aim of education was that of developing the head, the heart and the hands. Pestalozzi’s ideas on learning and the importance of nature in childhood were captured some decades ago in the following quotation, cited by Silber (1965): ‘I wish to wrest education from the outworn order of doddering old teaching hacks… and entrust it to the eternal powers of nature herself’ (p. 134). Pestalozzi believed that children’s early learning should involve active engagement in activities and the use of objects that were part of their natural environment and, like Locke, he believed children should be free to follow their own interests. Importantly, he was one of the first pioneers to view teaching as a subject that should be studied in its own right, and because of this he is often referred to as the ‘father of pedagogy’. It can be said that Pestalozzi’s ideas on children’s learning were ahead of their time, for he believed that children need to learn by engaging with the world around them through their actions and within their environments, and being encouraged by adults to pursue their own interests.

Early childhood is a time of wonder

Valuing Emotional Growth in Early Learning

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the Psychodynamic Tradition

Locke, Rousseau and Pestalozzi all understood the importance of recognising what it is to be a child and how emotions impact significantly on learning in early childhood. Later, towards the end of the 19th century, a major shift in thinking began to emerge as philo-sophers and theorists wrestled with the emerging discipline of psychology; this shift accelerated with the emergence of psychodynamics and most notably the work of Freud, who placed enormous emphasis on what it means to be a child and how experiences in early childhood affect later development and learning. In his original work Freud proposed that at the core of individual development are two determining elements, characterised by pleasure and by tensions; tensions, he suggested, arise from sexual energy (the libido), with pleasure emanating from a release of this sexual energy. It should be emphasised that Freud used the term ‘sexual’ in a broad sense to account for thoughts and actions that individuals find pleasurable. Freud also proposed that children and young people move through a series of stages: Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency and Genital, with the first of these following birth. His ideas were then developed by others and applied specifically to learning in early childhood, most notably perhaps by Susan Isaacs (discussed later in Chapter 2).

Chapter Link

The ideas of Freud and Isaacs are explored in greater detail in Chapter 2.

Recognising the Value of Play in Early Learning

Whilst the early pioneers saw the value of play in early childhood and how play was central to learning, they were largely isolated in their thinking from popular practice. It must be remembered that learning in previous generations was for the most part formal and highly prescriptive, and at times brutal, as indicated by the historian Ruth Goodman who wrote about children’s education in the Victorian era, as follows:

Many teachers firmly believed that an error in a child’s work was the result of ‘not trying’, of the child not having listened properly to their instruction. Child after child was beaten for their spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, incorrect sums and messy handwriting. (Goodman, 2013: 292)

One pioneer, however, whose ideas focused on the value of play in children’s learning, and who drew heavily on the ideas of Locke, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi, was Froebel.

Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852)

Froebel (1887) was one of the first pioneers to fully embrace play as central to children’s learning and their emotional and social development. Froebel saw the value of play in supporting children’s learning and, more particularly, how play could advance and extend thinking and learning. He believed, for example, that children could express their individual nature through play, and it was this idea that lay very much at the heart of his philosophy of learning. Froebel’s significant and enlightened contribution to our understanding of the importance of play in children’s learning was expressed most eloquently by Tizard and Hughes (1984: 4), who drew attention to how the kindergarten and nursery school begun by Froebel had ‘freed’ young children from the harsh and overly prescriptive learning of their time, when children were typically made to sit passively, be drilled by their teachers, and subjected largely to memorising and rote learning.

In developing his ideas on the value of play in learning, Froebel developed an array of educational materials which he believed could support and extend learning in children. These materials, or ‘gifts’ as he called them, included such items as objects of different shapes that could be employed by teachers to stimulate children’s thinking and learning, for example: Gift 1: Small soft balls knitted or made of rubber with three being in the primary colours, red, yellow and blue, and the other in the secondary colours of green, orange and purple. Gift 2: A box in which was contained a wooden cylinder, a cube, and a sphere with holes. Gift 3: A box with eight one-inch cubes made of wood. Gift 4: New shapes of varying sizes and dimensions. Gift 5: A box, different in size to others with blocks of a different size and of a greater numb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One The Early Pioneers
• 1 Recognising the Concept of Child
• Part Two Modern Perspectives
• 2 Emotional Learning in Childhood
• 3 Social Learning in Childhood
• 4 Cognitive Development and Learning
• 5 Practice Outside of the Mainstream
• Part Three Seeing Theory in Practice
• 6 Play as a Pedagogic Approach
• 7 Emotional Learning in Early Childhood
• 8 Social Learning in Early Childhood
• 9 Language and Learning
• 10 Health and Wellbeing
• Some Concluding Thoughts
• References
• Index