Developmental Education for Young Children Concept, Practice and Imp
Developmental Education is an approach to education in school that aims at promoting children’s cultural development and their abilities to participate autonomously and well-informed in the cultural practices of their community. From the point of view of
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Learning to Communicate in Young Children’s Classrooms Dorian de Haan
Introduction Communication is the exchange of meaning. Learning to communicate is, therefore, “learning how to mean”, which was the title of a now classic study by Halliday (1975). In this study of language acquisition by his son Nigel, Halliday took a “functional-interactional approach”. This approach views learning a language as a semiotic process of interaction in which language becomes part of a system of meanings in a functional context. The source of this system is the socio-cultural world in which the child participates. A similar view was also developed by Vygotskij more than 50 years earlier in his writings about the semiotic mediation of higher levels of thought. Children learn the psychological tools of their culture, which leads to qualitative new levels of mental processes and thus to development. In particular, as neoVygotskians have emphasised, children need to learn the mental procedures of using these tools in given socio-cultural activities. This cannot be attained by mere exposure: children appropriate these procedures in joint activity with knowledgeable others who are sensitive to the child’s zone of proximal development (Karpov 2005). The motor of learning in such activity is the emotional involvement of the learner; affective processes make children participate. Fundamentally, Vygotskij considered the dynamic of development to be the result of the development of new motives, personal needs, and interests that emerge in interactions with cultural others.
D. de Haan, Ph.D. () Department of Developmental Education, Faculty of Learning, Education and Philosophy of Life, Inholland University of Applied Sciences, Haarlem, The Netherlands Department of Developmental Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] B. van Oers (ed.), Developmental Education for Young Children, International Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Development 7, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4617-6 5, © Springer ScienceCBusiness Media Dordrecht 2012
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D. de Haan
Teaching children how to mean is the core of Developmental Education (DE). Communication is at the heart of DE activities. In this chapter I will discuss the following questions: How do children acquire this communicative ability? What role do adults play? How can teachers and peers contribute to this? What practices can be found in Developmental Education?
Learning to Communicate Assisting children to develop means for communication is an important goal in Developmental Education classrooms. In their work with young children teachers invest a lot of effort in teaching children how to communicate, how to articulate their intentions and what they have in their minds and want to share with others. Researchers use different perspectives when studying children’s acquisition of communicative competence. Some focus on the role of adults in the guided participation of the child (Rogoff 1990); others emphasise the child’s ind
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