Making Sense Of Theory & Practice In Early Childhood: The Power Of Ideas

Making Sense of Theory & Practice in Early Childhood: The Power of Ideas ( Open University Press) (Paperback) - Common [By (author) Judy Whitmarsh.
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The paper describes a structure for learning through inquiry and criteria for the selection of appropriate content for young children. In a world filled with the products of scientific inquiry, scientific literacy has become a necessity for everyone. Everyone needs to use scientific information to make choices that arise every day.

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Everyone needs to be able to engage intelligently in public discourse and debate about important issues that involve science and technology. And everyone deserves to share in the excitement and personal fulfillment that can come from understanding and learning about the natural world. National Research Council, , p. The need to focus on science in the early childhood classroom is based on a number of factors currently affecting the early childhood community.

Making Sense of Theory and Practice in Early Childhood: The Power of Ideas

Research and practice suggest that children have a much greater potential to learn than previously thought, and therefore early childhood settings should provide richer and more challenging environments for learning. In addition, science may be a particularly important domain in early childhood, serving not only to build a basis for future scientific understanding but also to build important skills and attitudes for learning. A recent publication from the National Research Council supports this argument:.

Children who have a broad base of experience in domain-specific knowledge for example, in mathematics or an area of science move more rapidly in acquiring more complex skills…. This growing understanding of the value of science in early education comes at a time when the number and diversity of children in child care settings and the number of hours each child spends in such settings is increasing. Growing numbers of children live in poverty.

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More and more grow up in single-parent homes and homes in which both parents work. Media have become commonplace in the lives of the very young. Thus, experiences that provide direct manipulation of and experience with objects, materials, and phenomena—such as playing in the sink, raising a pet, or going to the playground—are less likely to occur in the home. More and more, it is in the early childhood classroom where this kind of experience with the natural world must take place, allowing all children to build experiences in investigation and problem solving and the foundation for understanding basic science concepts.

Science is both a body of knowledge that represents current understanding of natural systems and the process whereby that body of knowledge has been established and is continually extended, refined, and revised. Both elements are essential: Likewise, in learning science one must come to understand both the body of knowledge and the process by which this knowledge is established, extended, refined, and revised.


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Before turning to a deeper discussion of science for the very young, it is helpful to describe our view of science. The goal of science is to understand the natural world through a process known as scientific inquiry.

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Scientific knowledge helps us explain the world around us, such as why water evaporates and plants grow in particular locations, what causes disease, and how electricity works. Scientific knowledge can help us predict what might happen: Scientific knowledge can also help solve problems such as unclean water or the spread of diseases. Science can guide technological development to serve our needs and interests, such as high-speed travel and talking on the telephone.

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Science means different things to different people. Some think of it as a list of facts once memorized in school. Others understand it as a body of knowledge, including facts, concepts, principles, laws, theories, and models that explain the workings of the natural world.

But, as is clear from the quote above, science is more than knowledge and information; it also is a process of studying and finding out—which we call scientific inquiry or science practice. Many scientists also speak of the fun and creativity of doing science. I used to play with it. Some people, when they think of people doing science, imagine laboratories filled with scientists in white coats mixing chemicals and looking through microscopes. Such images are real, but there are other images of scientists charting the course of a hurricane, studying the behaviors of wolves, searching the skies for comets.

But scientists are not the only people who do science. Many jobs involve science, such as electrician, horticulturalist, architect, and car mechanic. These activities, by scientists and nonscientists, whether happening in the laboratory, in the field, or at home, have in common the active use of the basic tools of inquiry in the service of understanding how the world works. Children and adults, experts and beginners, all share the need to have these tools at hand as they build their understanding of the world.

Today I asked the kids at the snail table to draw pictures of the snails. I gave her a choice then — saying she could draw pictures of snails or play in a different area. Her snail pictures involved a lot of zigzaggy lines, and I tried to understand what they represented to her.

Then after awhile I figured out that the zigzags were the paths where the snail moved. So at lunch I arranged for the kids who hang out by the snail table to sit together and I joined them. And we talked snails. Delmy said the snail walks like we walk but just with two feet. Joanna said he goes slow and demonstrated by walking two fingers lightly and slowly across the table; and John said the snail runs fast with lots of feet. So, I had the idea to cover a table with easel paper and have the kids follow the path of some snails with pencil and see the shape of the trails they made.

At first, Christine just wanted to play with snails, and I said okay, but then when she saw the other kids tracing the paths of different snails, she wanted to join in, too. After awhile, they used string to track the snail trails and ended up with different length lines and loops. These notes provide an image of science teaching and learning in the early childhood classroom in which teachers and children are engaged in inquiries into scientific phenomena—animal behaviors and, more specifically, the behaviors of snails. They suggest the potential of 3- to 5-year-old children to engage in the practices of science.

These notes also provide a small window into science for young children that is based on several beliefs that have guided my work: Children entering school already have substantial knowledge of the natural world, much of which is implicit…. Contrary to older views, young children are not concrete and simplistic thinkers…. Children can use a wide range of reasoning processes that form the underpinnings of scientific thinking, even though their experience is variable and they have much more to learn. The content of science for young children is a sophisticated interplay among concepts, scientific reasoning, the nature of science, and doing science.

It is not primarily a science of information. While facts are important, children need to begin to build an understanding of basic concepts and how they connect and apply to the world in which they live. And the thinking processes and skills of science are also important. In our work developing curriculum for teachers, we have focused equally on science inquiry and the nature of science, and content—basic concepts and the topics through which they are explored.

In the process of teaching and learning, these are inseparable, but here I discuss them separately.


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Their curiosity and need to make the world a more predictable place certainly drives them to explore and draw conclusions and theories from their experiences. But left to themselves, they are not quite natural scientists. Children need guidance and structure to turn their natural curiosity and activity into something more scientific. They need to practice science—to engage in rich scientific inquiry.

Making sense of theory and practice in early childhood; the power of ideas. - Free Online Library

The cycle begins with an extended period of engagement where children explore the selected phenomenon and materials, experiencing what they are and can do, wondering about them, raising questions, and sharing ideas. This is followed by a more guided stage as questions are identified that might be investigated further.

This structure is not rigid, nor is it linear—thus the many arrows. And while it is used here to suggest a scaffold for inquiry-based science teaching and learning, it closely resembles how scientists work and, in interesting ways, how children learn. Scientific inquiry provides the opportunity for children to develop a range of skills, either explicitly or implicitly. The following is one such list:. This description of the practice of doing science is quite different from some of the science work in evidence in many classrooms where there may be a science table on which sit interesting objects and materials, along with observation and measurement tools such as magnifiers and balances.

Too often the work stops there, and little is made of the observations children make and the questions they raise. Another form of science is activity-based science where children engage in a variety of activities that generate excitement and interest but that rarely lead to deeper thinking. There are a multitude of science activity books that support this form of science in the classroom. Thematic units and projects are yet other vehicles for science work in the classroom.

These can be rich and challenging; however, they may not have a focus on science. Transportation or a study of the neighborhood are typical examples that have the potential for engaging children in interesting science but frequently focus more on concepts of social studies. If these projects or themes are to truly engage students in science, care needs to be taken to be sure that science is in the foreground, and the integration with other subject matter is appropriate and related to the science.

With an of the practice of science that guides how we approach science inquiry in the early childhood classroom, we turn to the question of the content of science for this age. There are many phenomena that can be explored, many questions to be explored, many basic concepts to be introduced, and many topics to choose from, so rather than make a list of possible subject matter and topics, following are key criteria for guiding decisions about topic selection.

At the core of inquiry-based science is direct exploration of phenomena and materials. Thus, the first criterion is that phenomena selected for young children must be available for direct exploration and drawn from the environment in which they live. The study of snails is an example of an exploration that meets these criteria. Others include light and shadow, moving objects, structures, and plant and animal life cycles.

Examples of some that do not meet these criteria include such popular topics as dinosaurs or space travel. Other topics often chosen in early childhood classrooms such as the rain forest or animals of the Arctic polar bears and penguins may be based in appropriate concepts habitat, physical characteristics, and adaptation of animals , but these too lack the possibility for direct engagement. Topics such as these need not be excluded. They can be the subject of important dramatic play, elaborate discussion, and exploration using books and other secondary sources.

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