Views of childhood and knowledge of children
South African Journal of Childhood Education
| Field | Value | |
| Title | Views of childhood and knowledge of children | |
| Creator | Henning, Elizabeth | |
| Description | In a country where there is a consistent loud outcry about school achievement of youthin the final school examination in Grade 12, attention has recently shifted to children inthe primary school. The very founding of this journal was motivated by a deep concernabout research in childhood education and children’s lives. Questions were being askedabout what happens in the first years of schooling, about the suitability of the nationalcurriculum for such a diverse population, about specialised research in the field oflearning in the early years, and about teaching with care and with insight, knowingwho the children of this nation are.The journal took an early stand when, at its launch in 2010, the editor noted that thenotion of a national foundation phase curriculum assumes the existence of a ‘national’Grade 1 learner. In South Africa there are children who come to school, well preparedfor the demands of school – and there are others who come with only their survivalrecords in homes of extreme poverty, of absent parents and of families broken by theeffects of the history of the nation and the effects of disease. Much as we would liketo see a standard of performance expected from the ‘national’ young learner, we needto see the layers of diversity too. Can such a stratified population, socially fracturedin many ways, truly enact a differentiated curriculum for children who have so muchand for children who have so little at the same time and at the same pace? Can ourfoundation phase classes be truly inclusive?It remains a vexing question. Much research is needed to even try to give a robustresponse. In recent years, in the research of the Centre for Education Practice Researchat my home institution, we have encountered more than 3000 children between fiveand seven years old in an extensive interview test of mathematical cognition. In theprocess we found children who had never encountered a print drawing and childrenwho did not know that a page can be turned. However, the very same children hada perfectly normal idea of approximate number and size. We regard this as evidencethat they have the core knowledge of number that has to be developed by systematicinstruction and caring apprenticeship in classrooms. But for that they would needteachers who know them as well as they know the latest curriculum and its suggestedtools of teaching.This is but one example of how important teacher education is and how importantit is that we should investigate both learners and teachers, but also teacher educationand teacher educators. Teachers and their educators at universities have their ownview of children, of learning and of childhood. Much as we may all agree that thecore activity of schools is for the young to learn the three Rs and the subject areas ofthe curriculum, there are researchers who are opposed to a developmental view oflearning. The journal’s stance is that, in the Vygotskian tradition (Kozulin, 1990), theyoung learn and are initiated – and thus develop – in the work of school (and society).SAJCE– December 2014iiIn the SAJCE we welcome different views on child learning and celebrate SouthAfrica’s researchers who argue that “pedagogical ‘know-how’ and views of child andchildhood constitute the subject knowledge that is foundational in the foundationphase curriculum” – as Murris and Verbeek do in this issue. Add to that knowledgeof how children the world over have core knowledge systems, as argued by cognitivedevelopmental psychologists and neuroscientists, and we have a composite pictureof what the object of teacher education is – to know 1) the learner and 2) the subjectcontent, but also 3) the self as teacher.This ‘didactical triangle’, was already proposed as view of teaching in the 17th centuryin Comenius’s major work, Didactica Magna (Comenius, 1632/1967). In the 20th century,for some reason, the English- speaking world used the term ‘didactic’ to denoteteacher-centred learning, while Comenius proposed what can arguably nowadays betermed pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Jari Lavonen, the chair of the teachereducation department at the University of Helsinki, recently noted that PCK is thetransformation of subject content knowledge by infusing it with knowledge of thelearner and of the self as teacher. In Finland they refer to PCK simply as Didactics, whiletaking full cognisance of Shulman’s model (Shulman 1986).But, views on teaching become more complicated when teachers are facedwith children who enter Grade 1, but who are not ready to embrace the way of lifeat school. Bruwer and her co-authors report in this issue on teachers’ views on thepredicament they face when children need to cross the liminality boundary – whenthey are still ‘betwixt and between’ life as an informal learner and life in school, wherethey have to be inducted into life as a formal learner in a national curriculum. In thesame vein, Condy and Blease argue that a “one-size-fits-all curriculum cannot addressthe issues that rural multigrade teachers and learners face”. Seldom do educationalresearchers contemplate this very real issue. I was in the same class in Grade 1 as mybrother, who was then in Grade 8, in a little farm school. I recall vividly how we youngones spent much time making clay oxen while they were doing indecipherable mathson the writing board.When more than one language is used, or required to be used, in a single classroomcommunication set-up, a teacher is faced with yet another dimension. Ankiah-Gangadeenand Samuel write about a narrative inquiry that was conducted in Mauritius, notingthat the “narrative inquiry methodology offered rich possibilities to foray into these[teachers’] experiences, including the manifestations of negotiating their classroompedagogy in relation to their own personal historical biographies of language teachingand learning”.Added to the multilayered types of knowledge around which a teacher needs tonegotiate her way in a foundation phase classroom, are knowledge and understandingof children’s transition from one grade to the next. Nieuwenhuizen and co-authorsfound that the move from Grade 2 to Grade 3 is notably more difficult for children thanearlier grade transitions. I wish to add that it is also a grade transition that requiresmuch more of the learning child in volume and in pace of learning; the transitionEditorialrequires a ‘mature’ young learner who has worked through the curriculum of theearlier grades effectively.Kanjee and Moloi not only present information about ANA results, but show howteachers utilise these in their teaching. To that, the editorial team adds: what is thenational testing ritual really doing for teachers? Are there many unforeseen and evenunintended effects? Many teachers may say that it alerts them to gaps in their ownknowledge and pedagogy and, especially, we would think, the way in which theyassess children’s learning effectively. While Kanjee and Moloi invoke local nationaltests, Fritz and her co-authors from Germany, Switzerland and South Africa showhow a mathematics competence and diagnostic test for school beginners foundits way from Europe to South Africa. They point to the challenges of translating aninterview-based test and of validating it in a local context in four languages. With thepromise that the test will be normed in this country, the foundation phase educationas well as the educational psychology community may stand to benefit from such atest, which is theoretically grounded in children’s conceptual development.The matter of teaching with formative assessment as pedagogical tool comes tomind whenever one discusses assessment. In an article by Long and Dunne, one readsabout their investigation into teaching of mathematics with a very specific angle – howto “map and manage the omissions implicit in the current unfolding of the Curriculumand Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) for mathematics”. In a very dense and fastpaced curriculum it is not possible to fill all the gaps. Who knows what the effect maybe for future learning of children who move through a curriculum quite rapidly?Staying in the early grade classroom, Sibanda explores the readability of twotextbooks for natural science learning for Grade 4 learners. She touches on one ofthe sensitive nerves of South African school education, namely the English language.In her analysis of two textbooks, using a range of methods of text analysis, shecomes to the conclusion that the books are simply too difficult to read. She arguesthat the authors have not taken into account that both vocabulary and syntax haveto be taught systematically in order for Grade 4 children to be able to read texts in alanguage they do not know well, for one, and in a discourse of science writing that isnew for them as well.Ragpot narrates the story of how an instructional film, #Taximaths: how childrenmake their world mathematical, was conceptualised, scripted and produced withsenior undergraduate students at UJ. This artefact serves not only as higher educationmaterial in teacher education, but is also used as material for teacher development.1This issue of the journal is rounded off by an important contribution about theethics of research on children. Pillay explains how experts in ethics have advised himin the work they do in the National Research Foundation South African ResearchChair he holds in ‘Education and Care in Childhood’ at the University of Johannesburg.The reader is reminded that care of vulnerable children and the protection of theirrights should be high on the list of educational practice and its research.iiiSAJCE– December 2014The next issue of SAJCE is a special one. It is edited by Nadine Petersen and SarahGravett and it celebrates a programme of research and development of the SouthAfrican Department of Higher Education and Training, with funding support from theEU. The Strengthening Foundation Phase Teacher Education Programme started in2011 and included most of the universities in the country. The issue promises to be amilestone publication on teacher education for the primary school.Editorial greetingsElizabeth Henning | |
| Publisher | AOSIS | |
| Date | 2014-12-24 | |
| Identifier | 10.4102/sajce.v4i2.200 | |
| Source | South African Journal of Childhood Education; Vol 4, No 2 (2014); 4 pages 2223-7682 2223-7674 | |
| Language | eng | |
| Relation |
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:
https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/200/51
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