Learning is a Journey

Welcome to the May Teach/Learn Blogging Carnival, ‘Kids and Learning.’

The Teach/Learn Blogging Carnival hosted by Science@home is for anyone, because we are all teachers and learners.  This month our bloggers have come up with some wonderful suggestions for fun things to do with your kids, ways to help them learn and thoughts on what learning is.  Please read to the end to find links to other blogs, you might find a wonderful new blog to follow.

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A common way of thinking about learning is ‘the empty vessel’ – children’s minds begin empty and parents or teachers pour knowledge in until they are filled.  Different children have larger or smaller vessels to allow them to learn more or less facts, and they may have wider or narrower necks to affect the speed of filling.  But overall the learners are passive accumulators of what the teachers choose to pour in.  When you put it like that it sounds extreme, but that’s the basis for a lot of early learning programmes promoted or marketed to parents.  Think of flashcards, baby and toddler DVDs, ‘Your child can read by two!’

My eldest daughter has just started preschool at 4 and I’m honestly shocked by the number of kids in her class who know all their shapes (including hexagons), numbers and letters.  One or two will have a natural interest in that sort of thing, but so many of them?  I’m pretty confident both with parenting and education and I’ve still had moments of questioning if I should have ‘taught’ her more before she started.  I’ve listened to other Mums of children about to start school asking what their children should know, I definitely understand the pressure and the worry that comes with wanting to do the right thing by our kids.  But if our answer is based on the empty vessel, is it a good answer?

An alternative view is that people construct their own learning, and it is inextricably linked to all the other elements around them including the other people, toys, weather – everything!  An easy way to think of it is that learning is a journey, from wherever you begin to a distant goal.  Imagine a journey you commonly make, perhaps driving to work.  At one level you do the same thing every day, but at another level every single journey is different.  You start at a different time, the traffic conditions and weather could be completely new, the cars you see on the way change.  When you get to work, you choose where to park (unless of course you have a dedicated bay!).  But that unique experience is how you got to work today.

Learning is a lot like that.  All our children are heading in the same direction, and may be going to the same place.  But every journey is different.  It is influenced by who is there and what they do along the way, and learners can make a lot of decisions to shape their own journey.  Thinking about learning in this way has huge implications for what we do with our children, so I’ll give you some questions to think about.

The first and most obvious – kids are learning all the time, not just when a teacher decides to pour something in!  What are your kids learning?

Who is going with your child on their journey and what influence do they have?  Who would you love to have go with them?

What are they taking along with them?  What lunch are you packing for the trip?  (Metaphorically!  I mean what skills or objects are you providing?)

What decisions can they make about their own journey?

There are some paths that are obviously dangerous or dead ends, and as experienced guides we can help steer our children, but there are also many, many safe paths.  Does it matter which one they take?

How much should we smooth the road?  If we smooth it too much, how will they learn to cope with roughness?  What obstacles can they tackle on their own, or with their friends?

The things they’ve learned are useful in that moment of their journey (like how to get over that cliff now it’s raining) so how will they be transferred to other contexts?  In other words, are they getting many different experiences in different contexts, to help them construct general ideas?  And the flipside, if they want to get over cliffs, reading about it ain’t gonna help.  If they want to learn to be scientists (for example ) don’t they need to act as scientists?  If they want to be authors, don’t they need to be authors?

So many questions might sound daunting, but for me it is very freeing.  I don’t have to worry about whether I have the right facts and if I’m pouring them in quickly enough.  All I have to do is travel along with my daughters, making sure they have food, water and rest and aren’t trying to abseil without a rope.  We can go where we please and explore every cave, climb any tree, sleep in a haystack or hop on a bus.  We can pick and choose who we are today, spending a day as a zookeeper or a fashion designer.

Travelling together, we create our own learning and act as who we want to be.

(For anyone with an interest in epistemology, this is based on the theory of situated cognition.  The article on Wikipedia is technical but has some good references.)

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Visit Science@home if you are interested in participating in next month’s Teach/Learn carnival.  Please take the time to visit the other participants and see what they have to say:

• 5 Places to Teach the 5 Senses – Monique at Your Cheeky Monkey has some great suggestions for places to go and use all five senses when playing with your kids. (@Y_C_Monkey)
• Don’t look now, but… you’re being watched – Sarah from Untenured Teacher is asking about what we really want kids to learn in the classroom, and how are we unconsciously teaching them?
• Make Your Own Abacus – Staci at Teaching Money to Kids has an amazing activity to make your own abacus, which you can eat when you’ve finished.
• Teach/Learn Blogging Carnival – Kids and Learning – Marita from Stuff With Thing and her daughter have been travelling around the city in different ways and working out how to walk to Queensland. (@leechbabe)
• How to Study Like a Black Belt – The Original SuperParent can tell you how to study like a black belt, with great tips for focusing and getting the most out of your learning. (@superparents_au)
• Learning is a Journey – Deb at Science@home invites you think of learning in a different way and join your children on their journey. (@ScienceMum)
• Art for little kids – Katepickle at Picklebums encourages us to let go of our adult expectations and just enjoy the creative process with our small children. (@katepickle)
• Learning As We Walk – The Planning Queen walks to school with you and learns all sorts of things on the way. (@PlanningQueen)
• B-I-N-G-O is the name of the game – AmandaB from HomeAge shows her own learning in action – the maths game didn’t quite work, but she’s worked out how to modify it for next time.
• What’s In a Reflection – Miss Carly at Early Childhood Resources has a beautiful story about babies learning all the time, even when they are only a few months old. (@ECresources)
• Developing Brains: Laying the Pathways to Learning – Christie from Childhood 101 talks about the importance of sensory learning for early brain development and has lots of ideas for play that engages the five senses. (@Childhood101)
• The Magical Threshold Of School-Age – Mamapoekie at Authentic Parenting wonders why we have a point that we call school age and how children are not ready one day but ready the next. (@mamapoekie)
• Why you should help your child follow their passions – CatWay at Adventures with Kids helps her son learn about dinosaurs. (@adventureskids)

Thanks for joining us! We hope to see you next month.

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