Early Childhood Education Shapes Children Personality

My guiding assumption will be that early childhood education is not about young children as such, but about how teachers and children form relationships that mutually influence each other and that especially influence children. I assume that if I am an early childhood teacher, I will not be satisfied with simply knowing and observing the behavior and capacities of children in general or of my classroom of children in particular. I will also want to do something with my knowledge, even if doing something just means exclaiming how pleased I am with my children’s accomplishments. As a teacher, I will often do more than this, of course: I may engage children in further activities that extend their interests, motives, and abilities. But to call myself a teacher of the young, I must connect with them somehow, which means interacting, relating, and touching their lives in valuable ways.

          Given this perspective and given a focus on the needs of early childhood educators, certain theories and topics about human change and functioning get "promoted" in value to the exclusion of others. As a rule, theories that highlight social influence or collaborative processes are more useful to teachers of young children than viewpoints that leave human interaction out of the picture. A number of classical distinctions become more useful if integrated rather than separated: the classic differences between mind and body, for example, or between thought and feeling, the individual and the social world, or observation and intervention (Seifert, 2001). These binaries will not disappear in this chapter, but they will be more helpful to us as educators if we remember their mutual dependence, especially in the worlds of young children. Integrating the classic binaries alters how we think of "cognition," turning cognitive development into more of a project shared with others, and less of one marked by distancing from the social, emotional, or physical.

          Adopting a relational perspective about cognitive development makes obvious sense for aspects of classroom life that are explicitly social, such as the formation of peer relationships or the effect of early attachments on preschoolers’ behavior. What may be harder to believe may be that a similarly social or collaborative perspective is both possible and helpful for developmental activities that seem less inherently social—including the topic of children’s thinking in particular. We tend to regard cognition as a skill expressed independently—something that is acquired and displayed alone even in the most activity-oriented, developmentally appropriate classroom. But from an adult’s perspective, the independence is illusory: seen in broader context, even a child working alone is still a partner with teachers, peers, and (as I will also argue) unseen others in learning and thinking. Teachers therefore need ways to understand and work with children that acknowledge these partnerships fully. That, at least, is what I will argue below.

          I begin the chapter by clarifying key ambiguities in the concepts of development and of cognitive development in particular. The clarifications will assist in locating the research topics described in the chapter within the larger landscape of developmental theorizing. The topics themselves definitely do not cover the field of child development as an academic field, but they are arguably the two most central concerns of early childhood educators as professionals: pretend play and literacy. Pretend play is especially important to educators working with the youngest children and who seek to provide them with the most developmentally appropriate practice possible. As it turns out, pretend play also clearly supports the claim that cognitive development in early childhood is "really" social. The benefits of this people-oriented activity are very real, but definitely not confined to the social. Because of the focus of the chapter, I will not in fact focus on the social importance of pretend play, but on how pretend play connects to and stimulates particular cognitive skills in young children. As we will see, the cognitive skills are ones that early childhood teachers value, and that they can encourage deliberately.

          The other area of research discussed, literacy development, is especially important to educators working with "older" young children. Because the research shows the importance of the preschool years for literacy, however, the chapter will focus on emergent literacy during both the preschool and early school-years periods. Although some readers may feel that literacy belongs in a chapter on curriculum studies than one about developmental psychology, I will argue the contrary: that literacy both influences and is influenced by cognitive development in early childhood. As these comments suggest, however, the term development can have several meanings—a problem that can cause confusion when not understood. Before going further, therefore, the various meanings of development should be clarified.