Philosophic Speech: Main Points

My own perspective is that all students deserve a learning environment which, while holding them equally accountable for learning the material, respects the different ways in which their inevitably varying perspectives will contribute to and enrich the learning experience of fellow classmates. As Dewey points out, “the child can carry over what he learns in the home and utilize it in the school; and the things learned in the school he applies at home” (Dewey, 1990, p. 80).

Children who have different learning styles, including students with special needs, can bring much added value to a classroom by providing their peers with a varying perspective on material that they are learning. Including children from different backgrounds and with different learning styles in mainstream classrooms will serve to make the first step towards helping us as teachers to “bridge the gap between school and society and play some part in the fashioning of those great common purposes which should bind the two together” (Counts, 1959, p. 28). In the adult world we encounter many different types of people and the classroom should emulate that real life scenario as closely as possible.

In Erikson’s Eight Stages of Man, he outlines the consequences of lording rules over children without giving them any insight into the meaning behind them. He addresses parents in his writing, cautioning them that they, “must not only have certain was of guiding by prohibition and permission; they must also be able to represent to the child, an almost somatic conviction that there is a meaning to what they are doing” (Erikson p. 222). These words are meaningful for teachers as well because seemingly meaningless rules imposed on children in a classroom could also bring about the same type of frustration that can lead, as Erikson mentions, to neurotic behavior.

As discussed by Kessler who addresses the politics of play, when the teacher in a classroom made “a conscious decision…not to impose their views on the children’s self-expression and knowledge construction, the children themselves were quite active in their attempts to influence each other and take control of particular situations”(Kessler p. 66). A striking result of this tactic was a boy who instructed a classmate to pick up an item that had fallen off the table as if he “were filling a kind of void left by the teachers’ purposeful relinquishing of authority” (Kessler p. 67). Evidently, children are able to imitate and internalize certain community regulating modes of behavior when left to their own devices.

As stated by Vygotsky who discusses the zone of proximal development “Studies are proving new insights into the ways in which adults gradually shift the responsibility for solving a problem from themselves to the child, how adults monitor the child’s interest and enthusiasm, and other details of the teaching process” (Crain 215). Therefore, providing useful tools and a productive environment are ways that teachers can urge children to learn. Adults do not hand down learning to children, but instead they learn through their own interactions with the environment around them. As discussed by Piaget, “development is an active construction process, in which children, through their own activities, build increasingly differentiated and comprehensive cognitive structures” (Crain p.103). The cognitive and emotional leaps made by children with special needs as they navigate the social and academic rules of a classroom can be supported through his or her teacher’s careful construction of a community.

References

Counts, G. 1932/1959. Dare the School Build a New Social Order? Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Crain, W. (1992). Ch. 6 Piaget’s cognitive-development theory, In Theories of Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice hall, pp.100-233

Crain, W. (1992). Ch. 10 Vygotsky’s social-historical theory of cognitive development, In Theories of Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice hall, pp.193-221

Dewey, J. 1900, 1915, 1990. The School and Society/The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago:U. of Chicago Press.

Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and Society. (2nd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton. Chapter 7, Eight stages of man.

Kessler, S.A., & Hauser, M. (2000) Critical pedagogy and the politics of play. In L.D. Soto, (Ed.) The Politics of Early Childhood Education. (pp.59-71) N.Y.:Peter Long.