The contributions of different constructivists help us to see how context, experience, play and talk with adults and children provide opportunities and support for children's cognitive development.
Major constructivists' ideas have made us aware of the ways in which young children's minds are not 'blank slates', nor primed for learning according to the behaviourists' stimulus-response theory (Nursery World, 18 March 2004), as had been assumed earlier in western societies.
Constructivists are convinced that human beings actively construct their knowledge of the worlds they inhabit - people, their ways of behaving, objects, and environments they come into contact with - out of their experiences. In other words, constructivists see knowledge not as a body of facts that are stored in and passed between human minds, but as a process.
Jean Piaget
The pioneer of constructivism in the west was Jean Piaget, a Swiss zoologist who wanted to create a theory integrating philosophy of mind with biology. He thought that, as organisms, humans are constantly adapting to their environments. He called these processes schemas (or schemata).
Piaget then named the processes by which schemas evolve 'assimilation' and 'accommodation' - assimilation taking place when a child absorbs new knowledge and fits it into what is already known; accommodation when the new knowledge challenges the 'old' to such an extent that the 'old'
knowledge is changed in some way, to make the new and old fit together and make sense.
Chris Athey carried out much research about schemas, which she explained as patterns of repeatable behaviour into which experiences are assimilated and gradually co-ordinated (see Nursery World, 19 February 2004 and 15 April 2004).
The number of schemas a child has will increase rapidly during their first year. At the same time, schemas are becoming interlinked in a complex way.
Many early years settings have found the idea of schemas useful when they observe children's activities and try to understand how each individual is attempting to make sense of their world.
Piaget also proposed a series of broadly age-banded, but universal, stages in children's development. His two main stages most relevant here are the 'sensorimotor period' (from birth to around two years of age) and the 'pre-operational stage' (two to seven years).
He emphasised that during the very early stages, babies are developing an understanding about object permanence - the knowledge that a person or toy still exists when out of sight.
Piaget stressed the importance of language during the pre-operational period, because being able to use language enables a child to communicate more effectively, internalise words as thoughts and internalise action.
Children at this stage can increasingly imagine things that they cannot see or events that happened in the past.
Lev Vygotsky
Lev Vygotsky's theory of child development is based on the following ideas:
* activity generates thought
* language and thinking develop separately but relate to each other in a very complex way.
Vygotsky thought all children pass through the same sequences in stages of development but that higher, or more complex, thinking abilities are in fact new psychological systems, rather than accretions overlaying existing development.
This is interesting in the light of more recent research by neuroscientists, such as Alison Gopnik, who show how toddlers' thinking changes in the latter half of their second year. According to Gopnik, experience causes children not simply to re-programme their own brains, but to reconstruct them.
Building on Vygotsky's ideas, Jerome Bruner, who also devised a stage theory of human cognitive development, popularised the notion of scaffolding. Vygotsky had proposed a zone of proximal development that adults can identify through observing what a child can do and then scaffolding, or supporting, learning through that zone to the higher level of learning the child wants to achieve.
Vygotsky is important to early years workers because he emphasises the key 'instructional' role played by adults and other children who know more than the baby or young child who is learning. His theory recognised that learning is a social activity which happens in culturally relevant contexts during playful interactions.
Piaget, on the other hand, focused to a lesser extent on the role of social interaction. As a result, Piaget's theory has been depicted as proposing the child is a 'lone scientist' during exploration and play.
Post-Piagetians
A group of thinkers known as the Post-Piagetians, including Margaret Donaldson, recognised the ways in which criticisms of Piaget's theories needed to be addressed, for example by exploring the extent to which a child's thinking is dependent on context or the kind of language used.
To show that young children can understand others' perspectives, they devised experiments, such as building a landscape with a mountain and asking children what a teddy could see from different places, or asking a child where a doll might hide so as not to be seen by policemen on another set. They argued that children need meaningful experiences to help them move from particular to general understandings.
Piaget's critics
Some critics of Piaget's theory suggest he was too dependent on Darwin's ideas of evolution. Others argue that the research leading to his stage theories was culturally limited - for example, Corinne Hutt explored the understandings of the conservation of volume with Sri Lankan children who fetch their family's water. While most western children were found to state that a tall, narrow glass of water contains more than a short wide glass, even after being shown that they contain the same, their Sri Lankan counterparts were not fooled.
Similarly, the language used in some of Piaget's experiments has been viewed as tricky and the reason why younger children 'fail'. Further, none of these theorists took account of differing power relations and their impact on children's co-constructions of understanding.
A community of learners
Vygotsky and Piaget were in broad agreement that children are active learners and that they construct knowledge, transforming both the new and existing knowledge to gain a sense of conflict resolution.
It is these 'messages' that we can take to help us understand early development and learning that right from birth, young children are active learners, deeply interested in people. They are trying to 'make sense' of the world around them and we are the co-constructors, participating in their communities of learners. NW Tricia David is Emeritus Professor of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University College
Further reading
* Hidden meanings, Nursery World, 22 January 2004
* Show the way, Nursery World, 18 March 2004
* Donaldson, M (1992) Human Minds. London: Allen Lane/ Penguin Press
* Gopnik, A, Melzoff, A and Kuhl, P (1999) How Babies Think: the Science of Childhood. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
* Nutbrown, C (1994) Threads of Thinking. London: Paul Chapman/Sage
* Wood, D (1998) How Children Think and Learn. Oxford: Blackwell