The Influence of Pedagogy and Psychology on Early Childhood Education

Posted on May 15, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

Introduction

Early childhood education, as we understand it today, is the result of an approach based on teaching and psychological knowledge about our students. This document will explore the influence of mainstream educational and psychological theories on childhood education, focusing on their contributions to the current view. We will analyze relevant and innovative experiences, such as renewing projects, and provide a critical assessment of them.

The Influence of Educational Principles in Early Childhood Education

Authors Prior to the New School

  1. Aristotle believed that the age of seven is the starting point for learning.
  2. Marco Fabio Quintilian emphasized the importance of early learning potential to encourage further work.
  3. Comenius spoke of the nursery school and the educational environment within the family.
  4. Rousseau, a precursor of the educational renewal that was the New School, insisted on respecting the child’s nature. His practical, educational, and negative methodology is reflected in his work Emile, which revolves around nature.
  5. Pestalozzi noticed the psychological and educational benefits of the socialization of children in groups. He believed that school should be a society without restrictions and individualism, where cooperation and support lead to moral and intellectual exposure.
  6. In the second half of the seventeenth century, School Friends appeared in Spain.
  7. In England, Owen promoted conducive teaching methods for mass infant schools. In Spain, Paul Montesino established kindergartens. Froebel, guided by Rosseau’s ideas, encouraged spontaneity and development through play.
  8. In the late nineteenth century, Pedro Alcántara introduced Froebel’s method under the Free Education Institution.

The New School

At the end of the twentieth century, the New School promoted early childhood education. Aspects of this trend applicable to current early childhood education include:

  • Primacy of education
  • The teacher as a guide rather than an instructor
  • Pedagogy based on psychology: there is no education without knowledge of the learner
  • Child-centered education: everything revolves around the child
  • Autonomy: we must make the child independent
  • Individual education in a community setting

Representatives and Contributions

  • Maria Montessori emphasized the need for self-education.
  • The Agazzi sisters designed their method to guide the educational process so that the child acquires perceptual and linguistic skills.
  • Decroly set early childhood education through centers of interest.
  • Freinet proposed drives and free text printing based on students’ interests.

Other Influential Pedagogical Theories

  • Freire’s liberating education encourages student awareness through reflection and creativity to achieve liberation.
  • The Open School believes that the center should be open to the community.
  • Carl Rogers believed that experience and authority are the sources of truth.
  • Dewey’s action-based instrumentalism presents action as a process of experimentation and actions, relating attitudes to things. The teacher contributes to building experience and appoints a project method to accomplish a job of their choice, involving:
    • Consideration of any significant experience in the child’s life
    • Identification of difficulty based on this experience
    • Search for practical solutions
    • Possible solutions
    • Testing hypotheses by doing

The Influence of Psychology in Early Childhood Education

Behaviorist Psychology

Behaviorist psychology attempts to explain how human behavior is acquired, maintained, or explained. The behavioral model assumes that behavior results from learning in the social environment where human beings grow and develop. Representatives include Pavlov and Watson (classical conditioning) and Skinner (operant conditioning).

  • Pavlov and Watson believed that the type of person children become depends on their breeding environment and how they are treated. They saw development as an ongoing process of behavioral change shaped by the person’s unique atmosphere.
  • Skinner’s operant conditioning suggests that animals and humans repeat behaviors with favorable results and suppress unpleasant ones. Operant learning posits that voluntary actions become more or less possible depending on the consequences, and development depends on external stimuli (reinforcement, punishment).

Social Cognitive Psychology of Learning

Bandura agreed with Skinner that operant learning is important but stressed that humans are cognitive beings who think about the relationship between their behavior and its consequences. He emphasized observational learning as a development, asserting that learning occurs through observation and imitation.

Cognitive Psychology

From the 1970s, the simplicity of the behavioral paradigm led to a search for alternatives, resulting in the emergence of cognitive psychology (Piaget, Brunner, Ausubel). According to this school of thought, the change in behavior called behavioral learning reflects a person’s inner change. Cognitive psychologists are interested in variables such as meaning, intention, emotion, creativity, and thought.

Contributions of Authors

  1. Piaget’s theory has implications for improving education. He conceived of mental development as having variable and invariable elements, speaking of two functional invariants: adaptation and accommodation.
    • He applied adaptation to develop the intelligence of individual maturation. The mind works using the principle of adaptation and produces intelligence structures expressed in suitable mental adjustments that result in growth. Intelligence is adapted by the processes of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the process by which intelligence enters data to experience their previous schemes. Accommodation is the transformation of previous schemes to new experiences.
    • Organization is another functional invariant because intelligence is organized at all stages of development.
    Piaget argued that the source of knowledge is action. Initially, the body acts on contact with the environment through coordinated actions, which he calls patterns, forming a structure. He distinguished two stages in the development of intelligence: the child moves from a state of disregard for reality to buying, increasing their possibilities of action, allowing them to progress cognitively. Cognitive structures are established in stages, which are cuts in development, with a genesis and final balance leading to the next stage.
    • Sensory stage: thought occurs in the presence of the object in contact with the senses. The adjective”drivin” indicates that the perception of the object is a passive, responsive, and inclusive process, especially manipulative activity (the child presents himself and discovers the object).
    • Preoperative stage (2 years): the capacity appears to represent something that Piaget calls”meanin” through a signifier. The child can think from the meaning of the signifier; this is the symbolic function that marks the beginning of a new stage (up to 7 years). This new possibility of relationship using symbols implies a higher realm of reality.
    • After seven years, the child goes to the stage of concrete operations.
  2. Brunner’s theory of discovery learning establishes a discovery learning approach where the student learns strategies built for himself and transfers them to new situations. The behavior involves three processes: assimilation of content, processing, and evaluation of such content.
  3. Ausubel’s theory of meaningful learning challenges Piaget’s concept of learning by discovery. For him, the content was not important; the teaching method should propose meaningful learning, assimilating and integrating reality into a global network of knowledge.

Socio-Historical Psychology

Vygotsky’s socio-historical psychology posits that children acquire cultural values, beliefs, and problem-solving strategies through interactions with competent members of society. Vygotsky said that collaborative learning occurs within the child’s zone of proximal development, a term used to differentiate between what a person achieves on their own and what they achieve with the help and motivation of another.

Ecological Contextualist Psychology

Ecological contextualist psychology completes Vygotsky’s theories regarding the role of the social environment in constructing knowledge. It studies human behavior in natural settings and the relationship between behavior and the environment. This model analyzes and describes the demands of the environment and responses to the same agents. In education, it examines the situations that occur in class and the response of individuals, emphasizing the individual-environment interaction. Representatives of this theory are:

  • Bronfenbrenner, who describes multiple levels of the environment surrounding children and adolescents that affect their development: micro, meso, and macro ecosystems.
  • Feuerstein, who emphasized the role of the mediator in facilitating the assimilation and conceptualization of stimuli.

Current View of Contributions

The current school favors a constructivist approach to learning, allowing the student to develop through play, action, and content testing schemes. By offering guidance and direction in the process, we enhance the autonomy that makes the child feel like the protagonist of the teaching-learning process.

We also promote meaningful learning based on prior knowledge, providing real and functional experiences. We consider the developmental period of the student group.

Everything is covered in a warm, affectionate, respectful, and tolerant environment. According to Spitz,

Through the ability to relate, the child interacts with peers, socializing. The program and activities are designed to improve and encourage the teaching of effort and success, as Vygotsky stated. The organization of the environment must be flexible, ensuring alignment of different learning rates and the needs of our students.

If children do not achieve the objectives, pre-primary education, with its preventive and compensatory nature, can address inequality and avoid problems in development.

Working with families is a fundamental principle and methodology in early childhood education.

Regarding the organization of space, the classroom is divided into different areas and corners. The provision of children will be mostly in groups, favoring peer coordination of interests, collective decision-making, distribution of tasks and responsibilities, mutual help, overcoming conflicts, etc. They will be distributed in groups with names relating to elements of the unit. In each unit, we will question the relocation of students, boys with a more advanced curriculum, etc.

Innovative Techniques in Kindergarten

  • The project (based on the interests and needs of students, working with families)
  • Corners
  • Workshops, where students create objects
  • Tours, where students manipulate and explore
  • Intercycle workshops
  • Exhibitions
  • Book travelers
  • The use of new information technologies and communication

Relevant Renewed Experiences: A Critical Appraisal

In times of change in the education system and education reform, renewal movements must be active. An era of curriculum centralization has ended, and another has begun where the teacher is the star, developing and contextualizing the students’ culture and environment.

Examples of Renewed Experiences

  1. Childcare Centers/Children’s Houses: These centers provide care for children aged 1-3 years, offering a space for interaction and relationships between children and adults. Teachers facilitate their integral and harmonious development, and families are made to feel part of the process.
  2. Preschools at Home: These programs offer parent education in kindergarten and kindergarten families. They have a library for parents and children, meeting rooms, magazines, radio, a games room, TV, and a web page.
  3. Project Work: These action plans are proposed by the children and their teacher with the intention of getting a result. Interactions between students are a learning tool through cooperation with others. Ideas come through conservation and developing a script argument work. The teacher should provide the exposure of children’s doubts and resources to solve them.
  4. Workshops: These take place in a specific classroom, in workplaces, or as comprehensive workshops. Psychoeducational advantages include learning with others, child autonomy, stimulating development, research, and curiosity.
  5. Farm School: This educational setting with gardens and domestic animals is devoted to teaching practices that demonstrate rural areas. Workshops are held parallel to expression, crafts, etc.
  6. The Star of the Week: This activity contributes to the development of a positive self-concept, facilitates attention to diversity, and involves families in the educational work of the school. Every week, a child will be the star of the classroom. Parents provide photographers, and the child will assume responsibilities for the assembly to discuss their hobbies, friends, etc. Everything is given in writing in the Book Protagonist, which is sent home at the weekend.
  7. The Traveler: Families create a tale, starting from a technical page. Each family continues the story.

Critical Assessment

While these renewed experiences are valuable, teachers must make a critical assessment before applying any model. Criteria to consider include:

  • The need to look critically at the various theories: if you do not know the theoretical basis underlying any experience, you will not understand its full meaning.
  • Note the implication that each person makes an educational experience.

Conclusions

This document has studied the main pedagogical and psychological theories and movements, both older and current, that support education. We analyzed both current and historical views and their contributions. We also explored renewing experiences that are still relevant today, offering a critical assessment of them.

As we have seen, this is a particularly important issue for teachers. The theory justifies our teaching performance, based on how children learn, and appropriate educational intervention is the key to integrated education.

Bibliography

Teaching Context

  • Paniagua, G. and Palacios, J. Education. Educational response to diversity. Ed Alliance. Madrid, 2005.
  • Piaget, J. Project Early Childhood Education and practice in the classroom. Ed Wall. Madrid, 1993
  • VVAA. The educational legacy of the twentieth century to the twenty-first century schools. Ed Graó. Barcelona, 2001.

Legal Framework

  • LAW 7/2010 of July 20, education de Castilla la Mancha.
  • Decree 67/2007 of May 29, establishing the curriculum for upper secondary Education.
  • Education Act of May 6, 2006.
  • Royal Decree 1630/2006 of 29 December, which sets the curricula for the second year of Nursery Education (MS).