North American Ed - Communicating and learning

1. Communicating and learning in early childhood

• How do children learn about and make sense of the world around them?
• How do they learn to communicate?
• What kinds of experiences best support children’s cognitive and language development?
• How can adults plan for and facilitate children’s learning?

We know that during infancy and early childhood, emerging communication skills and the capacity to learn grow at an extremely rapid rate. Communication, particularly language, plays a major role in children’s learning. Language is a mechanism for thinking. Language allows children to imagine, create new ideas and share ideas with others. It also enriches parent-child relationships as they develop a new way of interacting and provides a remarkable lens into the mind of a very young human.

In this clip, filmed in a home in rural Egypt, Mariam and her mother tell stories and exchange ideas while looking at an English-language children’s magazine. As you watch, consider how this type of interaction supports communication and learning.

Young children are born with an astounding capacity to learn, both in the amount they can learn in any one domain or topic and in the variety and range of what they can learn. Children are virtuosos as learners. Their aptitudes, personalities, prior knowledge and cultural assumptions are a central part of how and what they learn.

What babies need to grow great brains isn’t fancy programs.  They need daily back and forth, serve and return social interactions, that happen during face-to-face interaction with loving, responsive, caring adults. Babies are intensely curious about their environments. They’re like scientists that pick up cues from all around them” (Clinton, 2020, p. 19).

Dr. Alison Gopnik (2010) discusses the unique capabilities of babies and very young children. She explains how young children experiment, analyze and develop theories as they encounter new information in the world. She likens the human brain to a computer designed by evolution, which emphasizes the role that evolution has played in the development of babies’ amazing abilities.

The next video is an excerpt from The Beginning of Life documentary. In this clip, Dr. Gopnik and other experts talk about the fact that babies learn from birth – and even before!

Although brain development is “acultural”, cultural context is very important in determining how and what children learn and how they communicate. Listen now to Dr. Kang Lee, Canada research chair at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, as he describes how early cultural communication norms are learned by infants.

Barbara Kaiser, an early childhood consultant and author, explains that culture has an impact on how educators view children’s behaviour because what is considered appropriate may vary from one culture to another. It is important to consider the cultural “gifts” that children bring to their experiences outside of their families.

Cultural context also shapes what skills children are most likely to acquire in early childhood and beyond. For example, Penn (1999) describes how young children in the United Kingdom are expected to recognize basic colours (e.g., red, blue, yellow) as a result of preschool attendance, in comparison to Mongolian herder children who, by the same age, will have learnt to distinguish about 320 horses through their colouring in different combinations of varying shades of black, white and grey. Indeed, “the expectations of the level of visual discrimination the children can achieve, and the uses to which it is put, are very different in each community” (p. 10-11).