Child Perspectives and Children's Perspectives in Theory and Practice

ISBN-13: 9789400731509 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 233 str.

Dion Sommer; Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson; Karsten Hundeide

Opis

Recent decades have seen a growing emphasis, in a number of professional contexts, on acknowledging and acting on the views of children. This trend was given added weight by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified in 1990. Today, seeking the perspective of the child has become an essential process in all sorts of tasks, from framing new legislation to regulating professions.

This book answers the fundamental question of what it is that constitutes a 'child perspective', and how this might differ from the perspectives of children themselves. The answers to such questions have important implications for building progressive and developmental adult-child relationships. However, theoretical and empirical treatments of child perspectives and children's perspectives are very diverse and idiosyncratic, and the standard reference work has yet to be written.

Thus, this work is an attempt to fill the gap in the literature by searching for and defining key formulations of potential child perspectives within parts of the so-called 'new child paradigm'. This has been derived from childhood sociology, contextual-relational developmental psychology, interpretative humanistic psychology and developmental pedagogy. The highly experienced authors develop a comprehensive professional child perspective paradigm that integrates recent theory and empirical child research. With its clear presentation of underlying theories and suggested applications, this book illustrates a child-oriented understanding of specific relevance to both child-care and preschool educational practice.

Recenzje

This book provides the reader with a rare example the application of academic wisdom to a problem of enormous complexity: how should we organize children's early education? The authors' approach is informed not only by a deep knowledge of developmental psychology, sociology, culture and history, but by deep involvement in educational practice as well. They advocate, and convincingly defend their advocacy of "developmental pedagogy" which "brings the act of learning together with the object of learning." This synthesis demands that one take as foundational the ways in which, and the conditions under which, children create meaning. It requires that pedagogues both take seriously children's perspectives and recognize that education is always a normative process, one saturated by un-cognized ideologies which are "like sand at a picnic - they get into everything."

All those who seek to understand the relationships between society, human development, and education will profit from this book. It provides a wonderful tool for thinking about how to organize children's experience in the historically evolving crises of our times so that our grandchildren's grand children may have a human world into which they may develop.

Michael Cole, University of California, San Diego, USA

Spis treści

Preface.- Introduction: Child Perspectives and Children’s Perspectives.- Changes in the Developmental Ecology of Infants and Young Children.- Scandinavian Mothers in Employment.- School-for-all: a Growing Global Phenomenon. Daycare-for-all: a Scandinavian welfare right.- Conclusion: Changes in Developmental Ecology.- The Welfare Model and Values Facilitating a Child Perspective.- The Scandinavian Welfare Model – a brief introduction.- Children’s Health and Well Being in the Scandinavian Welfare States.- The Ethos of Humanization.- Children as Citizens and Child-centredness as a Vital Societal Value.- Child Perspectives without Ideology?.- Curricula of Early Childhood Education and Child Perspectives.- Child Perspectives and Children’s Perspectives: distinctions and definitions.- Part I: In Search of Child Perspectives and Children's Perspectives in Childhood Sociology and Developmental Psychology.- Introduction.- In search of child perspectives and children’s perspectives in childhood sociology.- Childhood as a social structure.- Children’s interpretive reproduction.- The study of 'real children' and the 'experience of being a child'.- The ethnographic, interpretive approach of childhood sociology as child perspectives and children’s perspectives?.- Conclusion: child perspectives and children’s perspectives in childhood sociologies?.- In search of child perspectives and children’s perspectives in contextual-relational developmental psychology.- A child perspective in developmental psychology?.- The child paradigm in contextual-relational developmental psychology.- The phenomenology of contextualism.- A psychological child perspective - criteria and challenges.- The pre-verbal child’s intersubjective world – an empirical example.- Conclusion and closing reflections.- Childhood sociology and contextual-relational psychology – common platforms for a child perspective?.- Challenges raised by childhood sociology for developmental psychology –and vice versa.- First period: Parallel processes of redefining childhood, children, and child.- Second period: Integrative redefinition of childhood, children, and child.- Children as intentional, meaning making actors.- The inner psychological space of the self.- Perspectives and future integrative potential.- Part II: A Child Perspective to the Care for Children in Practice.- Introduction.- Fundamental Features Embedded in a Humanistic Dialogical Approach to Children.- Care as a Sensitive Communicative Process: the Primary Circle of Care.- 'Attunement to the attunement of the other…'.- The component of dialogic caring behaviour.- From caring ability to caring processes.- The primary caring cycle.- When Empathic Care is Obstructed.- Children in objectifying, non-child perspective oriented institutions .- When children are negatively defined and stigmatised.- Objectification and abuse.- The dehumanising of 'outsiders'.- The Zone of Intimacy.- Ways in and out the zone of intimacy .- Face-to-face and gaze contact (p) ® P.- Sensitive touch and bodily contact.- Sympathetic participation in the child’s initiatives and activities.- Conditions that Impinge on Empathic Identification.- Beyond the primary cycle of care.- Natural care as opposed to professional help?.- Conclusion: the Ethics of Closeness and the Primary Circle of Care as a Child Perspective Orientation.- the Interpretive Approach to Children.- The interpretive approach as opposed to competence diagnostics.- Reconstruction of how a child interprets the situation.- When misunderstanding becomes a deficit.- The intersubjective space.- Conclusion: an Interpretive Approach to Children’s Replies in Diagnostic Tests.- Part III: In Search of the Role of Child Perspectives and Children's Perspectives in Early Childhood Education.- Introduction.- In search of the role of child perspectives and children’s perspectives in early childhood education.- How young children learn in early childhood education.-