“What a child can do with the help of an adult or more experienced peer.”
Child A (I guess about two yo) does not show a sign of enjoying the seaside. He is in the (fairly calm) sea, carried by an adult whom I assume is his father. Perhaps he is unused to his father’s closeness but this seems unlikely: the child is clinging tight to his father, arms round his father’s next, legs tight round his father’s waist. Perhaps he does not like the noise, the movement of the water, all the people, the sun, or all of these. Perhaps his father’s eagerness is also a factor. None of this will I ever know. He is howling as his father takes him deeper into the sea (still not so deep that the boy’s feet are wet). The father is bobbing up and down as he stands in the water – so that the boy is closer to the waves? – and smoking, and talking, I lose sight of them as I swim.
When next I see them, after maybe a quarter of an hour, Child A is back from the sea, hair wet, father wetter, both of them laughing, the father running water with his hand over the boy’s back.
Child B is maybe six yo. She runs into the sea with an older child – again I’ll assume a relationship and say this is her elder brother – who goes deeper than she can comfortably go on foot, given her height. Older child (maybe ten? ) comes back for her, splashes her and runs back into the sea, beyond her reach. She pursues him, laughing. He splashes her, she splashes him back. He come back to within her reach as if to allow himself to be splashed. Their bodies are tense, attentive, they keep their way on each other (as far as the splashing allows): it is a contest, of sorts.
But what might Child B be learning? Or practising?
There are, of course, huge limitations to this sort of ad hoc observation, but consider the two examples. In the first, there is a clear pedagogic intention of the kind we might think of as “join the club.” This is the game that’s being played, and I expect the father hopes the boy will get used to the water. It rather looks like this, and it rather looks like the boy has a nice time and the dad “succeeds.” The second was more chaotic, and I just wonder how many learning events and opportunities remain unseen because an observing adult is looking for purpose, especially adult purpose. What does a child learn from the kind of play that is a fight, a skirmish ?????
Lave and Wenger in Daniel’s Introduction to Vygotsky propose that
Conventional explanations view learning as a process by which the learner internalizes knowledge, whether discovered, transmitted from others or experienced in interaction with others…too easily construed as an problematic process of absorbing the given.
I suspect that this kind of rough-and-ready model suggests that neither child A nor child B (nor their more experienced peers) is actually involved in any teaching or learning.
However, I would suggest that Lave and Wenger’s discussion of social practice (Daniels p145, 147 etc) is important.
If participation in social practice is the fundamental form of learning, we require a more fully worked-out view of the social world…We think it important to consider how shared cultural systems…are interrelated, in general and as they help to coconstitute learning in communities of practice.
While I recognise they are still talking about something other than Mondello beach, does this give us a clue with what the children are doing? They are apprentices, actively exploring a set of social practices and expectations: what to do at the seaside; what fun can be had in this situation; who you can trust. This goes beyond skills and concepts, but nevertheless mirrors that kind of learning: even in wild, playful splashing, there is a community to join.
nicktomjoe 