DANISH SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, AARHUS UNIVERSITY
- RESEARCH UNIT CHILDHOOD, LEARNING AND CU RRICULUM THEORY
Usage Based Language Acquisition in the Danish
Crèche –
Paper presented at the OMEP World Conference in Gothenburg
August 11th - 13th 2010
By Ole Henrik Hansen
PhD fellow
Danish School of Education
Aarhus University
Department of Curriculum Research
Research Unit of Childhood, Learning and Curriculum Theory
Office B234
Tuborgvej 164,
DK-2400 Copenhagen
Telephone +4588889859
Mail ohh@dpu.dk
Website www.dpu.dk/about/ohh
or www.dpu.dk/bld
Ole Henrik Hansen
MA (ed). PhD Fellow
Aarhus University
1
DANISH SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, AARHUS UNIVERSITY
- RESEARCH UNIT CHILDHOOD, LEARNING AND CU RRICULUM THEORY
Abstract: In curriculum research concerning language acquisition in the Danish
crèche1, one challenge is to identify educational content that takes into consideration
the child’s well-being, as well as personal development, social abilities, language
acquisition and cognitive development, and in the process provide basis for
democratic youth by seeing, hearing and respecting the individual child (Broström,
2006b; UNESCO, 1989).
The field of research is preschool children, who acquire care, norms, values
and skills, trying to learn about and understand themselves as beings in the
surrounding world and environment (Broström, 2006a; Lindahl & Pramling
Samuelsson, 2002, p. 15).
This paper is based on the dominant theories of language acquisition and
Nordic theories of curriculum research (Broström, 2006a; Broström & Vejleskov,
2009; Lindahl, 2002; Lindahl & Pramling Samuelsson, 2002), and discuss why and
how language acquisition can be facilitated in the Danish crèche, for the child aged
eight to fourteen month of age (Stern, 1998, 2004; Tomasello, 2009). The paper
discusses pedagogical research between post-humanist (Barad, 2007) and postmodern
language psychology (Pinker, 1994; Tomasello, 2009).
Keywords: Crèche; Language; Curriculum theory; Socio-cultural; Post-humanism;
Child’s perspective.
Introduction
One could argue that pedagogy in the Danish crèche is a light version of pedagogy in
the Danish preschool, and one reason for that claim would be that research
concerning the child’s stay in the Danish crèche is inadequate (Nordenbo, 2010), and
consequent reflection concerning a pedagogic structure in the crèche may be limited.
It seems beside the point, that Denmark has a national curriculum for the crèche that
in six themes emphasizes the child’s acquisition of competences 2. On the contrary
the national curriculum seems to have had a slightly different effect. On the one hand
it has been part of a good and needed professionalisation of the pedagogues. These
1
In 2007, 122,000 children aged one to three years of age attended daycare: 13,000 children, attended a crèche, 65,000
a municipality day-care home and 44,000 a mixed age institution. That is approximately 90% of all children aged one to
three years.
2
The six themes in the Danish national curriculum for day care, preschools and leisure time centres are: 1. Language. 2.
Social competences. 3. Personal competences. 4. Cultural expressions and values. 5. Nature and phenomena of nature.
6. Body and physical movement (Retsinformation, 2007).
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MA (ed). PhD Fellow
Aarhus University
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themes have infused the profession with comparable nationwide educational content
for early childhood. On the other hand, in order to implement political agendas and
developmental standards for some of the themes, in particularly the language theme,
there has been a tendency to narrow down the pedagogical approach, assuming that
e.g. the process of language acquisition for small children in the crèche is somewhat
similar to that in preschool or even in school.
The main problem may be an unreflected academic insight in how the small
child acquires language. In Denmark there are two main theories of language
acquisition, each one claiming its validity: A functional linguistic concept (Bleses,
2007), and a usage based concept (Tomasello, 2009). The linguistic concept has the
present political support, probably because this concept provides developmental
standards, that can be tested and thereby contain some degree of assumed
accountability. The other concept is a socio-cultural, or postmodern social-pedagogic
approach, where language is believed to be acquired as individual and contextualised
competences. This concept does not provide a basis for standards or fixed scales that
can be used as a parameter for testing. On the other hand, the socio-cultural stand
needs to emphasize e.g. the symbolic gestures, in order to extend language and mind
(Clark, 2008). But as illustrated in the end of the paper by preliminary data, the
Danish crèche seems reluctant to facilitate that kind of dialogue.
The pedagogic tradition in the Danish crèche is, inspired by humanistic
psychology and reform pedagogic tradition, a practice where development is the most
important goal in early childhood education (Broström, 2006a). This tradition implies
that the child’s self-governed activity provides the best development, which in
practice leaves the smallest children with a mainly caring environment, and little
educational content. Combined with a linguistic concept where the children are
stimulated according to development psychological scales, and tested for their
language performances at the age of three, this becomes a problem for those children
who don’t perform well.
It is a paradox that children, even before they can celebrate their third birthday,
must perform at a test in order to pass to the next level and at the same time, for two
years, have been attending a pedagogical system, that only to a certain degree
provides relevant educational content or, as seen in some of my empirical
observations, provides educational content which is more relevant to the preschool
child and, due to the fact that 12 children and two to three adults are in the same
room, the system can only provide limited adult attention to the individual child. The
consequence is, that some children risk lacking a) linguistic challenges that can help
their linguistic and cognitive development or b) sufficient empathic care. Instead they
are left with a custodial kind of care that primarily ensures their physical wellness.
These paradoxes are the substantial topics for my PhD project, where it is a
main ambition to outline prescriptive and differentiated curricula, based on videoOle Henrik Hansen
MA (ed). PhD Fellow
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graphic and ethnographic research concerning the crèche’s ability to facilitate a
relevant language in the child.
The project is based on themes of the national curriculum for the crèche, more
specifically on the theme about language acquisition. However, investigating the
child’s language involves two other themes; firstly the theme of social competences
and secondly the theme of personal competences. These three themes are naturally
connected, and it is not possible to separate them in a usage based language pedagogy
(Tomasello, 2009). One of the main reasons for this is that language and thereby
cognition, as described below, evolves from socio-cognitive and socio-motivational
reasons and furthermore as a guided and contextualized process involving the child’s
own activity in the social environment. In this concept, language facilitates cognition,
identity and a self-awareness which helps the child to transform from an object to a
subject (Merleau-Ponty, 1984). And when children communicate with other children
they learn to control social situations, and to extend their mind and cultural
knowledge (Tomasello, 2009).
But infant communication is challenging to pedagogues. Mainly because
preverbal children do not master an iconic verbalized language, which means that
they are at the mercy of the caregiver’s ability to appreciate the child’s perspective,
using intuition and experience in reading and interpreting children’s gabble, body
language, gestures and eye movements in trying to understand their thoughts and
intentions.
A curriculum concerning language acquisition for the children from eight to
fourteen month of age must therefore contain three main elements: 1) A theorized
reflected standpoint which may facilitate a content of learning. 2) A clarification of
the pedagogues role, and 3) A specific balancing of the three main pedagogic
elements, that are expected to facilitate the child’s well being and development: Care;
upbringing and teaching (Broström, 2006a; Lindahl, 2002).
The main goal of this paper is hereby to discuss a setting for a caring and
educational environment, where the small child can decode contextual meaning, and
thereby interpret into words and thoughts.
Part one – a concept of learning
The global war on language acquisition
In the past three decades the study of the child’s first language has been divided into
two opposing fields, one that builds upon functional linguistic skills (among others
Bleses & Højen, 2009; Chomsky, 1975; Pinker, 1994) and one that emphasize
context-sensitive, psychological processes (among others Bruner & Watson, 1983;
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Tomasello & Todd, 1983; Vygotsky, 1962). There has been little communication
between the disciplines, and periods where each group drew upon the theories and
methods of the other in limited and often limiting ways.
The linguistic approach understands language acquisition as an ongoing
progression, where the child develops language according to universal rules, step by
step as though the child climbed a ladder. And children do so, generation after
generation, not because it is useful to them, but because it is an instinctive process,
and they really just can’t help doing it. (Pinker, 1994, p. 20).
The fact that language is described as a universally instinctive phenomenon
which develops in predictable steps, is in Denmark a politically popular language
concept (Bleses, 2007; Bleses & Højen, 2009). Not only because the concept is useful
to explain reproduction of knowledge but also because, from a laypersons point of
view, it claims that language acquisition is an individual cognitive act, which seems a
logical and effective approach. And as a politically popular side effect, it becomes
possible to test the child for linguistic, age-determined cognitive skills.
If, instead, language is conceptualized as a socially developed, contextualized
relation to individual time, place and culture, gender and socio-economic conditions,
then there is no either natural or universal language to measure (Barad, 2007;
Burman, 2008; Dahlberg, Moss, & Pence, 2007). In that concept children’s learning
is a contextualized phenomenon and the voices of the children are important, as are
their participation in constructing and determining their lives as they possess agency
(Dahlberg, et al., 2007, p. 49). The infant becomes a subject from the very start,
rather than a naturally developing object which can be reduced to separate and
measurable categories. It is from the start a sentient being rather than a foetus. And
language acquisition becomes …
… a cooperative and communicative activity, in which children (…) make meaning of the
world, together with adults and equally important, other children (…) Learning is not
transmission of knowledge taking the child to preordinated outcomes, nor is the child a
passive receiver and reproducer (…) ‘a child has got a hundred languages and is born with a
lot of possibilities and a lot of expressions and potentialities’ (Wallin, Mæchel, & Barsotti,
1981) (Dahlberg, et al., 2007, p. 50).
In this concept, language acquisition is not a question of developing an existing
language but more a question of constructing a cultural equivalent language, that
imparts the child with a sense of accordance between themselves and the surrounding
world. In this process the language induces contextual meaning in the consciousness
of the child. This language concept is to a greater extent in accordance with the
Danish pedagogical tradition, where it is due to social activities that the child
develops social and linguistic abilities (Broström, 2006a):
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The different concepts of learning imply different views on the same field of
research. Here is an example where first the linguistic viewpoint, and then the
postmodern viewpoint describes the same central principle in the child’s first
language, but with opposite conclusions:
The linguistic viewpoint:
Language is not a cultural artefact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the
federal government works. Instead it (…) develops spontaneously, without conscious effort or
formal instruction, and it is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, it is
qualitatively the same in every individual, and it is distinct from more general abilities to
process information or behave intelligently. (…) It conveys the idea that people know how to
talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs. (…) a three year old (…) is
a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts (Pinker, 1994, pp. 4-5).
The linguistic hypothesis is: the small child understands words, and thereby decodes
contextual meaning.
And then a Usage-based viewpoint:
It is emphasized that it is the caregiver’s different use of language, which creates different
language. Caregivers use of language to describe the outside world, generates language in the
child, primarily as a tool to create meaning in the surroundings. And children that experience
language as a tool of regulation and prescription, learn language as something they can use to
manipulate their social interactions (Nelson, 1985; Tomasello, 2003).
Tomasello emphasizes that it is not as much what the caregiver says to the child that
affect the child’s language, but rather how she says it and how she respond
(Tomasello & Todd, 1983). Also Nelson (2007) stresses that language occurs as a
consequence of use and of pragmatic reasons rather than linguistic. Language
becomes an individual tool for thought and a medium for understanding the
connection between “the world” and “me”, but not a random tool where the child
determines the conditions. It is the adults care-giving, the adults use of language, and
the adults ethical guidance, that makes language a bearer of culture and a key that fits
both the social space and the cultural codes (Tomasello, 2009).
The hypothesis is: the small child decodes contextual meaning, and thereby
understands words.
The two concepts of are, so to speak, standing back to back, facing the world in
opposite directions. The linguistic position focusing on grammatical content and
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expression, claiming that language are representations, free of human intelligence and
psychological abilities, independent of culture, context and linguistic interaction. To
underline this position, Chomsky (1965, p. 4) describes the human ability to use
language as an autonomic, innate ability, build on universal grammar, syntax,
semantic, phonology and morphology. He calls the mental ability of language for a
competence,3 and he calls the child’s use of language for performance. On the one
hand is the structure that belongs outside the language - performance, such as skills
and cleverness, learned in the social environment, and on the other hand are the
structures that belong inside the language, the linguistic code and the underlying
subconscious competence. The last category is the primary linguistic object
(Karrebæk, 2008, p. 15). Language acquisition is thereby a question of accountability
and acquiring the linguistic grammatical codes to use in interactions
This linguistic concept is opposed by a so called context-sensitive concept,
where it is the ”We” or shared intentionality, that is emphasized as the basis of
language (Tomasello, 1986). Human cooperative communication is in this field based
on individuals engaging in forms of collaborative activity, and joint goals, joint
intentions, mutual knowledge and shared beliefs, which all are elements in the
context of various cooperative motives and language occurs as intra-active
interference. Language thereby becomes more than words and grammar. The central
difference between the two concepts can be narrowed down to:
The infant possesses an innate universal grammar as an instinct (Chomsky, 2006; Pinker,
1994, pp. 4-5)
and …
The infant is biologically prepared and thereby has the potential capacity to learn language
(Tomasello, 2009).
The functional linguistic focus on universal internal processes and the absence of a
socio-cultural angle have, in recent years, been a target for criticism. One of the main
claims is that there is no attention towards the infant’s ability to empathise; a point
which Chomsky shares with Piaget, who describes the infant as:
… only concerned with himself, and ignoring more or less completely the points of view of
others (Piaget, 1929, p. 188). (Lindahl, 1998, p. 16).
Criticism of this view is stated in postmodern psychology (among others Sommer,
2006; Stern, 1998; Tomasello, 1986; Trevarthen, 1980), where one of the
3
It is not competence as in the usual Danish interpretation, where competence means that the child is
aware of her ability, and is able to put them in use (perform). For Chomsky, competence is a non conscious ability.
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cornerstones is the infant’s ability to communicate, imitate and possess a sense for
empathy, and thereby obtain a sense of self and identity; of individuality, and thus – a
sense of togetherness. That feeling is initiated by the infant’s ability to separate “me”
from “us”. So a postmodernist will claim, that it is the infant’s ability to distance
itself as an individual, that facilitates a sense of sociability, and thereby feel a need
for communication. And the post-humanistic philosopher and PhD in Quantum
physics Karen Barad (2007) emphasizes a scientific need to understand these ongoing
dialectics between individuality and sociability, between materialism (biology) and
discourse (culture), in order to understand that learning occurs as simultaneous
processes in humans and between humans in an ongoing intra-active process, (Barad,
2007, p. 227).
The material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra‐activity and
enfolding. Material and discursive constraints and exclusions are similarly entangled.
(Barad, 2007, p. 244)
Intra-action moves beyond the way in which materialism shapes, or influences the
socially constructed world. Intra-activity is an ongoing dynamism that configures and
reconfigures relations of space, time and matter – where matter must be understood
as both significance and substance (Barad, 2007, p. 181), which underlines the point
that children are not observers of the world, using language with an universal
structure. Neither are they simply located at particular places in the world; they are
rather active or agency parts of the world in its ongoing intra-activity (Barad, 2007, p.
184).
Hence according to Barad, it is in the on-going intra-activity, that the child
becomes a being, or as Barad puts it, “becomes matter”. But then I must explain the
concept of intra-action – to give an impression of how they ”become matter”, how
different spatial systems intra-act in the child. And to do so, I need to delve into the
difference between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr’s scientific understandings and
their discussions about objectivity.
Einstein, like many before and after him, speaks of the real world as the
external world. And he does so in a way that assumes a separation between the
observed and the observer. In other words, spatial separation ensures ontological
separability; and if two systems are spatially separated by so much as an infinitesimal
spatial interval they always possess separately determinate states. Hence in Einstein’s
way of thinking, the spatial separation of observer and observed consequently ensures
objectivity.
Bohr regarded the external world as an illusion. There is no external and there
is no internal – there is “the world”, and we are all part of this world. For Bohr, the
so-called instantaneous communication between spatially separated systems is
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explained by the fact that these allegedly separated states are not really separate at all,
but rather “parts” of the same phenomenon – the world itself. Furthermore, for Bohr,
representational research is therefore inadequate and a result of specific spatial cuts
enacted by the scientific arrangement, with a possibility of different conclusions. In
Bohr’s account objectivity is therefore a matter of immediate communication (Barad,
2007, pp. 173-174).
So for Einstein, science and research are spatial systems interacting as external
separated systems. For Bohr this is not possible; for him, science and research are
spatial systems, connected in instantaneous communication, influencing one another
because they are connected as different individual parts of the same phenomenon.
They are instantaneously interacting. So …
Interactions are spatially defined entities that interact as externally separate entities.
E.g.: child and crèche, child and pedagogue, child and child, and so on.
Intra-actions are spatially defined entities that interact in time, space and matter, as
spatial entities of the same phenomenon, which by their intra-action become someone
new or something else – or just – become something. And space, time and matter are
mutually constituted through the dynamics of iterative (on-going) intra-activity
(Barad, 2007, p. 181). E.g.: The child becomes someone else when entering the
crèche: in fact every time she enters the crèche! The spatial intra-acting systems
produce matter, and become materialized in the child.
Concerning the language war, this implies the following setup:
Biological sculpturing
I think the world is precisely what gets lost in doctrines of representation and scientific
objectivity. (Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters”) (Barad, 2007, p. 137).
Linguistic representationalism takes the notion of external separation as its
foundation. It separates the world into ontologically external domains of words and
significance, leaving itself with the dilemma of their linkage. There has been the
linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that
every turn has turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural
representation. And all these turns emphasize that language matters. Discourse
matters. Culture matters. But the only thing that doesn’t seem to matter - is matter
itself.(Barad, 2007, p. 132).
But how did language become more reliable than matter? Why are language
and culture granted their own agency and historicity, while biology is figured as
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passive or at best something that inherits a potential? Is it not the common view of
representationalism that language has a mediating function that displays matter as a
passive and mute phenomenon in need of an external force like culture to complete
it?
Barad’s (2007, p. 32) scientific discussion implies a recognition of the human
role in biological practices. But also beyond this process she marks a refusal to take
the distinction between human and nonhuman or biology and culture for granted and
in order to enable an analysis of how these distinctions are produced, any research
must avoid this nature-culture dichotomy. Hence …
Postmodern early childhood education is not to intervene from outside, but to
intra-act from within, as a simultaneous part of the phenomenon that needs to be
described (Barad, 2007, p. 174).
II. The fact that childhood’s materialization (ontology) through meaning
(epistemology) is a basic term that can be named onto-epistemology (Barad,
2007, p. 185)
III. The fact that this is inseparable from normative values (ethics), so that we may
talk about ethico-onto-epistemology, expressing the effort to unify everything
that the representational science has parted, everything that in childhood
constitutes how the child becomes matter (Barad, 2007, p. 185).
I.
Childhood as an intra-acting concept of biology and culture is such an ethico-ontoepistemological complex that unifies the process whereby words become matter. The
word “mother”, without its materiality in the consciousness of the child - is nothing.
As Barad lines up, biological dispositions intra-act with socio-cultural
representations, skills and motivations of shared intentionality, and constitute what
we may call agential realism, or maybe active communication.
So … first of all it is a presumption that children are biologically prepared for
communication, and some of their first communicative attempts are gestures and eye
gazes (among others: Murray & Trevarthen, 1985; Stern, 1998; Tomasello, 1986). It
is the social-cognitive4 and the social-motivational5 capacity; and the cultural needs
4
Social-cognitive abilities refer to the fact that children at an early stage adapt a conscious insight in social relations. A
growing ability to understand that other people are individuals with emotions and, foremost, with intentions. This
insight occurs as a precursor to communicative skills.
5
Social-motivational capacity refers to the unconscious evolutionary desire humans have for sociability. The complex
ability to cooperate and interact can be explained by various motivations for sociability. Children need meaningful and
challenging social contact to develop, and they need to create strong social bonds, embracing others who take care of
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that enable early forms of communication, and these capacities become platforms on
which linguistic communication can be built (Donald, 1991/1993; Stern, 1998, p. 43;
Tomasello, 2008, p. 2 and 60; Tomasello, et al., 2009, p. 65).
Consequently it is the intra-action of biologically driven human need for
attachment and sociability, that causes language, and with that in mind, we can
precede with the biological sculpturing:
We are cultural mongers [salesmen], driven by the very nature of our awareness to seek
refuge and solace in the community. (…) Symbolic thought is a by-product of this fact, and so
is language (Donald, 2001, p. 253).
If the development of a cognitive brain and language was an evolutionary advantage,
which enabled the human species to survive variations in the physical environment,
then it must imply that…
… without the human cultural niche, and the skills and motivations for participating in it, a
developing human child would not become a normally functioning person at all. Human
beings are biologically adapted to grow and develop maturity within a cultural context
(Tomasello, et al., 2009, pp. 106-107) [Italics by the author].
Language as a neural activity, which embraces symbolic representations of the
environment, facilitates an extension of the mind in the sense that the world becomes
more accessible to the child, and the child and its thinking becomes accessible to the
world; in that manner the language becomes a social and cultural scaffolding for the
child’s thoughts (Barad, 2007; Clark, 2008; Gopnik, 2009; Nelson, 2007).
This implies that the child becomes biological shaped in the image of the
contextual culture. And by shaped, it means that the child’s brain and body actually
are sculptured after the culture (Donald, 1991/1993), the child becomes matter. And
in that process language seems to have several functions. First of all it is through
language that culture is shared, it is through language that the brain is stimulated and
it is language that opens the child for the world, and the world for the child (Klafki,
1997).
The syntactically determined cognitive reach of the child begins as a growing
subset of its biologically determined cognitive reach. Then, two things happen: the
syntactically determined cognitive reach extends beyond the biological boundaries
and a new component of cognitive reach is created like an expanding ring around the
them; a strong desire for belonging, for being someone and for the little child, ultimately to survive (Bowlby, 1988;
Tomasello, Dweck, Silk, Skyrms, & Spelke, 2009).
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biologically determined component. This new component shares some features with
each of the other components. Like the genetically determined component, much of
this component remains beyond the reach of language.
So it is through language that we can attain insight in cultures in a way that
transcend the natural bodily boundaries, and at the same time this new insight
materializes biologically. Language provides the child with the ability to obtain
thought and intentions from others, and to communicate thought and intentions to
others (Klafki, 1997). Thereby language becomes a manifestation of our biological
cohesion. Language points out reality for the child and gives it a sense of both
togetherness and diversity, language is thereby the driving force in the intra-active
sculpturing of human biology, and thereby the cultural transformation of a human
being.
So, when Tomasello (2009), states that the infant is biologically prepared and
thereby has the capacity to learn language, he is in fact pointing out the very basic
human competence that enables human cognition. And at the same time he places
language acquisition in the socio-cultural field, pointing out that: Children’s
language will emerge as a consequence of the child’s social, cultural and physical
environment; the child decodes contextual meaning and words thereby materialize.
Part two – The role of the pedagogue
Proto-Language – the communicative crux
Why is it that some children talk well by the time they enter preschool, whilst others
lag behind? One reason probably is the fact that children’s different home
environments facilitate different language, and children from language-poor home
environments will develop a poor language. A second reason could be that language
acquisition requires a caregiver’s emphatic presence, which can be difficult, when the
child must compete with 11 peers for the necessary adult attention. A third reason
could be, that preverbal language is not, contrary to verbal language, a common
language with common codes. It is rather a private language developed between
mother and child, you might call it a private proto-language.
Proto-language is the first communication between the primary caregiver
(mother) and the child, developed whilst the child was breast-feeding, in nurturing
situations, during storytelling and other intimate interactions. Protolanguage is an
intimate communicative structure which, due to the strong bond of attachment and
motherly care, provides the child’s first communicative experiences.
Perhaps the first intersubjective experiences are the sounds heard in the womb,
the mother’s voice, her hand on the stomach as she talks to the unborn child. Perhaps
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the first biologically conditioned social activity - the sucking reflex is what kickstarts
sociability and the feeling of belonging, both of which stimulate communication.
Others are crying, smiling, eye-contact; action and reaction where the mother
responds with smiles, care and comfort. It is possible that such communicative logic,
created through this and much other daily social practice, build a structure for all
further communication. One can perhaps go so far as to say that the child utilises
these individualised structures each time it communicates. It is possible that these
structures form a proto-language which in this interpretation is the ”point of
communication” for the child.
And if we, in usage-based language understanding, consider language as the
socio-cultural variable in all facets, then children from strong linguistic backgrounds
will have a qualitatively better relationship to pædagogues than children from homes
where emotional communication with the child is less. There are children who have
experienced more care combined with interactive communicative contact than
others who have been more left to their own devices or have experienced much less
care or a lesser degree of linguistic communication in the relationship. So the usagebased proto-language is individual and therefore children’s communicative potential
on starting in the crèche can vary greatly.
This means that there is talk of two essential points: 1) That the child’s protolanguage is individual and developed in a close relation between mother and child.
Thus the mother is the only one who “speaks” the child’s ”language”, and 2) that the
quality of that “language” is socio-culturally variable, which thus gives children a
variety of linguistic potential.
Even if this is only an approximation of the truth, the next question is how can
a pedagogue learn this individual language? How can they interpret a poorly
developed proto-language? And how can it be transformed into a universal method
which can be professionalised and used in practice?
An intelligent guess would be that this is scarcely possible. Unique for
communication with a little child is that the person caring for it must respond
immediately. It is of little help if the pedagogue first has to consult a colleague or
analyse a video-recording to be able to interpret the child’s wishes. The
communicative child needs an immediate response. With just a few seconds delay in
responding, the child’s focus has moved on to something else. One viewpoint is
suggested by Taguchi (2010, p. 65) who, inspired by Regio Emilia and Karen Barad,
writes that “in an intra-active pedagogy the emphasis is on an interdependent and
mutual listening and observing that expands the focus from merely dealing with the
intra- and inter-personal relationship (…) to be inclusive of the performative agency”,
but Taguchi continues, “we (…) lack a language and concepts to use in order to make
visible or actualise the intra-active processes in between organisms, objects, matter
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and things.” Her point is my point; pedagogy is understood to deal with internal
cognitive processes in the individual child, or emerging through an encounter with
another child, a teacher or a pedagogue who knows what to learn.
Perhaps, with this in mind, one should recognise that the key to the problem is
that the child communicates contextually and that we, as humans, possess senses
which are intuitively capable of receiving the contextual signals which appear and ,
not least, the communicative signals which our conscious observance overlooks. So
the pedagogue has to use his own intuition and interpret the contextual impressions
with his professional ability. This, however, implies several problems. One is that
people are different; we all have our own cultural inheritance, which produces
different values and thus different intuitive experiences; we only see what is visible
for within our own individual horizon; the rest is invisible. The combination of
intuition and interpretation will furthermore result in what is more or less a qualified
guess! Admittedly a guess from the context, but nevertheless a guess. And yet this
may be a useable method even though its starting-point demands the ability to see
events in the child’s perspective. First and foremost it requires sensitivity,
observation and contextual empathy. So to facilitate an adequate usage-based
language acquisition, the pedagogue needs to be aware of the child’s perspective, of
the child’s thoughts and the child’s individual way of communicating, of the child’s
proto-linguistic style and the child’s intra-active contextual being.
The child’s perspective
Halldén (2003) separates the two concepts, childperspective (in one word) and child’s
perspective (in two words). Childperspective concerns conditions for childhood, such
as political decisions, socio-economic conditions etc. Child’s perspective is the desire
to see and hear the world through the eyes and the ears of the child. This perspective
is an individual perspective that requires knowledge about the complexity of the
individual child, its background, its language abilities, its way of communicating and
its contextual intentions. It is a very difficult task. And the younger the child is, the
harder it will be for an adult to comprehend the child’s intentions.
Taking the child’s perspective demands first and foremost observation,
empathy, humility and a sensitivity to the child’s means of expression (Lindahl, 2002,
p. 27; Tomasello, 1986, 2003, 2009); an attempt to understand movements in the
child’s consciousness here and now, when it responds to different situations, but also
to be aware of each individual child’s background, how it slept the preceding night,
how it reacted to being left by its parents in the morning and so on (Åberg &
Taguchi, 2007), in other words giving the child observant care.
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Being observant in this situation refers to the fact that the little child learns
everything contextually; what is happening now has a meaning for the child. From
birth, the child’s brain is phylogenetically developed so that it immediately a carer’s
intentions by observing her deliberate actions. When a carer reaches out a hand, the
child will do the same. When the child smiles, the carer do the same and are filled
with warmth and happiness. The carer can immediately feel the same emotions as the
child by observing facial expression, listening to oral expression and watching body
language. And when they talk together, they also listen in silence and unconsciously
register changing reactions to what is said, by observing micromovements in the face,
direction of sight, tone of voice and sounds. These changes express what is being
thought and felt. We experience each other as if we were in the other’s body. There is
an immediately open empathic channel for feelings to and from each other, and we
take part in their reasoning and experience just as they take part in ours (Nelson,
2007; Stern, 2004). Thus our minds are not independent, separate, or isolated. We are
not alone in our state of mind. The border between child and carer are physically
defined; they experience themselves as separate subjects, which at the same time, is
the reason that they can meet as two individuals. But the borders can be overrun by
intentions, emotions and thoughts, which are constantly changing in a dialogue with
other’s intentions, emotions and thoughts, even if the dialogue is only with oneself.
The child’s mental life develops in intra-activity, and the concept of a psychological
singularity or individually developed psychological phenomena is not possible in the
postmodern psychology of development. In fact postmodern psychology according to
Bohr and Barad, says that psychological development takes place in a dialogue with
the whole of society, with culture, as in a dynamic melting-pot of developmentpsychology. We have channels open to all those we are in contact with. Interactivity
is not just a relation between two people, but between all the members of a society
and, ultimately, the whole world. (Stern, 2004).
Childhood is always contextualized in relation to time, place and culture, and is
therefore never a natural or universal childhood. And children are recognized as
social agents with a voice of their own, and should be seen and heard in a democratic
dialogue of understanding for childhood (Broström, 2006b; Dahlberg, et al., 2007, p.
49).
Intuition and interpretation
Intuition is the direct understanding of a situation, as an uncensored experienced
background. It is not guessing or mysterious impressions, but a holistic understanding,
which enables humans to make expert decisions (Benner, 1995, p. 197).
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Dreyfus og Benner, who both follow thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty og
Wittgenstein, propound that rationalism is not the optimal working method. Dreyfus
bases this theory on Merleau-Ponty’s thesis that it is our ability to adopt flexible
”styles” and behaviour which creates a basis for perception and understanding and
not our ability to comprehend rules (Dreyfus, Dreyfus, & Athanasiou, 1986, p. 5).
Once a decision intuitively presents itself, rationalization in the first sense describes the
attempt to find a valid explanation by identifying the elements of the situation and
combining those elements by a decision rule to justify the chosen decision (Dreyfus, et al.,
1986, p. 34).
The point is that the pedagogue can benefit by using his intuition, which, in relation
to preverbal children, has the quality that intuitive feelings are both contextual and
based on all his professional experience as a pedagogue. Intuition has furthermore the
innate quality that it cannot be false. Cohn (1968) describes three aspects of the
human impression of reality:
1) Perception: Based on the senses and previous experience. One links up what
one sees and what one knows.
2) Deduction: Based on perception and the linking up of experiences.One links up
what one sees, what one knows and what has happened or will happen.
3) Intuition: Based on unproven end-games which provide an answer. It is built
on the knowledge and experiences of the whole being, linked up to the senses.
Thus intuition is not verbal assumptions, verbal understanding or cognitive
images.
None of the three statements contain an inherent truth. This means that the pedagogue
who wants to understand a child’s body language must resort to contextual
interpretations. And interpretations, like intuition, build on previous experiences with
communicative actions. But they also build on contextual logic. For example, if oneyear-old Freddy was frightened of a horse on a trip out with his crèche, then his
pedagog knows what he is “talking about” when the child points to a picture of a
horse. A stranger, on the other hand might well believe that Freddy likes horses. In
that way contextual interpretation can be a decisive method of understanding the
preverbal child. This relates to Barad’s idea of moving beyond how materiality
'shapes', or 'influences' the social constructed world (Barad, 2007). Intuition and
interpretation are an important part of all human relations. But as suggested earlier it
involves great uncertainty and elements which are very difficult to professionalise.
However, research has been made in methods of avoiding intuitive interpretation, or
at least of putting them into a system. According to Tomasello, the ability to
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communicate intuitively with the little child has a lot to do with reading gestures.
Toddlers do a lot of gesturing; pointing, waving bye-bye, raising their arms to be
picked up, and an American research project indicates that the more the small child
gestures, the better its vocabulary will be (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 1998). And
inspired by M. Merleau Ponty, the preverbal child’s body-language is a means of
taking part in the infant’s daily life, early experiences and intentional actions (among
others: Løkken, 2005; Tomasello, 2003). With that in mind, Tomasello (2003),
underlines that the infant’s intentional language starts out with gestures. And he has
isolated three main types of gestures:
1. Ritualizations are gestures in which the infant simply employs an effective
procedure for getting something done. For example many infants learn to
request being picked up, by raising their arms over their head, while
approaching an adult. The act is not symbolic, but learned directly by doing so.
When the child reaches for the adult’s arm, or grasps the adult’s finger, it
engages in an activity designed to bring about the desired physical result. The
adult understands what the infant wants and responds immediately. On future
occasions when the adult sees the infant approach and prepares for this same
activity, her arms begin to go up, and thus she responds appropriately to these
very first signs of intentional movements. The infant for its part, notices that as
soon as it raises its arms, the adult responds, and so she learns that just the
initial part of the sequence is sufficient to obtain the desired result, not only
physically, but also socially and communicatively through adult assistance.
The process does not involve cultural codes or imitative learning of any sort; it
does not involve shared communicative symbols. Ritualized gestures are thus
not symbolic, because the gestures are only a way to achieve some concrete
result, using a behaviour that originally was designed to be physically effective
(Tomasello, 2003, p. 33).
2. Deitic6 gestures: When the gesture is deitic, there is usually a third object or
person involved. Normally this gesture requires joint understanding and
contextual knowledge. The infant pointing at an apple, requires the presence of
an adult who knows what the infant means. Maybe the child is pointing to
induce the adult to share attention, because the child is hungry, or maybe the
child wants to play with the apple or maybe the infant just points with an index
finger to orient its own attention to the apple. The appropriate adult response
will be to follow the finger, and get the apple. So once again, the child
understands and learns that gesture is a procedure for getting things done, and
not necessarily an invitation to share attention, using a mutually understood
communicative symbol. The alternative is that the infant sees an adult pointing
6
Deitic refers to the phenomenon that the meaning of an utterance requires contextual meaning.
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and comprehends that the adult is trying to share attention. And the infant
learns that when it does the same, the adult responds as desired. Thereby they
have made an intersubjective symbol act for sharing attention.
3. Symbolic gestures are iconic gestures. For example raising arms to imitate an
aeroplane, blowing at hot things, leaning one’s head and smiling at something
pleasant. According to Tomasello, the infant learns most of such symbolic
gestures, by imitating the adult. That is to say; they are learning to point
symbolically via imitative learning or use of linguistic symbols: by first
understanding an adult’s communicative intention in using the gesture and then
engaging in “role reversal imitation” to use the gesture herself – when she has
the same communicative intention (Tomasello, 2003, p. 34).
The fact that gestures run on a scale from symbolic to non-symbolic, and emerge
alongside the first linguistic skills, implies that children’s ability to communicate
symbolically is not tied specifically to language, but rather emanates from the more
fundamental set of social-cognitive and social motivational skills. And as a
consequence, gestures seem to pave the way for early language at least in a functional
way. So although infants can vocalize soon after birth, it is primary gestures that
seem to carry the one-year-old’s communicative intentions, and thereby pave the way
for language. And the evolutionary benefit is the mastering and inheritance of culture.
When the child reaches the age of 8 to 10 months, it begins intentionally to use
the adult as a social reference point, and to use objects in the same way as adults
(imitating). This behaviour is triadic, in the sense that it involves infants coordinating
their interactions with both objects and other humans (Barad, 2007; Stern, 1998,
2004; Tomasello, 2003). Such behaviour would seem to indicate an emerging
understanding of other people as intentional agents, with goals and the ability to
make choices to obtain those goals. Such interactions require, beside intuition and
attention, some kind of joint attention. And according to Tomasello (2003), the ability
to learn language, depends on the ability to create zones of joint attention:
Frames of Joint attention
A zone of joint attention is defined intentionally, which means, that the child and
adults’ common understanding of focused interactions and activities outlines the
zone. The child’s ability to decode and understand these communicative intentions is
actually language. Joint attention becomes an intersubjective zone of interactivity, in
which the child can monitor the communicative intentions of the adult and at the
same time understand not only the adults’ role but also its own role in the interaction
from the same “outside” perspective. This will be the foundation of being able to
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imitate communicative structures and cultural patterns, a phenomenon described by
Tomasello as: “Role reversal imitation” (Tomasello, 2003).
Three elements are in play:
1. The framework is the zone of joint attention, the space, the time, the activity
and the interaction.
2. To understand each other’s communicative intentions, implicates
intersubjectivity in different forms and the ability to observe the interaction
“from within”.
3. Cultural learning through “role reversal imitation”, in which the child
imitates the intentional actions of the adult. It is to be perceived as simple,
mechanical imitation. The child must learn to use a communicative symbol
directed to the adult, in the same way as the adult used it on the child. This
means that the child has not only to imagine itself in the position of the adult,
but also make the adult imagine himself in the position of the child. This is
according to Stern’s concept, “intersubjectivity”:- ‘I know that you know that I
know’ (Stern, 1998). The result of the process can be a linguistic symbol or a
communicative tool; intersubjectivity understood by both parties. The process
also ensures that the child understands that she has acquired a symbol that is
culturally accepted and socially dividable in the sense that it knows that the
listener both understands it and is able to produce the same symbol.
As argued by Tomasello (2003, p. 22), joint attention first and foremost implicates
the active intentional participation of the participants. A participation that has a
meaningful purpose and content. In this perspective, joint attention is much more
than just eye contact or gesticulating, or being aware of the same object; each party
has to be aware of the other’s awareness and each party has to be aware of the
other’s intention.
Attention is a biologically based competency, which for example shows when a child
focuses on an object in the immediate environment (Bauer, 2006; Bråten, 2007, 2009;
Bråten & Trevarthen, 2007; Hansen, 2002/2005; McDonald, 2006; Merleau-Ponty,
1984).
Attention can occur in two situations:
1. Passive (unconscious) attention: When something sudden occurs, for example
a loud noise, attention will unconsciously be apparent in the child.
2. Active (conscious) attention: The child is a part of an intentionally planned
process, which involves intersubjectivity. For example to have a story read out
loud, in which the joint attention can be the story. To achieve an active, joint
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attention, the child must attract the attention of someone else – this happens in
the zone of joint attention. Joint attention is thus most often associated with a
situation in which two individuals look at each other or at the same object.
In the cases below, role reversal imitation is not discussed.
a. Passive attention: To look at the same object at the same time, attracted for
example by a loud noise.
b. Random joint attention: At the same time and independently discovering a
problem or something which is different. Two children look at a box of balls.
All the balls are blue except for one, which is pink. The attention of both
children is attracted to the pink ball.
c. To follow another’s gaze: A child follows the gaze of an older child or an adult
expecting that this often leads to something new and exciting. But it has
nothing to do with joint attention.
d. Coordinated attention to an object: Both children see the same toy and are
aware that the other sees it. Immediately it appears as joint attention, but one of
the children wants to play with the toy, the other child just notices the toy
because it is pink.
Active attention occurs when a child is involved in an intentional, relational process.
In order to realize this, the child focuses selectively, in the sense that the attention is
selectively, intentionally directed (Tomasello, 1986).The only way that the
pedagogue can decode the selective intention of the child is to observe its
gesticulation, behaviour and attention and then imagine (associate) what the
behaviour and attention could mean; that is to say, what intentions the child has. This
imagining can be either a cognitive decoding or an affective decoding (balancing)
(Stern, 1998).
The pedagogue must be aware of at least four pre-stages of joint attention:
1. To discover attention. The child must be capable of perceiving the attention of
the others. This can involve following the other’s gestures and gaze.
2. To underline attention. The child must be capable of gesticulating or maybe
even verbalizing the attentive behaviour in itself and the adult.
3. Social coordination. The child must be capable of participating in coordinated
interactions with other children. This involves mastering social competencies
such as waiting for your turn, role-division and ritualized games.
4. Intentional standpoint. The child must see itself and others as intentional
participants. It must understand that other people can have intentions differing
from its own. By presuming that others’ behaviour is focused towards an end,
they can interpret and predict that behaviour.
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Part three – The emotional, meaningful and ethical dialogue
In the nineties, the element of teaching was toned down in the pedagogic structure in
the crèche and the common pedagogic approach became more a relational and growth
oriented approach. Michelsen, Edsberg and Posborg (1992) assess this approach to be
of a positive nature albeit underlining the lack of challenging content of learning.
Diderichsen, Thyssen & Jacobi (1991) furthermore argue that the child in the caring
approach must be presented to content which can aid the child in exploring the world.
Also Andersen & Kampmann (1988) argue that the pedagogue must support the child
in both exploring and creating its own culture, just as Broström does in multiple
writings (among others 2006a, 2006b, 2006c; Broström & Vejleskov, 2009). The
number of children in the crèche rose quickly until the year 2000, in which most
regions had a guaranteed placing, and in 1999, 55% of the 0 to 2-year-olds were
being taken care of in crèches. In 2007, this number increased to 92%, which equals
13.339 children. Following this development, came the 1998 Social Services Act,
which, for the first time ever, put the aims of crèches into legislation. Aims which
like those of kindergartens, were to provide the children with care and furthermore
support them in acquiring and developing social and cultural skills as well as
contributing to the stimulation of the child’s fantasy, creativeness and linguistic
development. Keeping in thread with the reform-pedagogic tradition, it ensured the
child sufficient space to play and learn and also for physical expression, togetherness
and the opportunity to explore the environment (Retsinformation, 2007).
In 2004, the Act on Educational Curricula was put into effect, stating that each
crèche must work out a plan for all the children affected, providing space to play, to
learn and to develop. Thus, the word “learning” was introduced to the crèche.
Along with the daycare legislation from 2007, the intentions have changed and
learning will be introduced as an element to prevent exclusion:
§1. The purpose of this law is to:
1) Promote the wellbeing, development and learning of children (…)
2) Prevent negative social inheritance and exclusion (…)
(Retsinformation, 2007).
Because there are only very few new investigations of the crèche’s pedagogical
praxis (Nordenbo, 2010), it is not possible safely to state anything qualified about
whether the previously mentioned research is still relevant today. But, in praxis, it
can appear as if the crèche is still affected by a relational and growth-oriented
approach: caregiving, carework and professional care (Davies, 1998) as
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compensation for the absence of the parents, which in everyday life can have a
tendency to become custodial watching over and babysitting – or as described by
Hundeide (2004/2006); show a character of external caring. This type of utilized
caring does not contain incitement for joint attention, joint focus of interest or joint
commitment in challenging the world. In a meaningful and transcending context, the
pedagogue will follow the attention of the child; the caregiver will experience an
empathic approach to the child; make use of his sensitivity in order to understand the
child from within and at the same time challenge the child; respond to the child’s
initiative in exploration and answer the child’s curiosity regarding the environment
and the symbolic world. Thus the interplay becomes providing – and curricular.
Care as a part of the discourse of relational pedagogics in today’s crèche can
prove to have a tendency to repress learning (Broström, 2006a) and especially
linguistically challenged children will suffer from the lack of challenge (Craig, 1994;
Reynolds, 2009). In the same way, a specific linguistic focus can suppress care,
providing the same result.
In other words, a balanced complex of the three elements, care, upbringing and
learning, become coherent pedagogic elements, which open the child for culture and
vice versa. It becomes a pedagogic foundation, which means that the well-being of
the child is in greater focus, along with the child’s increased opportunity to learn and
thereby an increased opportunity to evolve. One could state that the interactions
between child and pedagogue are based on care, upbringing and development and
that, put together with the interactions observed among the children, as well as the
individual effect of the child and the active pedagogic environment, will facilitate the
child’s well-being, its learning and its development. For the small child in the crèche,
this means that the care, the nearness and the one-on-one contact, together with the
opportunity for multimodal decoding, will bring the child into a state of learning. The
learning-objective of the crèche for the child’s language acquisition could thus be to
create the correct interactive conditions for the language of the child.
Care - as a frame for intersubjectivity
There is no convincing evidence that young children necessarily suffer harm or that their
relationship with their mother is inevitably undermined if care is shared (Dahlberg, et al.,
2007, p. 47)
Care is the upmost important ingredient in the planned approach of the crèche. Care
is characterized by one person’s attention on another persons physical, mental and
emotional needs (Davies, 1998, p. 126). In that manner, care, as a professional act,
will to some degree provide a replacement for the small child’s mother, and give the
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child a sense of attachment. Besides that, care will contain key attitudes in the
language acquisition process, such as imitation, empathy and guidance. And as the
Dahlberg quotation above indicates, there is no evidence that children in day care
suffer any harm, if care is shared. The important word here, is IF. There is evidence
that if care is not shared, the child will suffer physically, mentally and emotionally;
will not develop, will not learn language (Bernth, 1972; Spitz & Cobliner, 1965).
The foundation for care in a phenomenological perspective is an unbreakable
relation between man and his surrounding world as well as intersubjectivity: In
interaction with others we meet each other as two parts of the same piece. We enter
each other’s living-space and confirm as well as correct each other. We understand
each other from reactions: another person’s body language, facial expression,
gesticulation and words – all of which come together as a whole – an expression for a
world we can relate to. In that way, thoughts, senses, physicality, emotions and ways
to relate to others and to the world – become a whole.
The caregiver’s attention is directed against and sensitive towards the one who
is in need of care. At the same time, the recipient’s reactions and needs are
determining for which way the care-relation will progress. So it is about “seeing” the
other’s perspective while, in the relation, trying to expand the other’s competency
(Noddings, 1986).
The relations of care make use of three dialectic forms of dialog:
1) The emotional dialog – in which the adult spontaneously follows the
initiative of the child (affective balancing).
2) The meaningful and transcending dialog – in which the pedagogue is a
fellow traveller in the child’s discoveries of its own world – the adult
mentions what he sees and follows the child’s exploration.
3) The boundary-defining and ethical dialog – in which the pedagogue supports,
guides and provides the child with help to move on. Not negative,
judgemental help, but a positive and constructive form for help.
Here, the part about care is obvious: The pedagogue is engaged in the world of the
child – and at the same time there is a pedagogic strategy directed towards expanding
the competencies of the child. The pedagogue becomes the challenger of the learning
of the child, the moral guide of the child and in that process, the caregiver. Focus
does not become a static picture of how the child is, but more an interactive process
where the child and the caregiver can enter a still-altering process of change. The
pedagogue and child meet in the child’s sphere of reference. This meeting requires
tenderness, emotional presence – and coherence.
Upbringing – a frame for ethical culturation
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Children’s upbringing is a topic very many people have an opinion on. According to
Baumrind (1989, p. 349), children’s upbringing can be structured in two different
methods: The upbringing can be characterized by a demand dimension and a
responsive dimension. The demand dimension shows that parents either have high
ambitions and high norms for their children or at the other extreme, avoid making
demands at all. The responsive dimension shows parents that have great acceptance
of and empathy for the children, and parents who are uninterested or even rejecting
towards their children. These categories can be narrowed down to four different
styles of upbringing: Authoritative; Authoritarian; Allowing or Non-involving. The
authoritative make demands, but are also responsive. This implies that the styles are
democratic and rational, due to the fact that both parents’ and children’s rights are
respected. Research (Baumrind, 1989) implies that children in this category have a
passion for life, an ability for cooperation, are self-confident and open to new
challenges. These children can resist socially destructive actions. The parents make
development demands and are obvious and clear in making limits for behaviour. But
at the same time they possess consideration for the child and invite them to
participate in the family’s decision-making (Lindahl, 2002, p. 29).
Such an approach meets criticism at a time when children are often confronted by a
greater degree of self-determination or non-upbringing (Ziehe & Stubenrauch, 2008);
an independence which to a certain extent excludes the challenges of the parents.
Within the family, this will not necessarily have consequences for the child. But in
the crèche, where the child is obliged to be part of a social community, it can prove a
considerable challenge for a child who has never learned how. This can result in the
child being disadvantaged as far as learning is concerned. Broström (2002) uses the
metaphor to ”bring in” and introduce the child to and involve the child in culture,
rather than to ”bring up.” By this he means that the child must, by non-authoritarian
means. This point is supported by William Damon (1990, p. 146):
If (…) we want democratic citizens, we should provide for them relationships in which they
can argue, and freely make choices (…) This does not mean that schools should pretend to
be value-neutral; or that teachers and ministers should refrain from clear moral [and
ethical] instruction and explanation. Children need adult guidance. They also need to
develop morally responsible habits.
The overall goal with upbringing must therefore be to help the children to ethical
acceptable reasoning autonomously. And doing this by participation and guidance.
No indoctrination will prepare children for the many diverse situations which they
will have to face. The child must learn to find the ethic issue in an ambiguous
situation, to apply basic moral values to unfamiliar problems, and to create ethic
Ole Henrik Hansen
MA (ed). PhD Fellow
Aarhus University
24
DANISH SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, AARHUS UNIVERSITY
- RESEARCH UNIT CHILDHOOD, LEARNING AND CU RRICULUM THEORY
solutions when there is no one around to give the child direction. The only way to
master these key challenges is to develop an autonomous ability to interpret, manage
and understand ethical problems.
This does not mean that ethical aware adults should practice value neutrality.
In fact displays of such neutrality from professionals have the opposite effect than
intended (Damon, 1990).
Concluding remarks
Learning for the child eight to fourteen month of age, is as mentioned several places
in the paper, not something that occurs without intentions and efforts. It is a process
that needs an individualized combination of care, upbringing and content, and a child
perspective that implies humility and responsiveness for different enterpretations of
the child’s individual expressions. A direct authoritative language-education will for
the small child become an obstacle for the small child’s language acquisition.
Imitation is a very central element in the small child’s learning process (among
others Bauer, 2006; Bråten, 2009; Myowa-Yamakoshi & Tomonaga, 2009;
Vygotsky, 1978); imitation is for the small child also a way to attain a sense of self as
well as a crucial mechanism in communication. Imitation involves the combination of
perception and action, visual attention and motivation; to observe how others do and
then trying to do the same. The small child possess such an automatic competence
(Decety & Meyer, 2009), and in the linguistic approach it is the unconscious early
imitation, that is the overall important element of learning.
The ability to imitation is an aspect of the brains resonance system, which is
connected to an area in the brain that facilitate ideas and notions of actions (Bråten,
2007). When a child sees a caregiver perform an action e.g. a movement with the
mouth, the activity in the area of the brain of the child becomes active in the same
areas as in the brain of the caregiver, that perform the movements. The child’s brain
“practice” thereby in performing the movements that comes with the word from the
caregiver. When the caregiver says “food” the child’s brain do not simply process the
word, but also reproduce the neural activity of the mouth movements, the lips tension
and so on, a drill that later on helps the child shape the mouth cavity in order to create
the correct acoustic space and thereby perform the right sound to the right word to the
right meaning. The brains ability to mirror movements combines sensory perception
with movements and meaning, and thereby help the child to read the intention from
the caregiver. It is not enough that someone opens her mouth and says a word in front
of the child, it need to be a known caregiver, and she need to connect a
communicative intention to the sound in order to awake the child’s mirror system.
The mechanism helps as mentioned the child to understand the meaning of the
Ole Henrik Hansen
MA (ed). PhD Fellow
Aarhus University
25
DANISH SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, AARHUS UNIVERSITY
- RESEARCH UNIT CHILDHOOD, LEARNING AND CU RRICULUM THEORY
caregiver’s action, and thereby the caregiver’s mouth movement and the word comes
to represent a goal in the child’s consciousness, “Food” = Bodily contentment =
Emotional satisfaction.
One of the reasons why the child can read, comprehend and respond emotional
corresponding to what other experience and feel, or should experience and feel in the
same situation, is the ability to share emotions; a unconscious ability to mirror
another persons emotional and bodily status. A process that entail the child due to
internalized, imitative representations can imagine how the other persons intentions
are at the present moment.
To imagine, that is to take the other persons perspective, involves cognitive
competences, based on own experiences, presence and multi modal reading. The
small child’s experience of intersubjectivity, takes place due to facial expressions,
mimic, gazes and glances that reveal emotions and thereby intentions and attention.
The ability to receive and interpret such emotional cues is important all life through.
In the early childhood are the caregivers emotional display used to regulate behaviour
and not least to underline the importance of vocalizations. Bodily expressions and
emotional intention are two sides of the same phenomenon, side by side explaining
the message. In other words it is a multimodal system that via empathy and the
phenomenon of cerebral resonance, creates the ability to connect an emotion to facial
mimic, to a voice, to a meaning of a word.
Facial mimic causes besides reading of lips, emotional procedures in the brain,
an activity that amplify the experience for the speaker as well as the listener. Mimic
communicates both emotional messages, but are as well movements that entail
semantic decoding.
Educative structures for the small child involves thereby not just word, but also
paralinguistic messages such as mimic, emotional prosody, which contain educational
informations that in connection with not pronounced words, as grunt, accentuations
and laughter, plays a vital role in mediation of intentions. The educational content for
the small child is development of ability to integrate visual and vocal cues.
Learning as an element, hereby becomes a question about the quality of the
modal interactions with the little child. To share attention and to facilitate role
reversal imitation. To invite the small child to combine her self and the social world,
learning to imitate its codes and cues. And to facilitate symbolic linguistic gesturing.
The child learns the zone of joint attention is intentional defined, and the child must
learn to monitor the linguistic intentions in the zone. This will give the pedagogue the
opportunity to challenge the child.
Ole Henrik Hansen
MA (ed). PhD Fellow
Aarhus University
26
DANISH SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, AARHUS UNIVERSITY
- RESEARCH UNIT CHILDHOOD, LEARNING AND CU RRICULUM THEORY
Appendix: Preliminary data concerning the character of the usage-based
dialogue between the child and the caregiver.
Method
Eleven typically developing infants six males and five females, all from middle class
monolingual Danish speaking families. The children are observed longitudinally
between the ages of 10 to 16 month. I focus here on sessions between the onset of
gesture speech (range: 10-14 month) and the emergence of one-word speech.
Procedure
The infants are videotaped monthly. On average, each child is observed 10 minutes,
replicated six times over six month. The observations take place in their crèche,
during ordinary activity, planned by the pedagogues.
Coding
I focus on gestures used in dialogue. The child has to make an effort to direct the
listener’s attention through eye-gaze, vocalisation, for behaviour to be considered as
communication. Such behaviour could be gesture on its own or gestures and speech.
Each gesture is classified into one of three categories: Ritualized gestures, Deitic
gestures or symbolic gestures.
Reliability
Accordance between three independent peer coders will at the end of the project be
assessed for 10% of the sessions. 100% agreement between the coders must occur in
at least 80% of all observations.
My Preliminary findings are
The observed children only use symbolic gestures in the crèche in less then 10% of
all observations.
Ole Henrik Hansen
MA (ed). PhD Fellow
Aarhus University
27
DANISH SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, AARHUS UNIVERSITY
- RESEARCH UNIT CHILDHOOD, LEARNING AND CU RRICULUM THEORY
Final remarks
Bodily gesturing is not merely a neural activity, but serve as an embodied signal to
the caregiver that the child is ready for a particular kind of verbal input – a cognitive
extension so to speak. The gesture is the bodily expression of the child’s thoughts.
And the dynamic loops through which mind and world interact are a symbolic
activity that runs from brain through body and world and back again and actually
constitutes cognition. And symbolic gestures, is the embodiment of the child’s
imaginative mind, of her wannabe thoughts, and extends her mind in the process.
That kind of gesturing opposes the ritualized gestures. Consider a child who points at
his or hers father saying “Dada” – the child’s caregiver might respond by saying:
“Yes, that’s father” – translating the child’s gesture and offers word combinations in
a sentence. The child imitates, read lips, eye-gazes, tone of voice and so on. In my
video recordings, I observe many such contextual ritualized gestures translated into
sentences, but very little symbolic gesturing. Why is that? It could imply a lack of
attention from the pedagogues on the symbolic language, maybe because such
symbolic gesturing is not part of the common culture of custodial care in the crèche,
but may be seen as a less important form of dialogue.
The consequence might be that part of the children’s cognitive development is on
hold while they attend the crèche. You might even say that when the children’s
dialogue with the caregivers, is in a deprived language, using ritualized commands.
This means that children becomes limited in extending their potential sharing their
ideas, their dreams their humour and their thoughts, instead they express their
contextual needs in ritualized manifestations.
The connection between the development of the cognitive brain and the symbolic
language are well documented (Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998). We know
that it is the symbolic language that mediates the ability to think, it is the process that
is supersizing the mind, and we know that the human species is the only one, capable
of this process (Tomasello, 2009; Tomasello, Dweck, Silk, Skyrms, & Spelke, 2009).
This might not present a problem for the children from linguistic well-stimulating
homes. But the children from linguistic deprived homes will be lost, with insufficient
linguistic stimulation.
So, when I in my paper, states that the infant is biologically prepared and thereby has
the capacity to use symbolic language, I am in fact pointing out the very basic human
competence that enables human cognition. And at the same time I place language
acquisition in the socio-cultural field, pointing out that: Children’s language and
Ole Henrik Hansen
MA (ed). PhD Fellow
Aarhus University
28
DANISH SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, AARHUS UNIVERSITY
- RESEARCH UNIT CHILDHOOD, LEARNING AND CU RRICULUM THEORY
cognition will emerge as a consequence of the child’s social, cultural and physical
environment. Which requires attention from the caregiver to symbolic gesturing
dialogue with the infant. A huge responsibility for the professional caregivers. The
question is weather or not they can embrace that responsibility.
Ole Henrik Hansen
MA (ed). PhD Fellow
Aarhus University
29
DANISH SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, AARHUS UNIVERSITY
- RESEARCH UNIT CHILDHOOD, LEARNING AND CU RRICULUM THEORY
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