A Vision for Parenting and Educational Practice

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura E. Berk
Keyword(s):  
Sociocultural Theory ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Educational Practice ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Social Competencies ◽  
Cultural Worldview ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Children's Development ◽  
Children’S Development

Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory is an empowering perspective for parents and teachers. In underscoring the role of adult–child dialogues in children’s development, it offers a balanced resolution to the dichotomy between adult directiveness and child-centeredness that has, for decades, permeated American parenting advice and educational practice. Consistent with a wealth of current research, sociocultural theory stresses that children contribute actively to their own development, etching their unique imprint on everything they learn. To implement sociocultural concepts of child rearing and teaching, parents and teachers must have a firm grasp of children’s temperaments, interests, knowledge, skills, and strengths and weaknesses. Yet each ingredient of effective dialogue—the shared understanding essential for genuine communication, the sensitive guidance inherent in scaffolding, the narrative conversation that builds the child’s cultural worldview, and the meaningful activities that spark learning of all kinds—requires that adults and children join forces. To create the “zone”—the dynamic region in which children acquire cognitive and social competencies and the capacity to use thought to guide behavior—children and important adults in their lives must collaborate. Adults are leaders in this collaborative process. Through dialogues, they fashion the child’s lifeline with humanity. Weaken or sever that line, and no matter how well endowed children are genetically, they become less than they otherwise could be. Although not the sole influence, adult-child togetherness through the give-and-take of communication indelibly affects children’s development. Dialogues with parents, teachers, and other significant adults transform the child’s mind, connecting it with other minds and transferring to it a wealth of understandings and skills. From the sociocultural perspective, parents help children realize their potential by making a long-term commitment to sensitivity, consistency, and richness of interaction, not by offering brief bursts of attention interspersed with little involvement. This means that good parenting is possible only through great investments of time. Early in this book, I cited evidence indicating that contemporary parents—even those with demanding careers who claim the greatest time scarcity—have ample time for generous involvement in their children’s lives.

Awakening Children's Minds

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura E. Berk
Keyword(s):  
Adult Child ◽  
Educational Practice ◽  
Private Speech ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
General Audience ◽  
Educational Environments ◽  
Problem Solving Strategies ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
And Control

Parents and teachers today face a swirl of conflicting theories about child rearing and educational practice. Indeed, current guides are contradictory, oversimplified, and at odds with current scientific knowledge. Now, in Awakening Children's Minds, Laura Berk cuts through the confusion of competing theories, offering a new way of thinking about the roles of parents and teachers and how they can make a difference in children's lives. This is the first book to bring to a general audience, in lucid prose richly laced with examples, truly state-of-the-art thinking about child rearing and early education. Berk's central message is that parents and teachers contribute profoundly to the development of competent, caring, well-adjusted children. In particular, she argues that adult-child communication in shared activities is the wellspring of psychological development. These dialogues enhance language skills, reasoning ability, problem-solving strategies, the capacity to bring action under the control of thought, and the child's cultural and moral values. Berk explains how children weave the voices of more expert cultural members into dialogues with themselves. When puzzling, difficult, or stressful circumstances arise, children call on this private speech to guide and control their thinking and behavior. In addition to providing clear roles for parents and teachers, Berk also offers concrete suggestions for creating and evaluating quality educational environments--at home, in child care, in preschool, and in primary school--and addresses the unique challenges of helping children with special needs. Parents, Berk writes, need a consistent way of thinking about their role in children's lives, one that can guide them in making effective child-rearing decisions. Awakening Children's Minds gives us the basic guidance we need to raise caring, thoughtful, intelligent children.

Acquisition of the imparfait in L2 French in adults and children: The same or different?

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Kihlstedt
Keyword(s):  
Adult Learners ◽  
Age Of Onset ◽  
French Immersion ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Considerable Difficulty ◽  
Advanced Stages ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
L1 And L2 ◽  
Children's Development ◽  
Children’S Development

In this study, we provide a comparison of adult and child L2 acquisition in relation to their use of the imparfait form in L2 French. Previous research on this form shows that it is an area of considerable difficulty, being lexically and functionally restricted in use even in advanced stages of acquisition. In the study presented here, we compare our child and adult learners in an immersion setting, where the adult learners were studying at a French university, while the children were attending a French immersion school. Their use of the imparfait is explored through a longitudinal lens, where we look in particular at its use to mark different aspectual values, as well as its lexical use with different verbs. The findings indicate that, while both groups benefit from the immersion context, the children’s development seems to be more rapid and more stable: once they start using the imparfait productively, they use it for a greater range of its aspectual values and in a more autonomous way than the adults. The results are discussed with regard to age of onset and the development of L1 and L2 discourse capacities.

The Child in Contemporary Culture

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura E. Berk
Keyword(s):  
Child Rearing ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Advice Literature ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Cultural Violence ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
Employed Parents ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Children's Development ◽  
Children’S Development

In this chapter, I take up dilemmas that today’s parents face in rearing young children. Throughout this book, we have touched on myriad forces that make contemporary parenting highly challenging. These include one-sided, contradictory messages in the parenting-advice literature; career pressures that impinge on parent involvement in children’s lives; abysmally weak American child-care services to assist employed parents in their child-rearing roles; cultural violence and excessive materialism permeating children’s worlds; schools with less than optimal conditions for children’s learning; and impediments to granting children with deficits and disabilities social experiences that maximize their development. Contemporary parents do not just find child rearing more difficult; they feel more uncertainty than their predecessors about whether and how to intervene in their children’s activities and behavior. In the pages that follow, I draw on major themes of this book—the power of adult warmth, appropriate expectations, narrative conversation, make-believe play, and teaching in the “zone”—to show how Vygotsky’s sociocultural approach can serve as a guide for resolving a great many child-rearing concerns. This chapter answers twenty questions drawn from a survey of over four hundred parents of 2- to 8-year-olds living in a Midwestern city with a population of one hundred thousand. In that survey, I asked parents to list any questions about young children’s development and learning that interested or worried them. The questions I answer here address issues that appeared most often in parents’ responses. Each represents a concern that surfaced in three or more parental replies. I intend these answers to parents’ questions to reflect a way of thinking about child rearing, not a set of recipes for dealing with specific events. When parents are familiar with principles that are grounded in contemporary theory and research on children’s development, they can better deal with the quandaries generated by the changing home, school, and community contexts in which today’s children grow up. Although adverse cultural trends have complicated and threatened good child rearing, parents—as agents of change, buffers against stressful life circumstances, and gatekeepers of learning opportunities—can do much to protect, restore, and reshape children’s experiences.

Enhancing Young Children's Development through Teacher Consultation and Curriculum: Results from Three Studies

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Hamre ◽  
Stephanie M. Jones ◽  
Donna M. Bryant ◽  
Patricia Wesley ◽  
Andrew J. Mashburn ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Consultation ◽  
Children's Development ◽  
Children’S Development
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