Experiences and Education, Content with Integrity and Meaning

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Experiences have meaning and integrity in terms of content, more so than with simple activities. For example, what social studies content are children learning when they are asked to color in a picture of a Chinese child dressed in a traditional costume? Other than learning that school is filled with meaningless activities, or learning to follow the will of another, children learn nothing.

One teacher said she believed in firsthand experiences for children’s learning. She decided to introduce a group of 3-year-old children to a standard from the field of history, that of change. To do so, she told children how years ago there were no zippers or Velcro and children had only buttons to fasten their clothing. After she talked, she gave each child a construction paper cut-out of a sweater and a bunch of buttons. She told the children to paste the buttons on the sweater. The question is, what did the children learn? To follow directions? To sit still and listen to a teacher?

Another teacher asked 3-year-olds to investigate how their clothes fastened. They listed zippers, Velcro, buttons, hooks, and belts as examples of fasteners. The teacher graphed how many of the children had pieces of clothing with zippers and so on. The next day she asked children to think about how their clothes would stay on if there were no Velcro, belts, and zippers. The children thought and thought and said, “We’d only have buttons, only buttons.” The teacher then showed children antique clothing and accessories, including button-up shoes and a buttonhook, she had obtained from a local museum. The children handled the clothing, looking for how the clothing was closed. Some of the dresses had no fasteners at all. The shoes with the rows and rows of buttons fascinated children as they learned to use the buttonhook.

After the children explored the clothing over a number of days, the teacher read a book about children living during the Civil War. During the discussion that followed, the 3-year-olds determined that today’s clothing was easier to get on and keep on, and it was too bad that long ago there were no zippers.

In the process, children reflected, predicted, posed questions, and found answers. They hypothesized about what life would be like without fasteners. They marveled over all the different ways people fastened their shoes. They discussed ideas together, and then graphed and sketched them. By doing so, the experience with fasteners had integrity. The content came from one of the history standards, and their firsthand experiences provided them with the opportunity to think, work together, learn, and problem solve.

Good teachers have always been concerned about fostering children’s concept development (Sarnecka & Gelman, 2004). Concepts, the ingredients for thinking, are like mental filing cabinets in which related facts are connected and organized into an idea. Without a store of concepts, children are limited in understanding their world to dealing with isolated facts and bits of information.

For example, without a concept of jobs or occupations, humans would have to memorize the name of each and every profession or occupation they encounter because they could not conceptualize or categorize occupations into a singular idea or concept, such as everyone needs an occupation, job, or profession. With the ability to group things into categories, or to think in terms of concepts, we are freed from focusing on each isolated fact. With concepts, children have knowledge of how facts and pieces of information are related and interrelated. They understand something because they’ve organized the information into a concept; it has meaning to them. Today, experts from nearly every subject area have identified concepts key to their discipline in the form of standards. For example, the social studies standards are history, geography, economics, multiculturalism, civic participation, and democracy. These organized concepts give direction and guidance to planning curriculum for young children. In addition, the National Council for the Social Studies has organized the standards around 10 integrated themes, six of which are listed below.