You fail. What do you do?
It is morning
in the kindergarten. The children are gathered together for the morning
meeting, they have checked the calendar, they have talked about events
of the day and the weather. After the meeting children take their place
at the tables and get their pencils, erasers and workbooks. This time
every child gets the same task, they should complete the pictures on
pages 36-37. This is done by drawing a line from one numbered dot to
another so that the line forms a picture. The children are all different
and of varying ages. When the task is the same for all, but where
children’s skills and orientation vary, children’s success and
failure can be seen. Some children complete the task quickly and easily.
They know numbers and draw confident lines from dot to dot. Some
children complete the task fumbling. The next number is not easy to find
and the line is insecure. Some children can complete the task only with
the help of an adult. Some children can not complete their task at all.
Their picture remains unfinished or is made wrong. One child is not
oriented towards the workbook at all but is concentrating on her toys.
So, some children succeed in their task and some children fail. What
does this failure mean to the children? What does it mean for the
teachers? How is this event, a failure, moulding the educational
practices and the children’s and teachers’ lives?
There are
many ways to grasp the meaning of children’s failure-situations. One
way is to consider the failure as constructed. Then you must evaluate
the situation’s effects on the child as the situation itself does not
change. The other way is to see the failure as something that can
possibly be changed. Then the child can be the agent of change in
the failure-situation. The purpose of this article is to move the
perspective of failure, that is, from something you have to accommodate
yourself to, into something that you can change. This happens not only
by completing the task but by reforming the criterions of failure and
the conditions of the situation.
The child doesn’t change the
failure criterion
One way to
get a hold of children’s way of perceiving failure is to look at
children’s causal attributions, which relate to the perceived reasons
of success or failure (see Weiner 1986). Failure itself isn’t being
questioned. When you know what the child sees as the reason for failure,
you can make assumptions about the child’s actions and success. In
this way you can examine the development of children’s actions and
attitudes towards failure. In this aspect, however, you can’t observe
children’s actions on changing the conditions of the failure-situation.
Molden &
Dweck (2000, 132-133) introduce goal theory as a tool to view the causal
attributions. In goal theory children’s success/failure problems are
seen through performance and learning goals. If the child’s goal in
his/her pursuit to accomplish a task is mainly to manifest his/her
competence (or avoid a demonstration of incompetence), the child’s
goal is the performance goal. When the child orientates himself/herself
to a performance goal, failure is a threat to the child’s conception
of his/her own ability and it can lead to helplessness. Failure is
followed by a negative attitude, ineffective strategies and the
reduction in performance. But if the child’s goal is to develop or get
a new skill like drawing the requested picture, the child’s goal is a
learning goal. It is more important to learn to draw than to succeed in
drawing. Learning goals relate to attempts, maintaining a positive
attitude, effective strategies and increasing effort. The
goal theory takes the criterions of failure for granted. The
child’s possible change of the failure situation and its criterions
are not considered.
Jacobs &
Eccles (2000) describe the development of children’s comprehension of
achievement values. How important the drawing of the picture (and
success in doing it) is to the child, is connected to how much the child
appreciates the task and how he/she feels about it. Young children’s
comprehension about accomplishing a picture is not very differentiated.
During the early elementary school grades, the subjective value of
completing a picture may be primarily characterised by children’s
interest in the task. During the early and middle elementary school
grades, children’s sense of usefulness of different activities,
especially for future goals, may not be very clear. A child’s
assessment of action is influenced by the child’s social identity and
the fusion of competence and interests. (Jacobs & Eccles 2000.) In
their perspective Jacobs & Eccles also see the interaction as a way
to change the child, not the child as changing the criterions of the
failure.
When the
circumstances are seen as given, we can view the interaction in a given
framework. Jacobs & Eccles recommend Vygotsky’s zone of proximal
development, which is defined by Vygotsky (1978, 84-91) as the range of
tasks that the child can not yet handle alone but can do with the help
of a more skilled partner. The trick for any parent, coach, or teacher
is then to be able to provide the activity within the child’s zone of
proximal development. The child is involved in an activity that is in
the upper limit of his/her abilities. The involved child is using his/her
abilities fully and is strongly motivated (see Laevers 1995). Adults
offer enough support for a child to accomplish a task but an effective
scaffold is constantly being readjusted to fit the child’s level of
performance. If more assistance is needed, it is provided, but as the
child exhibits independent mastery, the adult will withdraw support and
let the child succeed alone. Vygotsky saw the parents’ role as both
pushing and pulling development by adjusting communications and support
to fit the child’s understanding and ability to master a task. (Jacobs
& Eccles 2000.) Still
the development of the child is the key issue, not the child as changing
the criterions of the situation.
But the tough,
action-oriented, internally motivated child does not get stuck with an
insignificant detail as an externally given criteria of success or
failure. We have come to a border, where the permanent limits of success
and failure are not valid anymore. From now on we concentrate on a
situation, where in which the child takes part in moulding the
failure-situation and its criterions. In this perspective we can not
look at the child’s success/failure only in relation to the adults’
criterions. In this view both the adult and child are possible agents of
criterion change. We move over from permanent success/failure criterions
to criterions that can only be defined in the course of the process.
The child changes the failure
criterions
Vygotsky’s
idea of the “zone of proximal development” includes the idea of
intersubjectivity. It’s the process
of people who begin a task with different conceptualisations and
coming to a shared understanding of the task as each person adjusts to
the perspective of the other. Vygotsky’s ”Mind in society”
(1978) ends with words from Friedrich Engels: “The great basic
idea that the world is not to be viewed as a complex of fully fashioned
objects, no less than the images of them inside our heads (our concepts),
are undergoing incessant changes – –”. In the failure situation
this means, that success and failure are not permanent objects or
concepts. Before the process the child and adult can have different
views of the failure criterions in that particular situation. In the
course of the process, the child and adult can influence each other.
Finally, the child and adult can change each other’s views about what
is success or failure in that situation.
The child can
think that success means that the drawing is correct. Or success can
mean an adult’s positive feedback. Or it can mean avoiding negative
feedback. The child can interpret failure as a sign to stop working on
the task or it can mean a sign to increase effort to finish the task.
Failure in an educational setting can mean a child’s feeling that an
adult does not give him/her enough attention. The child may feel that it
is not so important to succeed in the drawing task but more important is
the feeling that he/she is appreciated in whatever he/she does. The
child can interpret the situation as a struggle for social control, in
which case success means that the child can control the events of the
drawing situation. The child can feel that he/she is being successful if
he/she can manipulate others away from the drawing. The child’s
definition of the situation may not have anything to do with drawing.
The child may want to challenge the teacher’s power or process his/her
own bad feelings in such a way, that the general chaos that the child is
accumulating in the drawing situation is a sign of successful action.
The child’s views of the drawing situation have an effect on the
teacher’s criterions of successful action. If the child’s criterion
of a successful action is chaos, the teacher’s view of the situation
and it’s criterions change. The teacher’s view of reality changes.
Moll (1990)
summarises Vygotsky’s view, “The power of Vygotsky’s ideas is that
they represent a theory of possibilities. The construct of the zone of
proximal development reminds us that there is nothing ’natural’
about educational settings - -. These settings are social creations;
they are socially constituted, and they can be socially changed. It
warns us how easy it is to underestimate children’s and teachers’
abilities when we analyse them in isolation, in highly constrained
environments, or in less than favourable circumstances. And it points to
the use of social and cultural resources that represent our primary
tools, as human beings, for mediating and promoting change.” (Moll
1990, 15.) A radical
interpretation of the zone of proximal development means that the
process does not only change the child’s and teacher’s different
views of objects. In the course of the process both the child’s and
adult’s actions are changed too. The interaction between child and
adult changes because of their changed views. Child and adult view the
world differently and interact differently. The child’s views about
things and their favourable change alter not only teachers’ views but
also actions too. In this manner not only the child’s concepts of
success/failure change, but with his/her concepts about probable or
favourable changes, the child changes the world. Thus, the child’s
view of the drawing situation’s definition and course effects the
development of events and what the criterion for failure in that
situation is. When every child’s different views about the situation
creates a different development of the situation, each child encounters de
facto a different situation. Children can learn those things that
they themselves encounter and change. In the drawing situation children
find different things and in this way affect different things. Some
children find drawing, some find a battlefield. When children change
their findings in their own ways it leads them to unique personal
situations. Children do not just interpret the drawing situation
differently, they change the situation according to their own situation.
This way children encounter not just different interpretations of
reality, but something concrete, they can be part of and take part in
the changing process. The drawing situation reveals itself as a
label under which abounds diverse and changing interaction. The
direction of this process is partly unpredictable.
Research problem
The purpose
of this study is to find a way to see and examine children not just
doing different interpretations or learning differently, but also as
creators of new aspects of reality. The focus is moved from a child that
is succeeding/failing in a situation, to a child that is moulding the
whole situation and its criterions of success and failure. In this way
maybe our insight gets sharper and we can see behind the label of
failure. We may learn to see the child as a participant in the process
of change in his/her own course of development. When we can see both
sides of the interaction, we are better prepared to take part in that
change now and in the future. The research problem is: How do the
children’s views about their actions in a failure situation manifest
themselves in their actions and thus in the everyday kindergarten life?
Research methods
For this
research 73 children, aged 3-7 years, from four randomly selected
kindergartens in Helsinki, were interviewed. The children were asked
fifteen different questions. One of the questions was “You fail, what
do you do?” The answers were grouped in two categories: 1) the child
does not change the criterion of failure in the given context, or 2) the
child changes the criterion (you fail). The purpose of the research has
been to find connections between the child’s way of perceiving
situations and acting in kindergarten. Children’s actions were
observed in a normal kindergarten environment. The systematic sampling
was used and the children were observed in two-minute intervals each a
total of 1678 times. The observation took place always between 8 am and
12 pm. The third way of getting information was teachers’ and parents’
evaluations of children’s
actions: did the children change themselves in the changing situation or
did they change their situations. The evaluation was done with a
questionnaire in which the child’s relation to the changing situation
was evaluated from one to five on the likert scale.
In this
article, for illustrative purposes, only one of the fifteen situations
is handled: the failing situation. The main statistical method used is
the Mann-Whitney test, where the children who are categorised as
themselves changing their own actions in the failure are compared to the
group in which the children change the given criterion. To complete the
Mann-Whitney test, averages, chi-square tests and partial correlations
are used. In order to evaluate several statistically significant
variables at once, the discriminant analysis is used.
Children’s descriptions of
strategies in failure situations
The children
were asked “You fail, what do you do?” The children’s answers were
categorised in two ways according to whether the child sees himself/herself
changing the criterions of failure or not. In the first class of these
categories are descriptions in which child gives a description of a
strategy, in which the child does not change the given criterion ”you
fail”, but changes his/her own behaviour or draws back from the
situation. The given criterion “you fail” sustains. In the other
class are descriptions in where the child describes a strategy that
changes the given criterion “you fail”. The child describes a
strategy that has an impact on the given fact that she or he fails. The
failure is not established or the failure criterions are redefined. In
the first table are some examples of the children’s answers and their
classifications.
Table
1
Children’s descriptions of adaptive and situation changing strategies
of failure
|
The child’s own actions change
|
The child changes the situation
|
- I start to
cry
- No. I would
break my work.
- I’d go
away.
- I’ll stop
it, put it in the drawer.
- I’ll throw
it in the waste-basket.
- I’ll get
food, I listen to music.
- I take
another work. I go playing.
|
- I’ll tell
the teacher that we’ll do it together.
- I’ll carve
with my own knife and make a new one.
- I could
start anew.
- I’ll take
another paper and do it there.
- Then I’ll
fix it.
- I’ll erase
it and draw it again of course.
- If somebody
teases me work fails. I start anew.
|
The percent of the answers
that were categorised as changing the criterion of the situation was 56
percent. The average of all the given fifteen situations was 44 percent.
The other given situations included situations like “Somebody teases
you, what do you do?” and ”Your friend won’t play with you, what
do you do?” So the failure situation produced a greater number of
criterion changing answers than on average. When we look at all of the
fifteen situations, thirteen percent of the children’s answers could
not be classified. In the failure-situation the percentage was eighteen,
which is a little bit more than usual. In the unclassifiable answers the
child repeatedly declares that he/she does not know what to do in the
failure situation. Someone reports that she failed in Jamie’s birthday
party, but she does not tell what she did. Two children gave no answer
at all. One child said that failure irritates him but he did not
describe his actions, even after at tempting to do so.
How the child’s
criterion-changing answer relates to his/her kindergarten action
and adults’ evaluations?
What does a
criterion-changing child do in kindergarten? How does the child’s view
of seeing failure as something changeable manifest itself in his/her
actions? With the Mann-Whitney test the differences between the two
groups, that is, the criterion changing and children who change their
own actions, were statistically evaluated. Because there are several
statistical differences, the probability that one difference occurs by
chance is rather big, so the probabilities describe more the amount of
difference than exact probabilities. On the other hand, the possibility
that several of the found differences were not real is small. So the
whole picture, if the results support each other, is hardly founded on a
statistical chance. So what is lost in the reliability of one difference,
is gained in the whole picture. Next, all the found statistically
significant (p<.05) differences are introduced and discussed. In this
way it is not so easy for the researcher to pick up only those results
that fit his own point of view. Of course the interpretation is still
influenced by the researcher. In the coding process the children’s
answers (n=66) were mixed randomly so the answers and children could not
be connected in the process of categorising. In this way it was possible
to make sure that coding was done only because of the contents of the
answer, not the coders impression of the child or his/her usual style of
answering.
The most
significant difference between the two groups was the amount of all the
criterion changing answers (p=.000). In other words the children that
described the failure situation as changeable described more of the
other situations also as changeable. Those children who saw the
failure-situation as not changeable gave, on average, only 4.7
changeable answers out of 15 possible. Those children who saw situations
as changeable gave, on average, 8.2 answers that were categorised as
changeable, which is more than half of the answers. It seems that
children’s description of failure-situations as changeable can
be generalised as children’s inclination to describe different
situations as changeable.
The child’s
inclination to describe situations as changeable exists also among their
nearest contacts. When the children were observed at two-minute
intervals, one of the aspects of observation was the child’s nearest
social contact that could be found in the moment of observation, if
there was a child that could be defined as one. After the observation
each child’s nearest contacts’ variable averages were counted. In
this way the profile of the child’s typical nearest contact could be
calculated. All in all the nearest child contact could be defined in
fifty percent of the 1678 cases. The undefined cases were usually doing
something alone or with an adult or an action in a such group that no
nearest contact could be defined. The not-changing children’s nearest
contacts gave, on average, 6.2 changing answers. The changing
children’s nearest contacts gave, on average, 7.7 changing answers.
According to the Mann-Whitney test the statistical significance of the
difference was 0.01. This means that children that view situations
similarly are found in each others’ company. In the kindergarten, a
similar view of the world means a more similar physical and social
environment. Similar situations and similar views of the situations are
inseparable. One can not tell which is dependent on the other. But it is
possible that children who view situations as changeable act accordingly.
They make up a “dynamic duo”. When the children find situations as
changeable they act with those aspects of the situations. They seek and
find strategies that are not just given to them but can be changed. So
to see failure-situation as changeable is related to the child’s
orientation in the kindergarten. The child seeks changeable contacts.
This affects the moulding of the situations. (In nine of the fifteen
situations that were presented to the children there was a similar
tendency. They are not dealt with here, however.)
Those answers
that could not be classified as not-changing/changing answers, were
classified in their own group. Mostly, the reason was an indistinct
answer, the answer didn’t relate to the question or refusal to answer.
In the failure-situation, according to Mann-Whitney, test the
not-changing child and the situation-changing child showed a difference
in their unclassified answers and the significance of the difference is
.017. Children that answered adaptively in the failure-situation gave,
on average, 2.8 unclassified answers when a moulding answer in the
failure-situation resulted in only 0.8 unclassified answers. The answer
was mostly “I don’t know”. This result indicates that children who
see the failure situation as changeable are more confident in their
answers and less dubious. They have at least one strategy in all kinds
of situations. When a child sees that he/she has a possibility to effect
the situation the situation looks like a pool of possibilities. This can
be a self-predicting feedback loop. When a child gets a grip on the
situation and gets to mould the flow of acting, the readiness for
ongoing assessment and adjustment develops further. The child learns how
to sustain him/herself as an agent of the changing processes. That is to
say, children can recognize how to be not just a part of change but how
to be an agent of change. In a changing world this result has a profound
meaning. In rapid change new things just do not exist yet. So if you
want to learn something new, you have to learn how to be a part of that
change.
When the
children were observed, one of the observed variables was the type of
the action that the child was doing during the observation. The action
was in the preparational study classified in eleven predefined classes
like: action according to the group; orientation; object play; role
play; rule play; work etc. When there was an action that did not fit in
to any of the eleven classes, the child’s action was classified as
”other action”. According to the Mann-Whitney test the children who
saw the failure-situation as changeable and the children whose answer
was classified as not-changing were different in how much their near
contacts’ actions were classified as ”other action” (p=.032).
Not-changing children’s near contacts did something out of the
classification, on average, 1.2 percent of their time while the changing
children’s near contacts average was 2.9 percent. This means that the
children who saw change were found more often near those children that
did something that didn’t fit the existing classification. This
indicates not only an inappropriate classification but also a phenomenon
in which were the change-oriented children are found in an environment
where something is going on that is not predefined. Something that is
not existing but just evolving or new. In a moulding, new, and not
predefined situation, a child’s method for seeking the possibilities
of change is an advantage.
The
kindergarten teachers evaluated children’s social skills on a likert
scale from one to six. The scale was defined: ”The child is socially
skilled. Different situations, interests or atmospheres do not hinder
him/her”. In the failure-situation children who answered in a
not-changing manner differed from those children answering in a changing
manner in teachers’ evaluations (p=.049). The teachers average
evaluation of the first group of children was 3.0 (the description does
not fit the child well). The teachers average evaluation of the second
group of children was 3.7 (the description fits the child quite well).
This means that the children’s way of perceiving situations was
connected to the children’s real actions in the kindergarten. It
should be mentioned that the interviewer and coder was a different
person than the evaluator of the child’s actions. The interviewer did
not know of the teachers’ evaluations and the teachers did not know
about the children’s answers. So the teachers’ evaluations and the
evaluation of the interviews are independent. The same applies to the
observations and the interview, because the answers were coded randomly,
and the coder did not know whose answer it was. Other intentional or
unintentional personal factors do not affect the evaluations. This from
three independent appraisals clustering around a similar tendency is a
strong indicator that the child’s way to see the failure situation as
changeable is related to changeable action in real situations. The
child’s view of how reality is moulded affects that reality.
The role of the intermediating
variables
The children
who answered not-changeably were an average of five-years-and-two-months
old. The children who gave changing answers were an average
five-years-and-nine-months old. According to the Mann-Whitney test the
significance of the difference is .045. This result brings to the fore
the role of the background variables and intermediate variables. Is the
orientation to change basically related to the child’s age, which only
has different manifestations as the child grows older? Similarly the
child that saw the failure-situation as not-changeable had a near
contact that was on average five-years-two-months old when the
change-oriented child’s near contact was, on average,
five-years-nine-months old. According to the Mann-Whitney test the
significance of difference is .014. Children with the same age get
together. Maybe the results do not necessarily indicate the children’s
different orientations in reality but do indicate, rather, their
gradually developing way of grasping things. Maybe we should, after all,
look at the child’s changing nature of their perception, rather than
the child’s perception as changing the environment? If a child’s
perception does not change reality, then the phenomenon should not be
investigated and is of no relevance.
The
importance of the background variables must be checked. In this effort
the partial correlations are used. The partial correlations procedure
computes partial correlation coefficients that describe the linear
relationship between two variables while controlling for the effects of
one or more additional variables. The child’s perception of the
failure-situation and the other variables coefficients were analysed
with SPSS. The controlled variables were the children’s age, sex and
kindergarten group. In practice this means that from the coefficient of
the variables, for example, the impact of the children’s age is
removed. In a similar way the effect of the child’s sex in the other
variables can be controlled. For the variable kindergarten there were
values one, two, three and four, which are basically qualitative values
because they are symbols of different kindergartens. But you can think
of them also as indicating the order of the measuring of the children.
This is because the kindergartens were numbered in research order. In
the course of the research the criterions of the observations can change,
but this tendency can be controlled.
Found partial
correlations, of which the impact of children’s age, sex, and
kindergarten, give after all a very similar picture of the results than
the ones found with the Mann-Whitney test. In the following table are
the found partial correlations. The larger correlations are first.
Table
2
The meaningful correlations between the variable ”seeing
failure-situation as changeable” and other variables, when the
variables of age, sex and kindergarten are controlled.
|
Variable
|
Correlation
|
|
The total amount of the changing answers
|
.558,
p=.000
|
|
|
-.3007,
p=.032
|
|
The total amount of the child’s nearest contact’s changing answers
|
.3004, p=.023
|
|
The observed high amount of the child changing his/her own situation
|
-.2948,
p=.025
|
|
The teachers evaluation of the child’s social skills
|
.2910,
p=.021
|
|
The total amount of ”I don’t know” or indistinct” answers
|
-.2819,
p=.026
|
The age of
the child’s nearest contact (partial correlation .161, p=.230) and
plentiful amount of ”other action” (partial correlation .1069,
p=.429) were no more significantly related. Background variables, mainly
perhaps the child’s age was the intermediate reason for these
variables being related. On the other hand, the partial correlations
brought along a new variable, the child’s observed changing of his/her
own situation. The child’s own situation differs from the given
situation. In the child’s own situation he/she is a part of his/her
orientation, when in the interview a predefined situation was presented
for the children (you fail). The child that changes much of his/her own
situation can be an indication of a separation from the context of the
others. The child can act differently than others or
separate himself/herself from the others.
It is
difficult to say what is the cause for a separate age factor for more
changeable answers. Maybe it is the child’s ability to express himself/herself
better. Maybe the correlation doesn’t really tell about a child’s
view of situations but of a child’s way of talking about situations.
Children with different language abilities give different answers.
Another new
statistically significant variable emerged. The parents’ evaluation of
the child’s preference of familiar and safe circumstances, which had a
negative correlation (-.3007, p=.032) with the changeable perception.
These variables fit well in to the evolving picture of the whole.
In a partial
correlation two variables can be perfectly related, but if the
relationship is not linear, a correlation coefficient is not an
appropriate statistic for measuring their association and the normality
of the variables must be checked. The variables “the number of
indifferent answers” and ”parents’ evaluation of a child’s
preference of familiar circumstances” do not qualify as normally
distributed, so the correlations with these variables are questionable.
Discriminant analysis
In a
bivariate examination when many variables are dealt with at the same
time, there can be distortion, so a multivariate discriminant analysis
was executed. Discriminant analysis is used to separate groups from each
other as clearly and with as few variables as possible. It can be used
as an exploratory tool to produce a good model, and it can be used to
identify “good” predictor variables. All the potentially useful
variables, which in this case means all significant differences found
using Mann-Whitney test, were included in the data set.
The stepwise
variable selection was executed with SPSS. Stepwise variable selection
algorithms combine the features of forward selection and backward
elimination. The variable selection method used here was that of the
minimization of Wilk’s lambda. The criterion for variable entry was
3.84 and removal 2.71. Variable selection terminates when no more
variables meet the entry or removal criteria. When the variables, “the
amount of changing answers” and “teachers evaluation of social
skills”, had both been included in the model, all F-to-remove values
were greater than 2.71, so no more variables were removed. All variables
not in the model after step 2 had F-to-enter values less than 3.84, so
none were eligible for inclusion and variable selection stopped. The
model with variables “all moulding answers” and “child’s social
skills” classifies 78.8 % of original grouped cases correctly. This
means that almost four out of five children’s answers in the failure
situation can be predicted knowing only the child’s general tendency
to respond to different situations and the teacher’s evaluation of the
child’s social skills. This is especially significant because the
children’s answers and the teachers evaluations are not measured by
the same meters. The way the children see the situation and how they act
in situations seem to be having a real connection.
Discussion
The research
results do not directly show, that the child’s way of telling,
interpreting or seeing different situations as changeable would be the
cause of the manner in which a child, in fact, changes his/her reality.
However, the children’s perceptions must be taken seriously, if we
really want to explore the other side of the interaction. A century-long
heavy tradition dictating the way of looking at child development is
making us blind. Psychological tradition sees the child as developing.
Sociological and historical tradition is heavy on the change of the
child’s status and role in society. But, the role of the child’s
perception as an agent of change has been little discussed or researched.
In this research the point is not the child’s development, but the
possibility of the child developing the environment. We can talk of
interaction only when both actors can be changed.
To pay regard
to a child’s reality-changing character from the departure point of
the perceptions can, furthermore, have a profound impact on the research
of perceiving success/failure. There is no point just to investigate the
reasons for failure or what kind of goals the child has to achieve the
given success, if the child is a real participant in the moulding of the
success-/failure-situation. The success/failure is not something that
the child only adapts to, but success/failure is a situation that a
child is preparing and which criterions he/she is defining.
In this
article Vygotsky’s model of proximal development has been referred to.
The model includes the child’s potential effect on the adult, society
and culture. However Vygotsky does not elaborate this point of view. So
many times the vygotskian approach is associated with the adult’s need
to adapt to making new evaluations and actions to acquire their goals.
But if the child really changes the adults’ actions, thinking and
environment, the contents of the learning can not remain the same. The
child does not learn things in his/her own way, not only because of the
unique interpretation of the phenomenon. Rather, the child’s way of
learning in his/her own way depends also on his/her own fingerprints up
on the phenomenon to be learned. The child projects upon the subjects
his/her own tones and abilities and which form the process of moulding
our evolving reality. The child does not only learn from reality, but
produces new aspects and introduces them into the learning environment.
There are things that can be learned only after the child has produced
them or has been participating in the production of these new aspects of
reality. Without the producing role of the child, these new things that
are learned would never have existed, and neither the child nor the
adult could ever have learned them. It can even be said that if the
fundamental principle of human action is interaction, learning does not
happen if the child does not change the thing to be learned.
Things on
physical reality do not progress according to reversible laws: that is
to say, most natural processes do not go from a state of disorde to
order without a infusion of energy to bring about such a change in a
natural environment. Likewise, in education, if we want to take the
concept of interaction seriously, this means that we must shift from the
stance of goal orientation to that of the evaluation of possibilities,
which thus emphasizes the way in which the role of the child’s
perception may function as an agent of change, as an “infusion” of
energy into his/her social environment.
This is not a
moral statement of the importance of the child’s view or of a
child’s right to act as a subject. But it hints that when we see
interaction from both sides we are better equipped to grasp situations
and to take part in producing our world together with the child. As such,
the train does not leave us standing motionless in the station. To
acquire this view, education and the social sciences must give up some
of their assumptions. It must be regarded, that with just the mere fact
of looking the at the world, the child changes that world, his/her own
and everyone else’s as well.
References
-
Jacobs, J.E.& Eccles,
J.C. (2000) Parents, task values and real-life achievement-related
choises in: Sansone, C. & Harackiewics, J.M., Intrinsic and
extrinsic motivation (Academic Press).
-
Laevers, F. (1995) The
concept of involvement and the Leuven involvement scale: An analysis
of critical reflections in: Laevers, F., An exploration of the
concept of involvement as an indicator for quality in early
childhood care and education (CIDREE).
-
Molden, D.C. & Dweck,
C.S (2000) Meaning and motivation in: Sansone, C. & Harackiewics,
J.M., Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Academic Press).
-
Moll, L.C. (1990)
Introduction in: Moll, L.C., Vygotsky and education instructional
implications and applications of sociohistorical psychology (University
Press).
-
Weiner, B. (1986) An
attributional theory of motivation and emotion (Springer-Verlag, New
york).
-
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978)
Mind in society (Harvard University Press, Cambridge).