Exploring Social Pedagogy for Caring for Children
Exploring Social Pedagogy for Caring for Children

Exploring Social Pedagogy for Caring for Children

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Homework Social pedagogy Social pedagogy is an approach to caring for children which combines education and care, emphasising that bringing up children is the shared responsibility of parents and society. A key principle is that the child is in charge of his or her own life, and the social pedagogue works alongside them rather than dictating to them. Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development Jean Piaget investigated how children think. According to Piaget, children’s thought processes change as they mature physically and interact with the world around them.

Piaget believed children develop schema, or mental models, to represent the world. As children learn, they expand and modify their schema through the processes of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the broadening of an existing schema to include new information. Accommodation is the mo

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dification of a schema as new information is incorporated. Example: Suppose a young boy knows his pet parrot is a bird. When he sees a robin outside and calls it a bird too, he exhibits assimilation, since he broadened his bird schema to include characteristics of both parrots and robins.

His bird schema might be “all things that fly. ” Now suppose a bat flaps out at him one night and he shrieks, “Bird! ” If he learns it was a bat that startled him, he’ll have to modify his bird schema to “things that fly and have feathers. ” In modifying his definition, he enacts accommodation. Piaget proposed that children go through four stages of cognitive development: Stage 1: Sensorimotor Period In this stage, which lasts from birth to roughly two years, children learn by using their senses and moving around.

By the end of the sensorimotor period

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children become capable of symbolic thought, which means they can represent objects in terms of mental symbols. More important, children achieve object permanence in this stage. Object permanence is the ability to recognize that an object can exist even when it’s no longer perceived or in one’s sight. Example: If a three-month-old baby sees a ball, she’ll probably be fascinated by it. But if someone hides the ball, the baby won’t show any interest in looking for it. For a very young child, out of sight is literally out of mind.

When the baby is older and has acquired object permanence, she will start to look for things that are hidden because she will know that things can exist even when they can’t be seen. Stage 2: Preoperational Period This stage lasts from about two to seven years of age. During this stage, children get better at symbolic thought, but they can’t yet reason. According to Piaget, children aren’t capable of conservation during this stage. Conservation is the ability to recognize that measurable physical features of objects, such as length, area, and volume, can be the same even when objects appear different.

Example: Suppose a researcher gives a three-year-old girl two full bottles of juice. The girl will agree that they both contain the same amount of juice. But if the researcher pours the contents of one bottle into a short, fat tumbler, the girl will then say that the bottle has more. She doesn’t realize that the same volume of juice is conserved in the tumbler. Piaget argued that children are not capable of conservation during the preoperational stage because of three weaknesses in the way

they think.

He called these weaknesses centration, irreversibility, and egocentrism: * Centration is the tendency to focus on one aspect of a problem and ignore other key aspects. In the example above, the three-year-old looks only at the higher juice level in the bottle and ignores the fact that the bottle is narrower than the tumbler. Because of centration, children in the preoperational stage cannot carry out hierarchical classification, which means they can’t classify things according to more than one level. * Irreversibility is the inability to mentally reverse an operation.

In the example, the three-year-old can’t imagine pouring the juice from the tumbler back into the bottle. If she poured the juice back, she’d understand that the tumbler holds the same amount of liquid as the bottle. * Egocentrism is the inability to take someone else’s point of view. Animism, or the belief that even inanimate objects are living, results from egocentrism. Children assume that since they are alive, all other things must be too. Talking Tables and Dancing Dishwashers Animism explains the popularity of children’s movies featuring characters such as talking vegetables or singing candlesticks.

Young children can readily believe that objects around them are alive, which means they can be entertained by stories involving living objects. Children and adolescents past the age of seven generally lose interest in heroic toasters and prefer stories about people. Stage 3: Concrete Operational Period From the age of seven to about eleven, children become capable of performing mental operations or working through problems and ideas in their minds. However, they can perform operations only on tangible objects and real events.

Children also achieve conservation, reversibility, and decentration during this stage:

* Reversibility is the ability to mentally reverse actions. * Decentration is the ability to focus simultaneously on several aspects of a problem. Furthermore, children become less egocentric during this stage as they start to consider simultaneously different ways of looking at a problem. Stage 4: Formal Operational Period In this stage, which begins around eleven years of age and continues through adulthood, children become capable of applying mental operations to abstract concepts.

They can imagine and reason about hypothetical situations. From this point on, people start to think in abstract, systematic, and logical ways. Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development | Stage | Age | Important Features | 1 | Sensorimotor | First two years of life | Object permanence, symbolic thought | 2 | Preoperational | 2–7 years | Centration, irreversibility, egocentrism, and animism | 3 | Concrete operational | 7–11 years | Reversibility, decentration, decrease in egocentrism, conservation | 4 | Formal operational | 11 through adulthood | Abstract thought | How this is reflected in my school

In my school we teach from the age of 4 to 7 years of age in lessons we try to give them a basic understanding of volume, length and capacity it is however just a small starting point to be expanded at a later time. In relation to this theory our teaching styles are very visual and tactile as our children are still of the age that they find this way of teaching more engaging and beneficial.

We also do alot of feelings lead work using examples such as in storeys how do you think they would feel and how would you feel so children can start to

form a correlation between how things make them feel and the impact it will have on others, we use this line of questions alot if a child hurts another they will be asked how do you think that made them feel, how would you feel if they hurt you Bandura’s theory Bandura’s social learning theory states that people learn from one another, via observation, imitation and modelling.

The theory has often been called the bridge between behaviourist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention for affective modelling. Necessary conditions for effective modelling. 1) Attention – various factors increase or decrease the amount of attention paid. Includes distinctiveness, affective valence, prevalence, complexity and functional value 2) Retention – remembering what you paid attention to. Includes symbolic coding, mental images, cognitive organisation, symbolic rehearsal and motor rehearsal. 3) Reproduction - reproducing the image including physical capabilities and self-observation of reproduction. ) Motivation – having a good reason to imitate, includes motives such asA past (i. e. traditional behaviourism), promised (imagined incentives) and vicarious (seeing and recalling the reinforced model). Bandura believed in “reciprocal determinism”, that is, the world and a person’s behaviour cause each other, while behaviourism essentially states that one’s environment causes one’s behaviour, Bandura, who was studying adolescent aggression, found this too simplistic, and so in addition he suggested that behaviour causes environment as well.

Later, Bandura soon considered personality as an interaction between three components: the environment, behaviour, and one’s psychological processes (one’s ability to entertain images in minds and language). How this is reflected in my school In our school we use a positive approach to discipline and behaviour management i. e. if child

A is talking on the carpet we will look to find a child that is not and loudly voice “oh child B you are sitting so well on ur carpet, you are showing excellent self control” this show of praise more often than not will make child A stop talking and try to be like child B in the pursuit of our praise, we also celebrate strengths in assemblies and around our classrooms i. e. wow cards they are put on our wall for all to see, we make a show of the children who have “earned” a wow card by telling the whole class why and allowing them to decorate it at a time the other children have to sit on the carpet. Sigmund Freud Freud is one of the most influential psychologists ever.

His theories radically altered the way that people understand the mind and behaviour. Freud’s Main Ideas 1. ) The unconscious mind Freud believed that we are aware of very little that goes on in our minds. Most of our Thoughts, feelings and many of our memories are locked away in the unconscious. We don’t know they are there, but nonetheless they have a huge impact on what we say and do. In other words, any of our actions may have hidden purposes and meanings. 2. ) The psyche This term is often used interchangeably with ‘personality’ but really is closer in spirit to ‘soul’.

Freud believed that the psyche contained several parts that are continually at war with each other. The conflict that arises between the id, ego and superego is what drives our behaviour. 3. ) Childhood influences Freud thought that

the first few years of our lives were crucial to our future development. The relationships we establish, the way we are treated by our parents and many of our other experiences have a huge impact to the structure of our psyche and the personality and behaviour we display as adults.

Stages of development Freud thought that childhood development went in stages. At each stage, different parts of the psyche are developed and different influences become important. The stages go in a fixed order, and a relatively fixed time scale. Problems in adulthood can usually be traced back to issues that first arose during a particular stage of development. 4. ) Symbolism Although the contents of our unconscious are locked away from us, we can understand people if we try, because the unconscious still influences them.

Unconscious thoughts and motives may appear in a disguised form in all sorts of ways – how a person acts, the mistakes they make, and the content of their dreams can all be decoded. 5. ) Instincts and drives Freud believed that we are still animals, and consequently that our behaviour is governed by the same drives as any other animal. Therefore, at the roots of our behaviour are drives like hunger, thirst, aggression and sex. Sexual motives he considered especially important. How this is reflected in my school

This theory is not to my knowledge reflected in my school, some of it is used in our understanding and how we passive the children we teach we build a picture of each Childs life birth to 4 and while they are in our care this help us help them in the most effective

way. I. e. it is very apparent to us the children who have lacked structure routine and discipline with in the first 4 years of their lives so as a school we will help them by giving them goals and targets teaching them boundaries and expectations. In giving the children structure and clear guidelines we find they feel more secure so their behaviour will improve.

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