Children’s Exploration as a Key in Children’s Play and Learning Activity in Social and Cultural Formation

Abstract

Children are active and intentional from birth, and from infancy explorative activity is central (Bruner, 1972, Stern, 2000, Vygotsky, Child psychology. The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, vol 5. Plenum Press, New York, 1998), but children’s learning and development must be seen in relation to a society’s cultural and educational practice. Three different educational approaches to early childhood education (Maria Montessori, Bert van Oers, and Roland Tharp) have contributed to turning the focus on learning in early childhood away from receptive learning to exploration as the central activity. Montessori’s contribution was to let the child become an agent in his or her own learning activity, by providing opportunities and materials for children’s exploration. Van Oers focuses on creating opportunities for children’s cooperation through playful activities that model well-known adult activities. Tharp and colleagues put weight on children’s possibility to model community activities. However, none of these approaches is clear about how the cultural formation aspect within early childhood is different from the cultural formation in the school. The chapter will conclude with an outline of ideas for an educational approach that proscribed instruction and instead support exploration in kindergarten that relate to experiences from everyday local settings. This approach gives a possibility for cultural formation that may be relevant for children’s transcendence to school.