RSS Feed for the unit Knowledge in everyday life

Introduction

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

The unit focuses on the knowledge, learning and thinking of children aged between 3 and 8 years old. It has been written for an audience of practitioners working in the full range of early years care and education settings: you may be a teaching assistant in an early years class, a nursery nurse, a playgroup worker or leader, or a childminder; you may work voluntarily in an early years setting. But whatever the context in which you are working, we expect you to be working there regularly, for at least five hours per week, with children in this 3–8 years age range. This is an important condition because we ask you to relate your theoretical learning to your experience of working with children. To work with children, even in a voluntary capacity, you will need to undergo certain official checks – for example, those relating to criminal records. This process will almost certainly have been carried out when you began working in your setting, but we advise you to check that it has in fact happened.

This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course Ways of knowing: language, mathematics and science in the early years (E230).

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Learning outcomes

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

After studying this unit you will have:

explored your knowledge, attitudes and feelings in each subject area;
begun to identify, in each subject, areas of knowledge where you are confident and others where you need to deepen your understanding;
extended your knowledge and understanding of the place that language, mathematics and science have in the everyday life of individuals and societies.

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1.1 An overview of the unit

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

The relationship between observation of children and educational theory is central to the teaching of this unit: the theory should help you make sense of what you observe, while your observations should help you make sense of the theory. This perspective is reflected in the activities you will find in the blocks of study material. We recommend that you keep a notebook as you work through the unit. You can use this both for the activities that you do at home and for those that involve observation of and working with children. If you keep your notebook with you as you work in your setting, you can use it to record other observations, useful discussions with colleagues and any other information that may help you with your study.

We anticipate that most students will be working in early years settings somewhere in the United Kingdom, and we make reference, where appropriate, to curriculum guidance and other relevant documents published by government for the four UK countries – England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Given the range of settings in which students of this unit are working, and the variety of curricula (according to age, type of setting, location, etc.) in which their work is framed, it would be impossible for every example used in the material to apply directly to your particular circumstances. In some ways this is a good thing: it will enable you to gain insights into the learning of children who are in older and younger age ranges than those you are used to; moreover, being able to make comparisons of your ownway of working with that of other settings can give valuable insights too. It is also more than possible that one day you will find yourself working in a context different fromyour current one. However, we have tried to make the unit as widely relevant as possible, and we encourage you to consider carefully all the arguments, case studies and examples used, to see what insights they can offer in your own situation.

Similarly, although most of the examples and case studies involve English-speaking children, we hope that it will be clear that the points we are making apply equally where the medium is Welsh, Gaelic or another language.

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1.2 What the unit is about

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

This unit is about the ways in which we come to know and make sense of the world, in particular how we do this using the media of language, mathematics and science.

There are many possible theoretical positions which can be taken towards early years curricula. Some people, for example, think of children as ‘empty vessels’ which can be ‘filled’ with knowledge that is transmitted to them by adults. This view has been associated with a behaviourist approach to teaching and learning, in which adults are seen to have control over what is learnt and children play a passive role in receiving the knowledge transmitted. In the 1960s and 1970s, school and early years curricula were heavily influenced by the constructivist approach pioneered by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). According to constructivist theory, learning involves the interaction of thought and experience: children, who are compared to ‘active scientists’, are led by their own curiosity to explore their environment at their own pace.

The approach favoured by the course team is a social constructivist one, a perspective associated with the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934). As with constructivism, this approach highlights the importance of learners relating their experience to their existing knowledge; however, it also emphasises the role of the child’s interaction with others. Far from being lone explorers, children are seen as learning with the collaboration and support of carers and others, usually people who are more competent in the skills and knowledge they are developing. This interactive perspective links the knowledge of all the individuals within a social grouping, and the commonly held knowledge that emerges is the culture within which the child learns. The emphasis on interaction puts a high value on language, while science, mathematics and various language practices (literacy, for example) are seen as cultural products that can be used by members of the culture as frameworks in which their knowledge can develop. As well as providing a structure in which to understand subject learning, social constructivism appeals to the course team as the model that best fits our experience of young children as active and interactive constructors of their own learning. We see children as meaning makers (Wells, 1987).

Another term you will come across quite often is sociocultural. Some writers use the terms ‘sociocultural’ and ‘social constructivist’ to mean much the same thing. For others, the difference is a matter of emphasis: they use the former when considering wider social and cultural issues (e.g. the influence of gender-biased language on the way we understand the world), and the latter in relation to smaller-scale events (such as an adult scaffolding the learning of an individual child). The title of Vygotsky’s book Mind in Society (Vygotsky, 1978) reflects the psychologist’s conception of individual minds developing through their direct and indirect contact with other members of a culture. Although it is possible to take a sociocultural position without taking a social constructivist one, in this unit the two approaches are seen as complementary. Moreover, by adopting the two perspectives, the course team does not favour either the role of local interactions or of wider cultural factors in their contribution to knowing and understanding; in reality, the two factors are inseparable.

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1.3 Language, mathematics and science in the unit

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

Because of the schooled culture we have grown up in, we are likely to recognise language, mathematics and science as distinct ‘ways of knowing’. The words ‘language’, ‘mathematics’ and ‘science’ probably prompted you to think first of the school curriculum, where they are often treated very separately from each other. One of the intentions of the unit is to explore and develop your understandings of these three subjects, which means that, inevitably, we will spend some time dealing with them separately. However, these ways of knowing are more than just school subjects or bodies of abstract academic knowledge: they are ways used by adults and children alike to engage with and make sense of the world. In most natural contexts, people act and think in many different ways at once: for example, when considering the mathematics you use when buying a carpet, if you were to give a detailed account of your visit to the carpet shop, you would find that you simultaneously used your skills and knowledge of both language (e.g. to discuss relative merits of different fibres, or to negotiate price) and science (e.g. when considering the cloth’s durability or ease of cleaning).

For young children, the need to separate out these ways of thinking will be still less obvious, as would be attempts to consider their thinking separately fromthe context in which it takes place. For these reasons, the course team favours a holistic view of the curriculum, where the totality of children’s experience is taken into account and learning opportunities are presented in a way that makes most sense. Similarly, we believe that practitioners should at all times be alert to the breadth and complexity of the things that children do. Consequently, when you are looking at the video sequences in the audiovisual material, we would urge you, even where the focus of an activity is on just one subject, to take account of how the children concerned are making use of other ways of knowing. For example, the course team considered illustrating a mathematical point with a sequence showing two children playing with water. At the same time as identifying their mathematical learning (relating to volume and capacity) we would also expect you to notice what they are learning about the properties of water and the way their language relates to their growing understanding.

The unit is structured to reflect the way in which the three subjects are often intertwined, and how our understanding of them can offer different insights into the same experience. Initially, the course team briefly considered organising it as three completely separate sections, so that you would complete your study of, say, mathematics in the first ten weeks or so, before moving on to the next subject. However, it immediately became obvious that, as well as not reflecting reality, this approach would involve a great deal of overlap and repetition. We settled, therefore, on a pattern where a succession of aspects of language, mathematics and science are examined, using linking text to bring together points of similarity and to discuss what can be learnt more generally about thinking and knowing.

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1.4 Subject knowledge

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

Subject knowledge is a critical factor at every point in the teaching process: in planning, assessing and diagnosing, task setting, questioning, explaining and giving feedback.
(Alexander et al., 1992, paragraph 77)

Subject knowledge, which lies at the heart of this unit, comes in different forms. One well-known typology (Shulman, 1986) identifies three kinds:

content knowledge;
curricular knowledge;
pedagogic subject knowledge.

Content knowledge, or personal subject knowledge, is what most people would perhaps think of simply as ‘knowledge’. It is the kind of knowledge that comes from textbooks and reference books, and is most commonly acquired through formal education. Teachers in primary and secondary schools are expected to have studied the subjects they teach to a high level. The subject knowledge books for this unit attempt to set out the subject knowledge needed by a primary teacher, and they are used throughout the unit to help you develop your own personal subject knowledge.

Curricular knowledge refers to what you know about the formally defined curriculum followed by your setting: for example, if you work in a nursery school in Scotland, the curricular knowledge you need will be found in A Curriculum Framework for Children 3 to 5 (SCCC, 1999) and in any supporting curriculum documents that may have been developed in your setting.

Pedagogical knowledge is the knowledge that practitioners have which helps them to teach and provide support as children develop their own personal subject knowledge. This may involve knowing particular ways of presenting knowledge so that children can relate it to what they already know; or it may be knowing common misconceptions that children may have, and how they can be led from these to more conventional understandings.

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1.5 Talking, thinking and learning

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

One of the main points which the unit will be making is that information and knowledge are not the same thing and that, in order to learn, learners have to engage actively with new information. We hope that you will learn to apply your growing knowledge by relating it to your professional context, and that, by questioning and analysing both theory and practice, you will be able to reach your own conclusions.

One way of engaging with knowledge is to ask questions. Earlier we suggested that you discuss the unit with fellow students. Talking to colleagues in your early years setting about specific questions can give another valuable perspective. Even when you are ‘simply’ reading the unit materials or viewing a video sequence, asking questions is a valuable strategy. You may resolve them later in discussions with other adults or through your observation of children. You may simply be able to think them through. In any event, approaching the unit with a questioning attitude will make you a more active learner.

We hope that this unit will enable you to develop your own understanding of language, mathematics and science, and give you rewarding insights into children’s learning and understanding. We also hope that you enjoy studying the unit as much as we have enjoyed writing it and wish you every success with your studies.

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2.1 Language in everyday life

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

Language is an ever-present feature of human life. In the developed world in particular, we are surrounded by language. Radio and television provide a soundtrack to the lives of many people. Written language is part of everything from cereal packets and street signs, to relatively new technologies such as email and text messaging. If you were completely alone, far away from any other people or any kind of human contact, how long would it be before words came into your head, perhaps because of something you noticed, or in the form of memories, or as you turned over possible solutions to some problem in your mind? Maybe you would talk to yourself.

Language keeps us informed and entertained. It helps us relate to others, work together, and give and receive instructions. It helps us think about the past and plan for the future. Language enables us to communicate with others, to come up with and think through new ideas. Language can be defined as a system for making and representing meaning, originally (and still mainly) using the sounds of speech. No human society exists without language. However, the ease with which most of us learn and use language should not blind us to the great complexity of the job of being a language user.

If you have studied the course E123 Working with Children in the Early Years, you may remember an activity asking you to record and analyse all the speaking and listening you did during a 24-hour period. (If you have not done this activity and would like to, it can be found below.)

Activity 1: Your use of language

0 hours 30 minutes

Think about all the speaking and listening you have been involved in over the last twenty-four hours: these will doubtless include talking to a range of friends, colleagues, acquaintances and children. You will also have used technology – for example, radio, television and the telephone. Maybe you have read something aloud.

In your notebook, make a list of all these language events. Try not to overlook any that involved speaking or listening, even something as trivial as muttering to yourself.

When your list is complete, note briefly beside each example what its purpose was. Some of the many possible reasons are:

to get something done;
to get someone else to do something;
to express your feelings;
to remember something or to organise your thoughts;
to express friendship or support (or the opposite);
to show your own importance, or to acknowledge someone else's;
to give or receive information.

Discussion

Were you surprised by how long your list was? This alone illustrates that language is an important accompaniment to a great deal of what we do in our lives.

Very often we use language to serve a number of purposes at once: by telling a child, ‘Put your painting on the table’, you are both getting something done and getting someone else to do something. You may also be showing that you are a helpful person, thereby building your professional relationship with the child. The fact that you are able to give direct orders is evidence of your importance within your setting. Your tone of voice may express your pleasure at the quality or subject of the painting, and so on.

It may be that you found relatively few examples of using language to remember things and to organise your thoughts. If, however, you widen your list to include your use of written language, then shopping lists, diary entries, teaching plans, observation notes and a host of other examples no doubt arise.

In the Activity, it was suggested that you may have used language when you wanted to:

get something done;
get someone else to do something;
express your feelings;
remember something or organise your thoughts;
express friendship or support (or the opposite);
show your own importance or acknowledge someone else's;
give or receive information.

Can you think of an example from your recent use of language (either spoken or written) which matches each of the above?

The next Activity invites you to reflect on a four-year-old girl's everyday encounters with written language.

Activity 2: Claire's environmental print day

0 hours 50 minutes

Clicking on the link below will open Claire's environmental print day by Elaine Hallet

View document

Read the section entitled ‘Claire's environmental print day’ from ‘Signs and Symbols: environmental print’ by Elaine Hallet in the attached PDF file. As you read, make a note of the times when Claire is exposed to information about:

people using written texts of all kinds;
the different purposes that written language is used for.

Discussion

You may have noted the following points.

Claire learns about how texts are used when:

she sees her brother reading silently, and hears her mother and Tracey (her big sister) reading aloud;
she reads with her mother and probably at nursery too;
she interacts with the text by asking questions, pointing and making comments.

Claire learns about the different purposes for literacy when:

she sees language used for labelling: some labels say what things are (Weetabix, toothpaste); other labels say who they belong to (Claire's cup at home or her milk at nursery);
the ‘belonging to’ labels enable Claire to see her own name in print;
she sees notices that inform, instruct and invite – for example, the menu that gives different information on the same topic each day;
through books and comics, Tracey learns that reading can be a source of enjoyment.

A similar log for yourself would no doubt include at least as many experiences, although some will be of a different kind: even if you share much of your time with young children, you will also encounter writing in many adult contexts.

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2.2 Language and shopping

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

The concept of self-service has reduced the use of spoken language dramatically, and nowadays shopping transactions may involve no more than the exchange of a few words. However, uses of literacy in shopping are probably increasing, as the next Activity shows.

Activity 3: Shopping and literacy

0 hours 10 minutes

Think back to a recent visit to the supermarket. Walk through it, in your head, from arrival (maybe in the car park) to departure. List the ways in which you used your literacy skills while you shopped.

Discussion

Writing is everywhere, from the shop's name over the entrance, through the signs above the aisles, to the packaging of items. The evaluations you make about nutritional quality and value for money are only possible because you can read the relevant words and figures. Advertising around the store emphasises positive words – ‘value’, ‘fresh’, ‘free’, ‘new’. The signs over the aisles work because you use language to sort things: ‘Home Baking’, for example, leads you to the flour and dried fruit. You may have used the same kind of categories to organise your thoughts when writing your shopping list.

Some of the signs that guide your shopping are not, strictly, writing. Symbols, like that identifying the disabled parking spaces, do not represent language directly, but have much in common with writing as an established and recognisable way of showing meaning. In the same way, you may recognise particular brands of goods from a distance by the colour and style of lettering on their packaging. When you pay, you may sign your name – a formal recognition of how your use of language is personal to you and a symbol of your identity.

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2.3 ‘English’ as a school subject

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

In official UK curricula, language appears as a curriculum subject under a range of labels. In all four UK countries – England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales – the curricula for the 3–5 years age range (ACCAC, 2000a; DENI, 1997; QCA/DfEE, 2000; SCCC, 1999) include the word ‘language’ in the subject title. In the formal school curriculum, the subject is known as ‘English’ or ‘English Language’ (ACCAC, 2000b; CCEA, 2004; DfEE/QCA, 1999a; SOED, 1991). Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland also have curricula for the languages of Welsh, Irish and Gaelic respectively.

Earlier, you had the opportunity to reflect on your own school experiences of mathematics and science, where it seems that many people recall negative and alienating experiences. Before we ask you to consider your personal history in this area of your education, we would like you first to think about what it means when we refer to ‘English’ as a school subject.

Activity 4: Your experience of English at school

0 hours 20 minutes

Think about your experience of ‘English’ as a subject in school (if your school used another language, e.g. Welsh, for most of its teaching, make that the focus of your reflection):

What kinds of thing did you learn?
How were these things taught to you?

Discussion

The course team (all educated in English-speaking schools) did this activity on a ‘first thoughts’ basis. Some thought immediately of learning to read and write, something usually regarded as a priority in primary schools. One described her experiences of English in secondary education as ‘grammar and Shakespeare!’ Reading and writing (including grammar), along with the study of literature, are the mainstays of the traditional curriculum for English.

If your school experience is more recent, maybe you included areas such as speaking and listening, drama and the study of ‘media’ texts. Today's curricula emphasise the use of language for communication and thinking. We wonder if, at school, your English lessons focused on you as a user of language, or if the knowledge and skills you were to learn were seen as things to be ‘given’ to you by the teacher.

Just as people's knowledge in mathematics and science includes elements that are learnt in ‘life’ contexts, it is clear that their knowledge of language includes both ‘school’ and ‘non-school’ knowledge. However, we would suggest that the relationship between in-school and out-of-school knowledge is different in the case of language. In particular, we would note the following points:

We learn a lot about language before we ever go to school. Most under fives develop a high degree of competence as language users, often without any professional or expert support. In fact, children begin to behave in language-like ways (e.g. making eye contact, copying expressions, making speech sounds) almost as soon as they are born.
The language that we learn out of school is extensive and can be very sophisticated. It is very rare for us to have any idea, no matter how complex, that we are unable to express through our home language. People who have never been to school are nonetheless fully competent users of spoken language.
We seem to be programmed to learn language. Some even believe that language is something we are born with (Chomsky, 1965; Pinker, 1994), others that as adults we instinctively support children's language learning (Bruner, 1983). There is no human society that does not have a fully developed language; being human and being a language user go hand in hand.

The English curriculum has traditionally focused on literacy – an aspect of language that is seen as requiring explicit teaching. Of course, spoken language will always be an important part of schooling as the medium through which most learning takes place.

All this makes our attitude to language as a subject quite complex. Many people are happy to say that they know nothing about grammar, just as they might say they are ‘no good at maths’. Studies of the formal language knowledge of trainee teachers (their knowledge of nouns, clauses, etc.) suggest that such assessments have some basis in fact (Williamson and Hardman, 1995; Wray, 1993). Few people, on the other hand, would say that they don't know how to talk to a friend or find it difficult to listen to the radio. Where language is part of everyday life, we are happy to be experts. We often fail to appreciate the range of skills involved in speaking or writing. One of the aims of this section is to highlight just how much you know about language and how complex that knowledge is.

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2.4 What do we know about language?

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

One aspect of language that illustrates the division between school and non-school language is grammar. Many people lack confidence in this subject, so we would like you now to reflect on what this term means to you.

Activity 5: Grammar

0 hours 20 minutes

Note down your responses to the following questions:

How much grammar did you learn at school?
In your view, how has your knowledge about grammar helped you in your work with children?

Sum up, in one sentence, your own definition of the word ‘grammar’. Then write down three or four words that sum up how you feel about the subject of grammar.

Discussion

Generally speaking, grammar does not appear to be a popular subject. One student on an Open University early years course reported that she had learnt to see grammar as ‘complicated, confusing, difficult to learn rules (and exceptions to them!)’. Maybe grammar was unfashionable when you were at school, so you were not taught anything; or perhaps you sat through grammar lessons and still feel none the wiser. You may feel that whatever knowledge of grammar you have has little bearing on your everyday life. Of course, you are thinking about grammar as a school subject (as we asked you to), but there is another way of looking at grammar.

Activity 6: Real grammar

0 hours 20 minutes

Note down your responses to the question (in italics) after each of the following sentences:

Bill hit Ben.
Who was hurt? How do you know?
Ben's dirty shoes did not impress.
What state were Ben's shoes in? How do you know?
Ben's shoes ended up as they had started, dirty.
What state were Ben's shoes in? How do you know?

Discussion

The first part of each question is easy. Ben got hurt, because it was Bill who did the hitting. How do you know? The sentence grammar – the order that the words are in – tells you. Putting it (very) roughly, English has a rule which says that, in a sentence like this, the first named person performs the action, the second word is the action and the third word shows the ‘victim’ of the action. In the same way that we know the ‘1’ in ‘156’ means ‘one hundred’ because of its position in the number, so we know that Ben is the ‘doer’ of an action by the position of his name in the sentence.

In the second sentence, we know that Ben's shoes are dirty because of the order of words. A word like ‘dirty’ regularly applies to the word that follows it. The grammar also tells us that the shoes belong to Ben.

You might think that both these examples depend on common sense rather than grammar: it's just the order that the ideas ‘naturally’ come in. But if you are a speaker of a different language, Welsh perhaps, the ideas may come in a different order. In Welsh, ‘Bill hit Ben’ would be Fe darodd Bill Ben (‘hit Bill Ben’), and ‘Ben's dirty shoes’ would be sgidiau brwnt Ben (‘shoes dirty Ben’).

From the first two examples, you might think that words relate to each other because they stand next to each other. However, in the third example, we can easily spot that the shoes are the dirty objects, even though the words are at opposite ends of the sentence.

The danger with talking about grammar is that it is possible to get into deep water very quickly. It is not intended that you get involved in anything complex here. The important point to grasp is that in using language one is able, without effort and without being aware of it, to do some very complicated things.

In the comment to Activity 6, we used the word ‘rule’, and, in the context of grammar, this needs some explanation. You are probably familiar with the idea that rules of grammar tell you what you should or should not write or say. This is not the kind of rule that is being talked about here: indeed, pattern might be a better word to describe what we mean.

The following sentences follow the same pattern as ‘Bill hit Ben’, so we can understand them in the same way:

Jane / hates / strawberries.
Bill / is eating / strawberries.
Strawberries / contain / vitamin C.

We don't need anyone to tell us that we should put the words in this order or understand them in the way we do. Mentally, we all have some knowledge (of rules or patterns) that enables us to make sense of sentences. In fact, most of the rules that we understand without effort are far more complicated than the rules that we are told we should use. One student's definition of grammar as ‘correctly presenting the written and spoken English language’ is a view of schooled grammar. The knowledge that allows us to use language appropriately is a different type of grammar and one that we have all mastered. The next activity develops further the idea that there are different types of grammar.

Activity 7: Types of grammar

0 hours 50 minutes

Read ‘Grammar: the rules of language’ from Primary English by Ian Eyres;.

Click on the link below to open Grammar: the rules of language by Ian Eyres.

View document

When you have finished reading this section, write a few words to explain:

what is meant by implicit and explicit language knowledge;
your reaction to the notion of correctness that is being proposed here.

Besides producing and understanding language, what else does your knowledge of language enable you to do?

Discussion

Implicit and explicit language knowledge are quite close in meaning to schooled and non-schooled grammar. As speakers, we all have implicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge enables us to talk about language – for example, to explain why a sentence ‘sounds wrong’. You were possibly surprised that not all forms of grammar are concerned about ‘correctness’: this is a question we will return to later in the unit.

You have spent some time now looking at the way in which English puts words together. The next Activity explores some other aspects of language. Again the intention is to show how complex language is, so do not spend too long getting to grips with all the details.

Activity 8: Your language knowledge

0 hours 30 minutes

Complete the attached activity from Primary English by Ian Eyres. When you have completed your list, read the three numbered paragraphs in the ‘Reflection’. What different knowledge would you need to understand this text if it were spoken rather than written?

Click on the link below to open Primary English by Ian Eyres.

View document

Discussion

The ‘Reflection’ concentrates on elements of language such as words and letters which are easy to think of as the ‘building blocks’ that texts are made up of. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that a speaker or writer develops meaning from a whole text and chooses his or her language accordingly.

We based this activity on a written text because we felt that it would be easier to analyse than an audio or video recording. This does have the disadvantage of excluding important features such as how a speaker uses his or her voice or the way that words are made up of speech sounds. In fact it may be tempting to make the mistake of thinking that, because these things are not written down, they are less important or not really part of language proper. Furthermore, if we stick to written texts, because the person reading the text is silent we run the risk of forgetting that most oral language involves more than one person.

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2.5 Communicating with language

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

It has been suggested that our ‘linguistic competence’ (Chomsky, 1965) consists simply of the ability to construct ‘well-formed sentences’. The sociolinguist Del Hymes (1979) considered this notion to be far too narrow, and proposed the term ‘communicative competence’ to account for speakers’ ability to use language appropriately. Communicative competence lets us know when to speak and when not to speak, how to take turns in conversations and how to start and end them, and how to involve and exclude people. We also know how to listen.

If you studied E123 Working with Children in the Early Years, you may remember an activity exploring young children's communicative competence.

In some conversations, the information content may seem very slight because the speaker's main purpose is to convey a message such as ‘I want to be sociable with you’. We are sure that at times you have noticed that speakers give ‘hidden messages’ such as ‘I find you irritating’ and ‘I have more important things to do’ without ever actually using those words. These interpersonal (Halliday, 1985) elements of the dialogue may help to reinforce the sense that, in constructing a dialogue, speakers are working together. Followers of Halliday's approach (Thompson, 1996) hold the view that language can only sensibly be studied as a way of making meaning, and meaning depends on the context (including who is speaking and who is there to listen) in which the words are written or spoken.

All speech is accompanied by additional features, which may include:

vocal features such as pitch, volume, voice quality (e.g. whispering, groaning), pace and rhythm;
gestures (including pointing to elements of the physical environment), eye contact and what has become known as ‘body language’;
‘non-linguistic’ sounds such as sighing, ‘tutting’, exclamations like ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’, and even screams.

These paralinguistic features are all ways of adding to or intensifying meaning, especially the emotional, or affective, content of what is being said: to avoid misunderstandings (or worse), all these behaviours have to be learnt and used appropriately.

Activity 9: A mouthful of sky

0 hours 30 minutes

Watch the video sequence from the Indian soap opera, A Mouthful of Sky. As you watch, list some of the skills that the speakers use in order to make the conversation succeed. Note the ways in which the characters use voice, gestures and other paralinguistic strategies to develop their meanings (including interpersonal meanings). Are there any ways in which this scripted scene might differ from a real-life discussion?

Click on the link below to watch A Mouthful of Sky.

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Transcript

Discussion

Among (many) things, you probably noted that the characters use eye contact (or lack of it), physical contact and distance, smiles and other gestures to relate to each other.

They use voice quality to convey moods and personality types: for example, a deep voice and slow delivery denotes seriousness; while Shama's voice, with its wild leaps of pitch and its laughing quality implies frivolousness. The way that characters use their voice is clearly related to their gender (this raises issues around the image of women projected by this programme); however, the difference between male and female voices depends on much more than pitch.

Because they are following a script, the characters do not have to use strategies (eye contact, gesture or intonation) to determine whose turn it is to speak. There are no interruptions, points where two people are speaking at once or uncomfortable silences, although silences (as short pauses) are used to increase the dramatic or humorous effect.

We understand smiles, gestures and other paralinguistic behaviour because they are used consistently. Some of the rules relating to these features have much in common with the rules of language use. Just as we know when we can politely enter a dialogue, so we know (within the rules of the culture we belong to) how close to somebody we can politely stand: in fact in both situations we may talk about ‘not stepping on the other person's toes’!

In the video sequence above, the physical context of the building is constantly referred to, but the characters’ knowledge of each other, of their shared history and of what they have planned and agreed are just as much a part of the context: they must take these factors into account before they can reach complete understanding.

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2.6 Context and language variation

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

As well as contributing to meaning, context can also influence the actual words and sentences that we use. Do you sometimes say ‘Hi’ and at other times say ‘Good morning’? Do you have a ‘telephone voice’? This variation in language may be done deliberately, but often it is not. There are two main reasons as to why we adjust the way we speak:

to fit in with our audience or what we feel they expect of us; you may use ‘professional’ language with children's parents, for example – in part to give the implicit message that you are dealing with their child in a professional manner;
to be clearly understood by our audience, e.g. in the way in which you speak to children.

Activity 10: Your language in context

1 hour 0 minutes

Over the next few days, keep a note of examples that you feel illustrate how your language changes to suit its context. Choose 10–12 of these and record them on a chart – for example:

My language	Context	Reason
‘Good morning’	Greeting a child's parent	Emphasising my professional role – a bit distant but ‘in control’
‘Oh dear, what happened to your poor knee?’	Gemma brought to me with a grazed knee, crying	Warm tone, comforting (with close eye contact and hand on child's shoulder)

Finally, write a brief explanation of how you adjust the way you talk to meet the needs of the young children with whom you work.

Discussion

You will probably notice the interpersonal basis of many of your choices. When we enter into conversation, we often want to express solidarity or ‘closeness’ with the person we are speaking to, although there may be occasions when we wish to establish distance by deliberately speaking differently from them.

For every variation in the way you speak, there will be a reason. Sometimes variation towards less formal ways of speaking is criticised as a lapse in ‘good English’, but this is a questionable view.

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Summary

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

In this section, you have begun to explore your knowledge about what language is and how you use it in your everyday life. In particular, you have seen that:

language (including literacy) is an inescapable part of everyday life;
language is a highly developed and specifically human system for making meaning;
using language involves coordinating a wide and complex range of knowledge of:
- formal elements like sounds, words and phrases, and the rules or patterns of how they are put together;
- paralinguistic behaviour that accompanies speech;
- how language and context support each other;
- how to use language in a way that is appropriate to context.

As speakers, we have both implicit and explicit language knowledge:

we are confident of our implicit knowledge, even if we are not fully aware of it;
schooling has traditionally concentrated on areas of explicit language knowledge and literacy, where we may be less confident;
the term ‘grammar’ may apply to both implicit and explicit knowledge, and is not just about speaking and writing ‘correctly’.

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3 Language, mathematics and science in context

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

In the opening part of this unit we argued that, as human beings, we are constantly engaging with the world through mechanisms called ‘ways of knowing’, and that three important ways of knowing are language, mathematics and science. Although it may be easy to see what makes language, mathematics and science different from each other, in real-life contexts they are rarely used in isolation. We tried to show this by using shopping as an example of an everyday activity that can involve all three subjects. Very likely, you can think of many other instances where two or more of these ways of knowing come into play.

Activity 11: Contexts and convergences

0 hours 30 minutes

Spend about ten minutes or so thinking of three activities that you have done recently which involved using at least two of the three ways of knowing – language, mathematics and science – within the same activity. Write a brief account of what happened, in particular noting how closely intertwined they were in each case.

Discussion

Possible examples of activities are:

buying fabric to make a coat (calculating quantities, judging fabric properties such as waterproofness and warmth, talking to the sales assistant);
showing a child how to make a cake (measuring quantities, explaining and instructing, understanding that heat causes chemical changes).

Examples of how these ways of knowing can converge include:

counting aloud, which uses both language and mathematics simultaneously;
heating sugar and fruit to exactly the right temperature to make jam, which combines the use of mathematics (measuring temperature) with science (knowing that a change takes place at a specific temperature).

Almost any activity can be supported by language: talking with a colleague, reading, writing or, indeed, thinking. (The relationship between language and thinking is a topic we will come back to later.)

As well as occurring together, the three ways of knowing have many capacities in common – they involve:

problem-solving and decision-making;
logical reasoning;
communication;
making connections and recognising common characteristics.

Another feature that language, mathematics and science have in common is that each can be:

either a toolkit that enables us to make sense of and engage with the world; or
an academic discipline – a refined body of knowledge and of ways of thinking, which can be applied to everyday situations but also extended to relate to many possible situations.

For example, the mathematical concept of square can help us both to recognise any square object and to plan a square building before going on to construct it.

Unfortunately, when subject knowledge becomes more abstract and decontextualised, it can appear irrelevant to everyday life and difficult to understand. This can cause frustration to learners of any age, engendering negative attitudes that they carry with them for the rest of their lives. The importance of context is a theme that will be developed further in this part of the unit, as we argue that the term covers much more than just the physical surroundings in which an activity or a communication takes place.

We now turn our attention to the idea of thinking, arguing that symbols are an essential element in developed thought. Although the focus will be more on the thinking patterns of individuals (i.e. ‘what's in your head’), we will not lose sight of the idea that thinking is not an isolated or decontextualised activity. We also develop the idea of ‘making meaning’ and the notion that there is more than one kind of meaning.

An important element of here will be for you to undertake an audit of your own knowledge of language, mathematics and science. This may seem strange, however such audits are aimed partly at exploring the gap between implicit and explicit knowledge, and helping you to articulate some knowledge that you may not have articulated before. If you have encountered Vygotsky's (1978) notion of the Zone of Proximal Development, you will be familiar with the idea that there are always areas of knowledge in which we have some understanding but are not fully confident; and that it is by giving attention to these areas that we extend our knowledge.

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4.1 From awareness to understanding

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

In this section the mathematical content is more obvious as we talk explicitly about what it means to know and to think in mathematics. We will also address your own personal knowledge in the subject.

Like any other activity, doing and learning mathematics involves:

using and adapting existing knowledge;
acquiring and constructing new knowledge through thinking and learning;
building up links that enable known things to be accessed when needed.

Activity 12: Calculations involving addition

0 hours 20 minutes

Do the following calculations. As you do them:

notice how you do them;
think about the knowledge that you are using.

6 + 4 = ?

2 + ? = 10

15 + ? = 10

12 + 5 + 38 + 6 + 17 + 15 + 24 = ?

36.5 + 77.8 + 54.5 + 53.2 = ?

Write a brief description of what you did and how you arrived at your answers.

Answer

10; 8; −5; 117; 222.

Discussion

You may have worked out the calculations in your head, on paper or with the aid of a calculator. You may have done different calculations using different methods; or you may have done one using one method and then have checked it using another. But to do the calculations at all, you needed to use a lot of knowledge, including:

symbol recognition;
number facts, e.g. spotting number pairs that add up to 10;
negative numbers;
decimal number system;
mental strategies;
different ways of writing additions;
how to use a calculator.

You probably also had some sense of what the mathematical operation of addition is all about.

You would have acquired this knowledge and the ability to use it over a number of years. Initially, you would have learnt something about addition by putting two or more sets of objects together to make a bigger set of objects. You would then have extended this understanding to summing whole numbers and making a ‘larger’ number

(e.g. 6 + 4 = 10).

Gradually, you would have learnt number facts that you can now instantly recall. You would also have learnt that subtraction ‘undoes’ (i.e. is the inverse of) addition: although you probably did not understand it in those terms, you learnt how to do it, perhaps by ‘counting back’.

It is likely that, at this stage, you thought that addition ‘makes larger’ and subtraction ‘makes smaller’; but when your knowledge of numbers was extended to include negative numbers, this notion had to be amended or reconstructed.

Learning about fractions and decimals extended your knowledge of addition further as you discovered that it could be applied to all kinds of numbers, and could even be used with ‘letters’ (variables) in algebra.

Along the way, you would have learnt several techniques such as mental strategies, ways of setting out written calculations, and how to extract a calculation from a word problem.

Learning is a gradual process, and consists of a continual building upon and modification of what has gone before. It can be thought of as a ‘See, Experience, Master’ framework (see Mason, 1999):

seeing a concept go by rather quickly, leaving one with only a taste;
experiencing an idea using previously mastered skills;
mastering by using newly acquired skills in different contexts.

The learning process involves an initial awareness, then an experiencing phase of manipulating, making sense, and practising use, before one is able to articulate understanding. Consider what happens when you learn a new word (perhaps you have encountered a few for the first time while doing this unit): first, you struggle with its meaning and pronunciation; then perhaps you start to use it tentatively, gradually gaining understanding and confidence, until it becomes part of your vocabulary.

This framework is fundamentally a psychological one which summarises a view of the process of learning, which is that both the building and modification of knowledge are stimulated by the experiences that come the learner's way. Structures that have already been built by past experiences are brought to bear on any new experience. This may require no significant effort on the part of the learner: it may just involve adding together more complex pairs of numbers as the learner becomes more proficient at addition. On the other hand, the new experience may pose a problem which the existing structures struggle with – for example, when the learner first attempts to add negative numbers. This struggle is what stimulates the growth and change of knowledge. To begin with, this growth and change may be only partial in that it is specific to the problem posed. However, as the learner experiences more and more problems of the same sort, he or she becomes sufficiently able to render modifications to knowledge which are so complete and stable that applying the same kind of thinking to new situations becomes possible.

The labels ‘manipulating’, ‘making sense of’ and ‘articulating’ are an attempt to capture this process. The learner manipulates particular problems – that is, he or she ‘plays around’ with them in an attempt to discover some kind of an answer. After manipulating several examples in a rather similar way, the learner begins to make sense of the general process being used. Eventually, the process is learnt so well that it can be articulated – for example, by explaining it to someone else.

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4.2 Knowing mathematics

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

How much mathematics do you think you know? You may feel that you know quite a lot, or that you are ‘out of practice’ and have forgotten much of it; or perhaps you were never very secure in your mathematical knowledge and feel that you did not achieve complete understanding. Primary teachers are expected to have a confident knowledge of mathematics. You are not expected to reach such a level for this unit, but you do need to know a fair amount. All the mathematics that children go on to do in secondary school has its foundations in work done in the early years. You need to know some facts about numbers, number operations (e.g. addition, subtraction), some measures and simple two- and three-dimensional shapes. You also need to know various mathematical rules, conventions, methods, strategies, procedures and techniques.

Activity 13: Ways of doing calculations

0 hours 50 minutes

Work through all the text and tasks in ‘Calculating’ from Primary Mathematics by Heather Cooke.

Click on the link below to open ‘Calculating’ from Primary Mathematics by Heather Cooke.

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Then make some brief notes on the following:

one mental strategy that you were previously unaware of or had not used before;
one feature of a calculator that you were previously unaware of or had not used before;
something else that you had not previously considered;
any words or terms you were unsure of.

Discussion

Working through the tasks in the mathematics subject book may have made you aware of the many things you know well about calculating. You may also have been alerted to other things of which you had only a passing knowledge or which you did not know at all.

People's attitudes to mathematics affect how well they learn and have confidence in using it. If you are anxious or are recollecting ‘bad feelings’ from school days, you may identify with Fiona, a student on an Open University mathematics course. She writes:

My background in mathematics, prior to starting the course, has been rather a dismal failure. Up until fairly recently, I had always considered myself as being very weak mathematically. I felt that I had a poor grasp of the rules and reasons for doing things in a certain order.
I have, within the last couple of years, realised that my confidence in mathematics was totally undermined when I was at school. My maths teacher informed my parents and myself that he had given up trying to teach me maths. I gained a CSE Grade 4 in my exams which I have felt ashamed of ever since, as the rest of my results were A or B passes at O level.
This performance at school has puzzled me on a number of occasions ever since. I have, for instance, received an apology from the bank when we were overcharged interest on our account. This was after I had insisted on the matter being taken further as the desk clerk had informed me, condescendingly, that the procedure by which interest was worked out was quite complicated. Also, in my work as a Learning Support Assistant, I have found that I can communicate mathematical ideas to children.
Before starting the course, the term ‘mathematics’ meant the study of numbers and usually involves doing something very complicated which has little relevance to real-life situations.
I have been most pleasantly surprised during my study of Unit 1 as it has more or less transformed my feelings about mathematics. It has helped me to develop much more of a feeling for relevance about mathematics, i.e. that mathematics is not about creating numbers and inventing rules, but about studying relationships.

Activity 14: Critical incidents

0 hours 20 minutes

Re-read Fiona's comments (above) and identify any incident(s) that she noted as important in making her feel that she could be successful at mathematics. Can you identify any similar ‘critical incidents’ in your own life? Write a brief outline of these.

Discussion

The apology from the bank seemed to have been an important incident for Fiona, although she also talked briefly about her success in communicating mathematical ideas to children. Perhaps you have had similar success with children and can give a particular example. Perhaps you can think of an incident where you have successfully carried out a piece of mathematics relating to your everyday life, as Fiona did in checking her bank charges.

You may find it helpful to make a note of any such incidents (involving language and science as well as mathematics) as they occur to you.

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4.3 Thinking mathematics

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

‘Thinking mathematically’ is something that everyone does. It involves:

problem-solving and decision-making;
logical reasoning;
communication (including using diagrams, charts, graphs and symbols);
making connections and recognising common characteristics;
using mathematical tools, including calculations and measures.

Much of the mathematical thinking done in everyday life seems to have little connection with the school subject which, for many people, seems to have concentrated on writing out solutions to practice exercises. Yet most adults appear to gain sufficient knowledge, both of facts and know-how, to function reasonably well. Somehow we acquire a general sense of number, measures and shape. We learn mathematical skills (e.g. how to measure) and work out when it is appropriate to use them. For many day-to-day activities, we use estimates and approximations. When we buy apples, we don't need to know the exact number we already have at home; ‘two or three’ is often good enough. We know that a cereal packet is too large to fit into the cupboard, without having to measure the packet or the cupboard. It may be good enough, when trying to determine whether a piece of furniture will fit a space, simply to compare the relative sizes using a piece of string. However, we may have to get out the tape-measure when ordering an item for a particular room. We understand when it is better to overestimate and when to underestimate: better to overestimate the time it takes to get to the bus stop, and to arrive early to catch the bus; but not so good to underestimate the amount of petrol needed to complete a journey! It is often only necessary to do rough-and-ready calculations: when working out whether there is enough cash to buy three items at £3.99, the approximation of ‘3 × £4’ will do.

But what actually happens when we ‘do’ mathematics? In some senses, mathematics only happens ‘mentally’ and what is said or written down is the result of that mental activity. ‘Thinking mathematics’ is subtly different to ‘thinking mathematically’.

Activity 15 Thinking mathematics

0 hours 20 minutes

Do the following exercise mentally. As you do, try to capture the sensation of what you ‘hear’, ‘see’, ‘do’ and ‘feel’:

Imagine a square.
Turn it round.

Describe what happened in words and/or pictures. Do you think that other people would have the same experience?

Now repeat the process with the following two questions:

What is 3 more than 4?
What is 19 less than 27?

Discussion

The following are comments from people who were given the same tasks.

‘I felt uncomfortable – ugh! Subtraction, take away nineteen in my head! Oh! Inspiration, more cheerful – take twenty and add one is eight. Satisfaction.’

Representations like those outlined above can have varying features of:

Context sensitivity: a quality that all images have to some degree; imagining an image of Trafalgar Square when asked to think of a square may be appropriate in some contexts, but perhaps not when considering mathematics.
Ambiguity: an ambiguous representation is one that associates the same form with more than one meaning within the same context.
Precision: the amount of detail in an image may be sufficient for the person conjuring up the image, but may not be enough to convey meaning to someone else. For example, the description ‘one square half black, half white’ may be precise enough for you to recall an image like the one below on the right, but someone else might conceivably imagine the image on the left.
Redundancy: content or meaning can sometimes be recovered from just a fragment of information. Normal spoken and written language has a high level of redundancy: it is often possible to reconstruct sense from a poor telephone connection, or make sense of shorthand such as mlk nd sgr (the vowels omitted from the phrase ‘milk and sugar’). Being able to reconstruct meaning from such compressions is particularly relevant to reading symbolic mathematics: ‘3 + 4 = 7’ is a succinct (low redundancy) symbolic representation from which several meanings can be recovered, depending on the context (e.g. putting three apples with four apples makes a total of seven apples; or starting at three on a number line and moving four in a positive direction arrives at seven).

Activity 15: Stressing and ignoring

0 hours 10 minutes

Do the following task slowly, step by step, trying to capture what changes as your mental image evolves:

Imagine your kitchen.
Where do you keep your spoons?
What sort of spoons do you have?

Discussion

To start with, you may have had a general impression – perhaps the view you get when you have just walked into your kitchen for no particular purpose. The next impression is likely to be more focused on a particular area – perhaps a drawer or a storage pot. Then you would need to conjure up all your spoons – teaspoons, soup spoons, slotted spoons …

In the final two parts of the activity, you were stressing some aspects of your kitchen memory and ignoring others. ‘Stressing and ignoring’ is an important aspect of being able to think. Depending on the context, sometimes it involves being aware of ambiguities (i.e. what is the same, what is different); sometimes it is about having a detailed perception (a high level of precision); and sometimes it is only necessary to consider a fragment.

When asked to work mentally – to imagine, to remember or to think – the brain conjures up various experiences that are representations of sounds, sights, actions and feelings. These are commonly referred to as ‘mental images’, even though not all of them are visual. Mason (2002) comments that a mental image can be such things as:

an awareness of which side of your sink the cutlery can be found;
a fleeting sense of recognition as someone walks past you;
the vivid recollection of a specific incident, complete with pictures, sounds and feelings.

Images can rapidly become abstracted. The word ‘spoon’ may not trigger the mental image of a particular spoon but more a sense of 'spoon-ness’. If asked to describe ‘a kitchen’, you are likely to access various memories of kitchens: you might work from a particularly vivid image of a specific kitchen; or you might find yourself working from a generalised or abstracted image, perhaps composed of fragments of images of many different kitchens. It is helpful, in mathematics, to have access to similarly abstracted or generalised images rather than be confined to images of particular triangles or additions.

People tend to have a preference for the way that they work with their ‘mental screen’: some prefer visual images, some prefer sounds (audio), some go for physical sensations kinaesthetic, and a few think in symbols. Rich mental experiences are those that combine more than one kind of mental image. Having several mental representations of the same mental experience makes it possible to obtain a detailed recollection from a fragment and, having recalled the whole, to stress and ignore different aspects as required. Good mathematical thinkers tend to be those who have developed a bank of rich mental images they can call upon when tackling a problem.

Activity 16: Noticing patterns

0 hours 20 minutes

This is a mainly practical activity, asking you to notice the way that your brain works. Work through the attached tasks from Primary Mathematics by Heather Cooke.

Click on the link below to open 'Number and algebra' from Primary Mathematics by Heather Cooke.

View document

Discussion

You may have been surprised to see that the chapter was called ‘Number and algebra’; it goes on to show how seeing and expressing patterns in various ways is a route into understanding algebraic ideas. You will do further work on this towards the end of the unit.

The tasks that you completed for this activity involved seeking out and using visual patterns. Young children are also good at detecting generalisations, both visual and behavioural.

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4.4 Summary

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

In this section, you have had the opportunity to work on some mathematical activities yourself. This should have enabled you to:

reflect on how you approach mathematics and what helps you to work on a piece of mathematics;
remind yourself of those pieces of mathematics that you can work at successfully;
identify aspects of mathematics that you can strengthen as you work through the later blocks of this unit;
get an idea of what is involved in knowing mathematics, including accessing your ‘mental screen’.

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5.1 Introduction to the social construction of scientific knowledge

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

This section explores how scientific knowledge and scientific literacy can be built up through working in communities of practice (groups of people who work together and share a common language). We also look at issues relating to the ideas of subjectivity and objectivity, and at deductive and inductive thinking. Finally, we explore the public understanding of science by examining how society, in wider terms, constructs or influences scientific thinking and understanding.

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5.2 Scientists as a community of practice

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

Science has been described as involving observation, description, categorisation, investigation, experimentation and formation of theoretical explanations for naturally occurring phenomena – activities performed by scientists using scientific methods.

Jacob Bronowski (1973) said, ‘That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer’ – an apt way to put it, as with science, we set off from a starting point of curiosity and incomprehension about some aspect of everyday life, which may involve asking simple (even stupid) questions. Why is the sky blue? Why are tulips red? Why aren't all tulips red? Why does my dog bark but blackbirds sing? These are some of the ‘impertinent’ questions for which science is expected to provide ‘pertinent’ answers.

Activity 17: Science in the media

0 hours 10 minutes

Popular opinion suggests that everyone knows what science is about. There is plenty of evidence in the media: this or that product has been ‘scientifically developed’, or such and such political strategy is firmly ‘based on the scientific evidence’. But what exactly is science?

Make a short list of the things you have seen, heard or read recently which mention or involve science. Then put a tick against each item on your list if you think that you fully understand the scientific principles on which it is based.

Discussion

Very likely, your list includes items relating to:

aspects of the natural world, such as climate change or pollution;
everyday concerns, such as food or health care;
the social consequences of medical issues such as euthanasia, cloning and abortion;
technologies, such as cars, petrol and oil usage, or computers.

Whatever your list looked like, we hope you can see that the scientific world is wide-ranging, reaching right into our lives. Science impacts on almost everything we do, every day of our lives. Our very understanding of ourselves, how our bodies work, our place in the environment depends on scientific explanations: ‘Science is valuable because it meshes with all our lives’ (Professor Susan Greenfield, in DfEE/QCA, 1999b).

It is crucial, therefore, that as an early years practitioner you understand underlying scientific principles, that you are scientifically literate and can make informed scientific judgements.

Because science is such an essential part of daily life, it seems obvious that we need to understand what it is all about. Each day we are called upon to make scientifically based decisions: what to eat, what technologies to use or discard, what the consequences of our behaviours may be, environmentally or socially; indeed which way to vote on political issues that may have scientific repercussions.

Earlier discussion in this block referred to an identifiable group of people called scientists who seem to speak a distinct form of language called ‘scientific language’. Scientists form a community of practice with its own distinctive style of communication. Our ability to interpret their language is what we refer to when we speak of ‘scientific literacy’. If we understand that language, we can fully participate in scientific debates; if we don't, then we are disenfranchised.

Activity 18: Ozone holes!

0 hours 20 minutes

You may have read/heard in the media about the increasing number and size of the holes in earth's ozone layers. Briefly (and without reading beyond this paragraph!), write down what you understand to be (a) the causes and (b) the consequences of these holes in the sky.

When you have completed (a) and (b), read through the account below, which is about the effects of CFCs on the atmosphere. What differences do you notice between the language you used and the language of the author of this text?

Over the last two or three decades, human activity has contributed significantly to the amount of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere. When CFCs break down into simpler chemical products, they create a hole in the stratosphere – a phenomenon known as the ‘polar vortex’, because it occurs at the polar regions as a result of an interplay between the breakdown products of CFCs and the weather conditions prevailing at the poles. If the mix is just right, then the holes get bigger (by a process of ‘photo-dissociation’, i.e. they are split by sunlight). There are now holes over both poles, and scientists think that most of the damage is due to human activities contributing large quantities of deleterious chemicals into the atmosphere.
The full implications of these losses for the planet and its ability to support life are still under serious investigation. Holes in the earth's ozone layer are dangerous because they let in a lot more ultraviolet (UV) light, whose rays are harmful to humans. Other plants and animals may be affected – in particular, their genes – and the consequences of these changes are not yet fully understood.

Discussion

This exercise may have highlighted strengths and gaps in your scientific knowledge. You may not, for example, have understood completely how the holes were formed, even though you may know that it has something to do with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) emanating from refrigerators and aerosols. It may be that you have heard the phrase but never really thought about what it actually means.

Your own account of the problem probably did not include such language as polar vortex and photo-dissociation. You may nonetheless have found it possible to follow the ‘scientific’ account as it gives some degree of explanation for the lay reader. On the other hand, a scientific paper which used similar terms without explanation would be a much more difficult proposition.

It is possible for us to recognise scientists by the code that they speak, which we identify as the language of science. Our ability to interpret this language is governed by our own scientific confidence, based on our knowledge of scientific methods and its paradigms. Science is a socially embedded practice, both because it is developed by the community of scientists, but also because the respect accorded to science is something that arises from wider society, which has traditionally considered scientific knowledge to be factual, real and ‘truthful’.

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5.3 Objectivity and subjectivity, induction and deduction

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

The purposes of scientific enquiry are to describe, explain, predict and control (Reaves, 1992). Through scientific training, natural curiosity is developed into objective, empirical (experience-based) study involving observations and controlled experiments which constitute the methods of scientific enquiry that lead to scientific knowledge.

Activity 19: What do you know?

0 hours 20 minutes

First, think of something that you know about subjectively – for example, the town in which you live or a particular piece of music.

Then compare this to something that you know objectively – for example, the boiling point of water or who the prime minister is.

Make a list of the main similarities and differences between your objective and subjective knowledge.

Discussion

You have probably been able to think of quite a long list of differences and very few similarities. Your differences may well focus on the notions of measurements and taking account of factual or verifiable observations. For example, you may know that water usually boils at 100 degrees Celsius because it is possible to test this experimentally and see that a thermometer registers 100 degrees once the water starts bubbling vigorously. Such objective knowledge would be described as reliable, replicable and generalisable: water is expected, under ‘normal’ conditions, to boil at this temperature, no matter who performs the test or how often the test is repeated. You probably know who the prime minister is because you remember the news the day after the election. In this instance, your ‘observation’ would be supported by the observations of millions of others.

On the other hand, subjective knowledge is more situated, particular and idiosyncratic: you may know certain parts of your town well, but you would not expect everybody to ‘see them in the same way’; you do not expect others to conform to your view even though some may. You may say that your subjective knowledge is valid but you do not expect to have it replicated or to be able to make generalisations from this understanding and position. Reaves (1992) gives the idea of honesty as an example of subjective knowledge. Most people would agree that honesty is all about integrity, fairness and morality; but how is it possible to measure, objectively, someone's level of honesty to show that one person is ‘more honest’ than another?

In practice, everything we know is a construct of the senses. We perceive the world around us and, through our senses, we construct meaning – a process that will always involve an element of subjectivity. Scientific method adheres to an objectivity paradigm because it wants to eliminate biases and idiosyncratic ideas from its body of knowledge. Therefore, all observations must be made more than once; they must usually be made using instruments rather than just the human senses; and, if possible, they should be made under various test conditions to see that the same reliable answers come up every time, thus ensuring scientific reliability.

Throughout this block we have argued that science is a particular way of knowing and speaking about the world; one way to find out what constitutes science, therefore, might be to investigate what scientists do and how they do it in order to create this particular way of knowing (Reaves, 1992):

The scientist postulates nothing of the world beyond sense [because] it is impossible to know what there is behind sense-impression, if indeed there ‘be’ anything.
(Pearson, 1900, pp. 179–81)

This is not the place to enter into philosophical debate about what ‘there “be”’ in the real world or, indeed, if anything exists outside human perception. For the moment, we must be satisfied that all empirical evidence comes to us through the senses and thus what ‘there “be”’ is real because we perceive it to be so. This, however, is one of the major stumbling blocks of scientific enquiry. Science demands objectivity and yet, paradoxically, all scientists use their subjective perceptions to perform their scientific work. Science must be objectively distanced from its object of enquiry so that its empirical measurements are robust enough to be considered valid and to form a scientific epistemology, or body of knowledge; but all scientists have fallible perceptions. Scientists overcome this problem through two methodological steps – inductive and deductive enquiry.

The inductive approach to science begins with an observation, then multiple observations enable scientists to make generalised statements. If there are enough supporting general statements then a universal statement, or law, can be postulated (a law is an explanatory theory that enables us to predict what will happen next).

Let's look at an example of inductive theorising. You see the sun rise one morning – this is a singular observation. You continue to observe the sun rise each morning, so you can now make a generalisable statement about sunrises. You still do not know under what conditions the sun will rise but, if you take a holiday in another part of the world, you can see that the sun rises in most places at intervals of roughly twenty-four hours – although at the poles, during the arctic winter, it may not rise at all. Now a universal statement, or law, can be made which develops a rationale that accounts for the sun rising each day over your home and in many other parts of the world, but for it not rising on a daily basis in all parts of the world. You now have a theory!

From this theory you can now reason when and in what direction the sun will rise tomorrow. This is deduced from theory alone – you no longer have to travel around the world observing the phenomenon. Deductive reasoning is logical and rational, and, because of this scientific knowledge, is deemed to be legitimate and robust – powerful even. Deductions are tested experimentally, adding further observations; but if the predictions are incorrect, then the theory will have been falsified and you will have to think again. This is how science operates. It is not a neat, linear, step-by-step acquisition of truthful, legitimate knowledge. Rather, it is more a case of one line of thinking being accepted by a significant number of people (achieving a consensus); then suddenly some part is falsified and everyone must start again, trying to discover an explanation that better fits the known facts. For example, according to popular legend, everyone once ‘knew’ that the world was flat and that ships would fall off if they sailed too close to the edge. We now know that the world is spherical and you won't fall off because gravity holds you to the planet's surface.

Although science appears to progress through small, incremental stages, it in fact goes through series of ‘revolutions’ interspersed by longish periods of ‘normal’ science (Kuhn, 1970). These revolutions are characterised by the abandonment of one previously long-held and cherished set of theories (the earth is flat), which is replaced by another, often contradictory set of theories that better fit the new facts (the earth is round). These protracted stages are important sociologically because the knowledge deemed acceptable is less to do with facts and evidence and more to do with what society allows to be investigated and openly discussed.

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5.4 A brief history of scientific revolutions

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We now go on to look at the history and traditions of scientific discovery. As an early years practitioner, you will find this survey useful in helping you to challenge the prevailing perception of science as ‘absolute truth’.

What we call science was once regarded as ‘magic’, ‘alchemy’ or ‘conjuring’. Such knowledge was viewed as ‘black magic’ and feared as a satanic art (Woolley, 2002). In part this may have been because, in the Middle Ages, scientific ideas were emanating from the Arab world: Christian Europe saw such ‘heathen’ knowledge as ‘evil’ and therefore to be discredited and feared. But these early activities gave rise to major scientific discoveries: for now we will focus on just one – the organisation of the planets in our solar system.

Some 2,000 years before the birth of Christ, the ancients were using arithmetic to solve problems. The ancient Greeks (c. 585 BC), in particular, were well-versed in astronomy: Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610–546 BC) postulated that the earth was shaped like a cylinder and the sun was twenty-seven times larger than the earth; Aristotle (384–322 BC) and, later, Ptolemy (c. AD 85–165) both believed that the earth was at the centre of the universe and that the sun revolved around the earth (Russell, 2000). Then came Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton – four giants of scientific discovery, on whose work much of modern science is based.

Living and working in Poland, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) was the first to publish a treatise on the heliocentric universe (i.e. as sun-centred, with the earth and other planets travelling around it in a perfect circular motion). However, Copernicus was a cautious man: he knew that the church would have him tortured and executed for heresy for his ideas, so he instructed his assistant, Rheticus, to publish his treatise only when he was on his death-bed. But why was this heliocentric view of the universe so contentious?

If you look at the sky, what do you see? The sun rises in the east, travels across the sky and sinks in the west. To the senses, it looks as though the earth is standing still while the sun moves around it. This is what Aristotle and Ptolemy saw, and certainly it was what the early Christians saw and believed. Their perception was strengthened by an interpretation of the Bible which depicted the earth in the middle and the heavens above, perfectly fixed by God who lived there while he governed his mechanical universe (see Figure 1). This geocentric (earth-centred) view of the world was theologically, socially and politically obligatory at this time; to challenge it was to risk death.

Figure 1 The clock, Exeter Cathedral (c. 1485): the sun, represented as a fleur-de-lis, and the moon revolve around the earth

Long description

In Florence, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) read Copernicus's work and set about using a new invention, the telescope, to view the ‘heavens’. He saw that Copernicus's heretical heliocentric theory actually made sense. In 1638, Galileo wrote about ‘this universe, which I with my astonishing observations and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred, nay, a thousandfold beyond the limits commonly seen by wise men of all centuries past…’ (Sobel, 2000, p. 371). His telescopic observations, which enabled him to confirm Copernicus's premise, is an example of what Kuhn (1970) describes as a ‘paradigm shift’, from an old-normal science (geocentricism), through a revolution, to a new-normal science (heliocentricism).

In 1616, the Pope sent an ‘inquisitor’ to reprimand Galileo and warn him to suspend his activities immediately. Galileo realised what could happen if he crossed the Pope and wisely retracted his theory, saying that the movements of the heavens were exactly as described in the biblical Psalms. However, he continued to make his telescopic observations and, when the political climate improved with a change of Pope, he published his new work.

In Prague, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), astronomer to Emperor Rudolf II, read Galileo's work and was able to confirm it. He did so without fear of execution because, in Prague, supreme political power lay with the Bohemian emperor and not the church. Kepler refined Galileo's observations by showing that the planetary movements were not perfectly circular but, rather, were elliptical.

However, Kepler's work presented some problems. From Poland, England, Prague or anywhere else in Europe at this time, if you looked unaided at the sky, you could not see anything that proved the heliocentric view of the universe – it was a counter-intuitive theory. The other huge obstacle to its acceptance was that if the earth was moving rapidly through the heavens – as it must surely do if it was travelling around the sun and spinning on its own axis each day – then why did things fall straight down when they were dropped from a great height? The problem was resolved by the work of Isaac Newton (1643–1727).

Newton formulated his theory of gravity (or ‘law of universal gravitation’) while studying theology at university: illness had interrupted his studies, and he had begun to dabble in science. Newton is known today as ‘the father of scientific method’ because he developed the concept of the controlled experiment for testing or falsifying hypotheses: all modern science is based on this methodology. A controlled experiment is one in which a ‘control condition’ is compared to another, the ‘experimental condition’, where one variable has been changed. Newton performed a simple experiment to show that a stone, dropped from a height, would fall straight downwards and not land at an angle: from this and other work, he was able to formulate his theory of gravity. (The story about apples falling on his head is almost certainly untrue, although it was told by Newton himself.)

But problems remained. The number of known planets was increasing and their orbits appeared, generally, to go along with Newton's predictions – but not with complete accuracy as there were seemed to be some small variations in the elliptical orbits. A couple of centuries after Newton, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was able to solve these problems with his theory of relativity, bringing about another scientific revolution and generating much excitement in the newspapers of the day! The London Times headline of 7 November 1919 reported: ‘Revolution in science – new theory of the universe – Newtonian ideas overthrown’ (O'Connor and Robertson, 1997).

Einstein's theory of relativity asks us to think of time and space as aspects of the ‘same thing’. We used to think, and our senses continue to tell us, that space is experienced directly and can be measured in three dimensions – height, length and width – while time is altogether another sort of thing that is experienced through our memories and measured with clocks. However, according to Einstein – and this was the big paradigm shift or revolution – time and space are on the same continuum and are relative to each other. Falsifying Einstein's theory is what scientists are grappling with today (Chalmers, 1978).

Table 1: A summary of the changes in human understanding of the universe

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5.5 How society constructs scientific thinking

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To understand science, it is important that we appreciate the contexts in which discoveries are made or suppressed. We can see from the account on the previous page that human understanding of the universe has changed significantly over time. The social and political climate in which scientists work has always had a profound influence on what can and cannot be said, done, published or even postulated as worthy of further investigation. (You could undertake a similar study of the debates on human cloning.) The great traditions of science have moved in parallel with the world's social changes. Scientists, like everyone else, do not exist in a social vacuum: like Copernicus and Galileo, they may find themselves working at a time when their ideas are viewed by society as heresy. Religion, philosophy and politics all play major roles in scientific discoveries.

The above history also shows the way that scientific knowledge moves from the situated learning of the individual, gazing up at the sky and wondering how it might work, through to a community of practice, in which accepted methods are used and theories are deemed legitimate by consensus, then shared among other professionals whose role it is to verify such knowledge. Building on the work of scientist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi (1962), Frade (2003) explains this process as leading the individual to transcend their own situated subjectivity and give way to a public (and thus objective) way of knowing. What this means is that we need to take account of the social demands and ‘enculturation’ that shape each scientist and their discoveries, and to recognise these as having a profound effect upon the formation of the knowledge moulded within each tradition. It is acceptable today to say that the sun is one of many stars in the universe, is about 4,500 million years old and approximately 333,400 times bigger than the earth (SSS, 2004), because no one will be burnt at the stake for saying such things!

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5.6 Public understanding and perception of science

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Everyday reality presents itself not just through the senses but intersubjectively (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) – that is, we form meanings about the world because we talk to others about what we perceive. Scientific knowledge is also formed intersubjectively through being shared within a community of scientists – a community of practice which stipulates what constitutes legitimate scientific knowledge, and validates the epistemological assumptions made by its own traditions.

Science's success rests on its ability to speak to the public about the real world in terms that do not always readily correspond to commonsense views but which, nevertheless, must be made intelligible. Unfortunately, this can make the language of science inaccessible to many people when, to be well informed on subjects that affect their futures, they need to understand it. Arguments always return to the truth of the claims being made, which are often reduced to absolutes by the popular media. Since science cannot prove anything – it can only falsify – it never claims to be the absolute truth. It can only put forward the explanation which is most likely, given the evidence.

Such relativism may make us uncomfortable: often we allow our perceptions to become judgements, in contradiction to scientific principles. And when our everyday knowledge is confronted by an alternative reality, we are inclined to believe our senses rather than the usually more difficult scientific explanations for the alternative. This is why we may find it so difficult to grasp the idea that space and time are the same.

Activity 20: Sunrise

0 hours 20 minutes

Will the sun rise tomorrow?

Write a brief account explaining the reasoning behind your response to this question.

Discussion

The answer has to be yes, it probably will. However, the reasoning is more complex and predicated upon relativism and subjectivity. You may want to reflect on how you might explain your answer to children, since it cannot be said that the sun will rise for everyone everywhere on the planet. And where is the sun on a rainy day?

This kind of dialogue may help young, imaginative and observant minds to engage with the language of science, as well as challenging your own perceptions of life.

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5.7 Summary

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

This section of the unit has made you aware that:

science is formed by a community of practice, creating knowledge and requiring a special language for its communication;
there is a difference between objective scientific methods and subjective ways of knowing;
political power influences scientific discoveries, and scientific knowledge is always socially embedded;
public understanding and perception of science have moved away from the individual to the formalised presentation of science.

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6.1 Knowledge and society

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If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Sir Isaac Newton (Letter to Robert Hooke, 1676)

At the foreground of this final part of the unit is one of its more important themes – that knowledge is something held, developed and perpetuated both by and in the context of communities, societies and cultures. Newton's declaration to Hooke (above) supports this view of knowledge, in its acknowledgement of his debt to the many other scientists from whom he learnt and on whose work he built.

Scientific knowledge arises out of a community of scientists. This is not just a matter of adding new knowledge to old; scientists have developed ways of thinking and investigating which have provided them with the intellectual tools for making discoveries and extending knowledge. Present in scientists’ intellectual toolkit are such implements as:

deductive and inductive reasoning;
the principle of objectivity;
procedures for formulating and testing hypotheses;
identifying and controlling variables.

A human grouping based on particular forms of shared knowledge may be called a culture, and the kinds of intellectual supports listed above may be known as cultural tools. Mathematical cultural tools range from counting and tallying to geometry, algebra, calculus and beyond. Linguistic cultural tools include both spoken language and literacy. Within these two categories, we find familiar ways of talking, listening, reading and writing – in the form of reference books, novels, speeches or classroom ‘storytimes’ – as well as an understanding of the meaning of variation, the rules of group discussion, argument and debate. The grid pattern, laptop computer, curriculum documents, and the ‘professional’ language that enables practitioners to carry out their work in early years education, were all cultural tools. The list of language-based cultural tools seems endless, since language can be a medium for countless ways of thinking and interacting in many other knowledge frameworks.

Activity 21: Using different tools

0 hours 20 minutes

Look at the cartoon from Wragg (2004, p. 125) below, which first appeared in the Times Educational Supplement. What cultural tools and cultural knowledge do you use to make sense of it?

Discussion

Both the language and the use of stylised drawing to convey information are cultural tools. Another is this particular way of conveying a (very) short story through a single image, accompanied by a line of text. We recognise the characters as ‘cavemen’, possibly from television documentaries or school history (where we may also have learnt about cave paintings or drawings). However, more likely (especially when they are depicted in this form) we recognise them from such cultural products as Stig of the Dump or The Flintstones.

We also recognise more modern cultural or social constructions, such as the use of mass production techniques and the status of one member who is obviously ‘the boss’. Part of the cartoon's humour is derived from the way that people who are obviously from a prehistoric culture are apparently acting as though they were from a modern culture.

The cartoon's original audience, school teachers, will have felt its resonance with their own contemporary culture, where it is ‘correct thoughts’ rather than original ideas that are recognised and rewarded.

The socio-cultural perspective we are developing throughout our discussion has profound implications for early years practitioners as educators. It implies that, to understand the ways in which we learn and construct knowledge, we must be aware of how knowledge and learning are socially and culturally constructed. Of course, our socio-culturally constructed view of what education is influences the way in which schools and other educational settings operate, and this in turn influences our view of what learning and knowledge are.

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6.2 Shaping knowledge

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It seems inevitable that any understandings we have will have been shaped and influenced by other (past and present) members of the same culture(s) we belong to. Most of these influences ‘just happen’: they arise out of our experiences as part of a culture whose members have had their experiences and shared them over many centuries. However, knowledge can also be deliberately influenced by powerful elements within a society: as we saw in Section 5.3, the church suppressed Galileo's reasoned interpretation of the movement of the planets, while as recently as 1925 an American biology teacher was put on trial for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution (Larson, 1998). Political authorities can also impose their own versions of the truth: up until the end of the 1980s it was widely believed in Albania that the country had the highest standard of living in Europe, when in fact it had the lowest (Hamilton, 1992).

Another, less sinister example of the deliberate shaping of knowledge may be found in the academic sphere. The conceptual toolkits represented by everyday use of subject knowledge have, over the centuries, been refined and developed for their own sake. For example, according to the Greek historian, Herodotus, geometry originated in ancient Egypt for the purpose of measuring and marking out fields after the annual flooding of the Nile Valley (Boyer and Merzbach, 1989). The principles of this practical activity were then developed in an abstract way by later mathematicians such as Euclid and Pythagoras. Thus geometry became a free-standing academic discipline, a body of knowledge with an internal consistency which could apply in many situations, even those that had not yet been conceived – it enabled the development of later applications such as accurate navigation.

One of the goals of science has been to develop knowledge in a form that is unbiased and which has not been influenced by, on the one hand, powerful authorities and, on the other, possibly erroneous popular beliefs. The resulting body of scientific knowledge may appear to exist independently of contexts and knowers. In reality, however, scientific objectivity is achieved, so far as it is achievable, by sharing knowledge widely through a scientific community of practice, in which it can be tested and evaluated to ensure that it is compatible with other knowledge held by the community. Far from being independent of knowers, objective knowledge is in fact dependent on the acceptance of a large number of knowers (Polanyi, 1962). Any academic discipline can be seen as a culture, with its own accepted practices and specialised ways of using language. Within this paradigm, subject learning is a process of enculturation (Brown et al., 1989) – that is, of learning to behave as a competent member of the culture.

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6.3 Meaning in action and interaction

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Earlier in this unit you considered the importance of manipulating and articulating information in order to understand it. This kind of behaviour is at the heart of constructivist and social-constructivist theory. The idea that we learn and understand what we are able to organise and make sense of is not just a theoretical viewpoint, as the next Activity demonstrates.

Activity 22: Knowledge and information

0 hours 10 minutes

Think about a time when you have needed to learn a lot of information, perhaps for some kind of test or examination. How easy did you find this? What strategies did you use to help you succeed? Write a short description of your reflections.

Discussion

Probably the least successful method is simply to read through the information to be tested. More effective strategies include:

turning notes into diagrams;
reducing information to lists of ‘prompt’ words;
rearranging sets of key words to produce mnemonics;
various methods involving word association and visualisation.

Brown and Duguid (2000) make a distinction between information (a self-contained object) and knowledge. Knowledge ‘entails a knower’ and ‘the knower's understanding and some degree of commitment’ (Brown and Duguid, 2000, pp. 119, 120). The feature that these approaches have in common is that they involve an active engagement which turns information into knowledge.

Experience tells us that information which we do not engage with ‘goes in one ear and out the other’. Learning, then, is not a matter of receiving meaning; rather, it is a matter of making meaning. It is easy to think of situations where we explore and develop knowledge individually: we might walkthrough the streets of a strange town and begin to memorise certain routes, or we might solve a crossword or learn how to play a computer game. However, although we may do these actions individually, all of them have a socio-cultural component. When we explore streets, for example, we use knowledge about how towns are typically laid out, which we have learnt from maps, at school and from other towns.

Getting to know a town provides different depths of knowledge. Certain journeys – the route to your workplace, perhaps – you could draw as a map without difficulty; but other trips you might be less clear about, although you could make them without getting lost. In making these journeys, you have to pay more heed to landmarks and signs and be more conscious of making decisions as you go. You might not be able to claim to have all the knowledge ‘in your head’ – you have to share it with the urban landscape with which you are interacting. It is not, therefore, a question of bringing your knowledge to a context: rather, the knowledge comes into its full existence only in the interaction between individual cognition and context.

This idea, usually referred to as situated cognition (Roth, 1999), is not simply a matter of understanding individual cognition within a social and physical context. In Roth's view, ‘thinking seems to lie in the relationship between individual and the environment’ (Roth, 1999, p. 15), and he defines ‘environment’ very widely to include culture, history and the individual's prior beliefs. Brown et al. (1989) argue that since knowledge arises out of particular activities that cannot produce universal, equivalent (context-free) meanings, no knowledge can properly be considered outside of its context.

A key concept in this social constructivist view of knowing is interaction. In Vygotsky's (1978) view, learning is a product of the interplay between nature and history, biology and culture, the lone intellect and society. Up to now we have concentrated on the individual's interaction with wider social and cultural factors, but of course social interaction includes exchanges between pairs and among groups of people. In Vygotsky's terms, we develop what our individual senses tell us through our interactions with other individuals and groups. We do this by constructing psychological representations or developing new forms of behaviour. We learn and know through interactions with fellow learners and with those who know more than we do. In getting to know unfamiliar streets, for example, we might ask directions of a longstanding resident. Alternatively, we could share the journey with another relative newcomer to the area, with whom we can pool key knowledge (e.g. the way to the main street or the river) and thereby construct the necessary understanding.

It follows from this, then, that schools and other educational settings – which are places where interactions are intended to shape developing knowledge – are of crucial importance in the development of both the individual and society. Throughout this unit we have argued that learning is not a matter of receiving meaning but of making meaning, and we make these meanings through the interaction between what our senses tell us and what we already know. Our familiarity with language, mathematics and science presents us with a choice of ways of making meaning. In the view of the course team, then, knowledge is far from being something fixed and static on the page of a book; rather, it is something that cannot exist independently of a knower and the act of knowing. And if knowledge is something that is always created anew in activity, then learning is something that never ends (Brown et al., 1989).

It is, therefore, very difficult to distinguish between learning and knowing. Commonly, however, the earliest stages of knowing are thought of as learning, and it is to young children's attempts at making meaning from their experience of the world.

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Next steps

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References

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

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Acknowledgements

The Open University — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:31:02 GMT

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Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources:

Figures

Figure 1 Postcard from Exeter cathedral, Pitkin Unichrome Ltd;

Activity 21 Cartoon: Wragg, T. (2004) Education, Education, Education: the best bits of Ted Wragg, Routledge Falmer. Copyright Ted Wragg.

Unit Image

Adapted from Carf: www.flickr.com/ photos/ beija-flor/ 289045307/ [Details correct as of 18th April 2007]

All other materials included in this unit are derived from content originated at the Open University.

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