week 3 2009

1. week 32009

2. good teaching: building the base • images • how have yours developed • cultural view of teaching limited to the visible • the foundation • shared knowledge, skills, attitudes, values • mistaken emphasis on uniqueness of good teaching • one’s “own” philosophy

3. I wrote to you in 2005, to update you on my new job. I was offered a position to teach in the Structured Early Childhood Program in Lombard, IL. It was a brand new program, which my team and I created to provide specific and individualized educational services to preschoolers on the Autism Spectrum. It was an amazing program, which I was very proud of and loved working in! After 2 years of teaching there, I was presented with the opportunity to move to South Africa to teach! And I took it! Since 2007, I have been living in Cape Town, South Africa working as a Special Education Needs Coordinator or SENCO. Because inclusion and special education is a fairly new concept here, it was a significant challenge for me professionally and personally. At present, I head the special needs department for a mainstream primary and pre-primary private school, which serves about 400 children. My roles have been quite administrative, which has been excellent experience for me, however, as a true teacher at heart, I have made an extra effort to work with the children as much as possible! I have also been volunteering regularly at a government school in the area. I have set up a pen-pal/exchange program with Kleinberg primary school in Ocean View, SA and Nancy Young School in Naperville, IL. Nancy Young has helped to refurbish their library and has shipped over hundreds of pounds of materials to help the school best educate its pupils. This has been an amazing experience and has provided me with an entirely different perspective on education in South Africa. I consider myself very blessed have the chance to work with such amazing educators and children. Recently, I have been offered the unique opportunity of starting one of the first inclusive special education programs in the Western Cape. I will be working with children who have disabilities varying from autism and Down's syndrome to mental retardation. It will be quite a challenge, but I am up for it and am excited to see such a phenomenal shift in education happening in the school I work in! Katie Elmen, 04

4. D 4: failing to reason or understand? • compatibility and incompatibility • class and subclass problem • how do McGarrigle's tasks differ from Piaget's? implications? • "In any event, the questions the children were answering were frequently not the questions the experimenter had asked." (46)

5. D 4: failing to reason or understand? • compatibility and incompatibility • class and subclass problem • how do McGarrigle's tasks differ from Piaget's? implications? • "In any event, the questions the children were answering were frequently not the questions the experimenter had asked." (46)

6. D 5: what is and what must be • inference • implications of Cole's experiment (50) • impossible to take account of this evidence and at the same time to maintain that children under 6 or 7 incapable of reasoning deductively. If sometimes they do not appear to reason deductively, look more closely. If we can observe them reasoning spontaneously, we must ask why. (52-53) • if and if and only if • conclusions on 55 & 56

7. Jean Piaget (1896-1980) www.piaget.org/biography/biog.html • began as a zoologist • worked in Binet’s lab in Paris, fascinated by kids’ incorrect answers • first writings 1920’s, becomes known in US 1960’s • “patron saint” of ECE • seen as supporting core ECE belief: young children think etc differently from older children and adults • view of young children’s cognitive and other limitations supports dominant ECE view of early schooling

8. Piagetian theory in US: middle Piaget • In 1970s (late Piaget) Piaget rejected much of middle Piaget • American Piagetians ignore late Piaget • refused to make explicit educational recommendations, allowing many “translators” to emerge • meticulous observer of young children • liberated developmentalism in US from behaviorism and psycho-dynamic theory

9. Piagetian theory complex—few people who claim to be Piagetians actually read him • warm, appealing, handsome person—grandfatherly • Piagetian tasks amazingly stable • if you give a child a Piagetian task, she will perform exactly the way the Piaget predicted

10. Donaldson (20 years after Children’s Minds) • Piaget chooses to ignore our ordinary, rich “lived experience.” He does not take this to be any part of his concern as a psychologist, and sometimes he treats with scorn the very idea of studying it. . . . The question is whether Piaget's epistemic subject is so shorn of the essentials of human functioning—even of human cognitive functioning—that the theory is quite inadequate. I have come to believe that this is so. (1996, p. 326)