CULTIVATING KNOWLEDGE EARLY

Learning should cultivate knowledge and skills, as well as language development. Children who have a broad base of experience are likely to move more rapidly in acquiring complex skills. So why have we somehow overlooked the importance of building knowledge in early childhood?

Early reading and knowledge plays a big role in learning, and when there is a hindrance to this, there is a halt in progress and innovative thinking. The skills necessary to learn how to read is one reason for the limited attention given to the important role of knowledge in early literacy development.

According to a recent reports (McCardle and Chhabra, 2004), children’s future success in becoming skilled readers is dependent on their becoming aware that spoken words are composed of smaller elements of speech, grasping the idea that letters represent these sounds, learning the many system correspondences between sounds and spellings, and acquiring a repertoire of highly familiar words that can be recognized on sight. Much of the research (National Reading Panel Report, 2000), in fact, substantiates the importance of these components in learning to read.

However, environmental factors are not included in the research, including material resources and the quality of the home environment that play a central role in learning to read. These factors actually contribute to background knowledge and concepts, vocabulary, familiarity with syntactic and semantic sentences, and verbal reasoning abilities.

Another reason for not recognizing the importance of knowledge in early childhood could be definitional: the terms knowledge, skills, and dispositions may be familiar to most early childhood educators, but have not been defined. Because of this, there is lack of clarity and understanding about the scope and depth of content knowledge in these early years.

One other reason for overlooking the importance of knowledge in early childhood might be ideological, according to studies. The field of early childhood still grapples over the balance between learning processes (i.e., thinking skills), or how children learn, and content, or what they learn (Eisner and Vallance, 1974). Young children in high poverty areas are subjected to intellectually trivial activities, limited in content and only loosely connected between subjects. They don’t have any regular experiences in topics of math, language, and science.

For early education to work toward helping children attain social and economic equality, there is a need to develop learning experiences that work on the edge of children’s competencies and understandings: a pedagogy that is both sensitive to children’s development and representative of conceptual knowledge that has sufficient coherence and depth.

— oOo— The author is Teacher II at Masantol High School