Teacher Preparation Pedagogy, Child Study Approach

The child study approach to education applies philosophical views about the nature of person-hood and human experience to the educational process. This entry reviews traditional, psychological, and phenomenological perspectives on the individual as they apply to learning and make the person as a child and the child as a learner the center of the teacher education enterprise.

The origins in Western culture of the ideas about individuals, usually children, and learning that form the basis of the child study approach to education go back at least to the Enlightenment and even to the Renaissance—to times when individuals and their inner experience, inner life, and individual conscience began to matter. Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to take two Enlightenment thinkers, both made room for the interests and ...