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 personality of the individual in their thinking about education, though in different ways. Differences emerged in part because of different ideas about the relationship of the individual to the society in which the individual was immersed, but the idea of knowing the individual as an essential part of teaching and learning had its roots there.

Following on these philosophical ideas about the importance of individuality came early educators who began to enact them. Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel were two European educators who made room for valuing and knowing the interests and thinking of their students as a part of education, and who began to consider and put into practice an education built on this kind of knowledge. Froebel wrote about the idea that what we can put into a child is already known, but what can come out of the child is not yet known. Later, these ideas were more fully developed by Maria Montessori in her schools and method.

In the modern world of education, contrasting views on the value of individual interests and thinking of the individual lead to different ideas about education. The traditional view, as John Dewey names it in Experience and Education, gives priority to the subject matter to be learned and sees the role of the learner as passive and receptive. The developmental psychology of Jean Piaget sees the learner as moving through stages of intellectual and emotional development. Here the developmental stage is given priority and determines the kind of subject matter or activity appropriate for each stage. The phenomenological view sees the individual learner as having unique interests and ways of thinking, and these are given priority. From this perspective, the role of adults working with children is to make these interests and ways of thought manifest and explicit through ongoing and disciplined observing and describing so that the child's education may be built upon or made consonant with them.

The psychological view when translated into child study pedagogy focuses on child development. This version of the child study approach asks that the person doing the study be fully knowledgeable about the various characteristics of the stages of development children, adolescents, and adults go through as they mature. Of interest is the physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development of the person; expectations for normal development that are age based are laid out according to the various versions of developmental theory. Using this approach, the child study is a description and assessment of a child using the expected levels of achievement as standards. The basic aim is to determine the degree to which the child is achieving normal growth. In teacher preparation, this version of the child study is included in coursework in order to help students of teaching learn to apply their formative knowledge of child development to an actual child in situ in a classroom through fieldwork or while actually teaching and to think about the implications of taking a developmental approach to teaching. In using this approach, it is necessary to question the concept of “normality” and the educational implications of the idea that there is such a thing as normal development. A second, related concern is the importance of recognizing that many developmental theories were created using largely White male samples and need to be questioned when applied to a wide range of children and adolescents.

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