Three aspects of competence
Ngā aronga e toru o te kaiaka
Teachers and other adults who work with children are invited to explore the following three aspects of competence:
- personal goals, interests, and working theories;
- learning strategies and dispositions;
- social roles and culturally valued literacies.
Each of these three aspects involves knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The aspects overlap, and the purposes of them will often be in opposition to each other. For example, personal goals and the smooth running of a centre may be at odds with each other. Māori aspirations for Māori children and the implementation of bicultural goals may also pose some major challenges. Tension between personal goals and social roles can raise issues of inclusion and exclusion, as illustrated in Vivian Paley's book You Can't Say You Can't Play (1992).
Personal goals, interests, and working theories
Children develop competence as they pursue their personal interests and goals. They develop working theories about themselves as learners and about the world around them. Their goals, interests, and working theories may not be immediately apparent, and many will change during the learning itself.
The longitudinal New Zealand Competent Children project (Wylie and Thompson, 2003, page 74) concluded that a number of items that described early childhood settings continued to show positive associations with children’s competencies at age ten, after taking family income and maternal qualification levels into account. Three of these were: “Children can select from a variety of activities”, “Children can complete activities”, and “Staff are responsive to individual children.”
Suzanne Hidi (1990) summarised the research on interest and its contribution to learning. She found that:
Individual interests have a profound effect on cognitive functioning and performance (individuals interested in a task or an activity have been shown to pay more attention, persist for longer periods of time, and acquire more and qualitatively different knowledge than individuals without such interest) ...
page 554
Learning strategies and dispositions
In documented assessments, teachers consider children’s culture, skills, inclinations, and intentions in relation to participation in learning and educational settings. Participation may be described differently in different settings. In any early childhood setting, children will have opportunities to explore and participate in a variety of ways.
Strategies and dispositions develop best in the context of whanaungatanga or reciprocal and responsive relationships with people, places, and things in the early childhood setting and beyond. Assessments are part of these reciprocal and responsive relationships.
Joy Cullen (1991) studied sixteen four- and five-year-olds at two pre-primary centres in Perth, Australia. She identified the following effective learning strategies: task persistence, use of resources, use of peers as a resource, use of adults as a resource, seeing self as a resource for others, directing self, and directing others. One year later, she reported, “Children whose approach to learning at pre-school was characterised by a range of strategic behaviours and reflective skills maintained a strategic approach to learning in their first year at school” (page 44).
Arapera Royal Tangaere (1997) refers to a strategy of learning that is significant to Māori: that of tuakana and teina, where the more skilled peer, or tuakana, scaffolds the less competent child, or teina, to a higher level of understanding and knowing.
Liz Brooker (2002) researched the experience of the first year of school of sixteen four-year-olds. One of her conclusions was that “learning dispositions” were “an important indicator of their future school success” (page 148).
Social roles and culturally valued literacies
As children learn, they explore a variety of roles and literacies and the skills and understandings that are allied to them. These roles and literacies may be valued nationally, or they may be specific to certain social or cultural groups.
In learning communities, children will have the opportunity to try out a range of sociocultural roles and their associated competencies, for example, tuakana, teina, friend, measurer, jam maker, tower builder, kaimahi, observer of insects, reader, citizen of the world, and member of hapū and iwi.
Children will also have opportunities to develop skills and understandings within a range of literacies, including reading, writing, mathematics, information technology, and the arts. (Future books will describe how assessments can contribute to these particular literacies).
In her research study of children learning in home-based settings, Lyn Wright (2003) includes a chapter entitled Learning Outcomes for Children: Meaning-making and Multiple Identities. She comments:
Whilst the identities being explored at times were clearly on topics such as mathematics, or gaining mastery over their bodies, or becoming independent, identities relating to being social participants in a setting were also being explored.
page 157
She describes, for instance, Alice “being a teacher”.