Early Childhood Education: Intervention & Learning
Early Childhood Education: Educational Intervention
Global Approach
Meaning and Significance of Learning
A Methodology Based on Observation and Experimentation
Your Project Under the Educational Lens
Introduction
This document addresses topic number twelve, Early Childhood Education, focusing on the methodology to be followed in this stage. It emphasizes that the needs and psycho-evolutionary characteristics of students, along with educational objectives, should guide the selection of appropriate strategies and resources for effective, adequate, and correct educational intervention.
First, we will address early educational intervention in early childhood education and delve into the global approach. Subsequently, we will discuss the meaning and significance of learning, moving to a methodology based on observation and experimentation. Finally, we will analyze the application within the framework of the Education Project.
Principles of Educational Intervention in Early Childhood Education
According to the Organic Law of Education 2/2006 of May 3, “Early Childhood Education is an educational stage with its own identity, serving children from birth to six years of age.”
This stage has some key features:
- It is **educational** because it is contained within the education system and aims to achieve certain objectives.
- It is **voluntary** and **free**, having two cycles: from zero to three and three to six years old.
- It is **globalizing** as it aims at the holistic development of the child and occurs in reality as a whole, according to the characteristics of the students.
- It is **preventive** and **compensatory** for inequality.
- It is a stage where **family-school collaboration** is essential.
This stage is based on principles that receive contributions from various theories and authors. Let’s analyze the theories and authors that form the basis of these principles.
The following principles are contributions of different authors and theories, such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Ausubel, Bandura, Bruner, and representatives of the New School, like Decroly, Freinet, and Montessori, among others. Their contributions can be summarized in these fundamental assumptions:
- Learning is a process of personal construction.
- In the construction process, students engage with the learning object, cultural content, and educators who act as mediators between students and content.
- Learning is a complex restructuring of cultural content.
Thanks to these contributions, teachers must incorporate them into our educational intervention. Let’s move on to develop the analysis of early educational intervention.
An educational program is a set of actions developed and designed by the teacher to adjust the teaching process to pupils’ learning.
This operation is characterized by:
- **Intentionality**: It pursues specific objectives.
- **Systematic and planned approach**: Specific times are set, with activities organized and sequential, in a pedagogical line.
- **Evaluation**: To ascertain whether the objectives are achieved.
To make this educational intervention effective, we must consider some principles as follows:
At school, a constructivist approach to learning is favored, making the student build through play, action, and testing content schemes, offering our guide and guidance in the process. Play is a teaching resource that we will consider in this stage of education.
Autonomy will be enhanced by making the child feel like the protagonist of the teaching-learning process. To achieve this, we will provide students with opportunities for exploration and manipulation, where their psycho-evolutionary characteristics are considered, promoting a comprehensive approach.
We will also promote meaningful learning in students based on their previous knowledge, providing realistic and functional experiences, taking into account the developmental stage of the group, since learning requires reaching a critical age to start.
This requires a warm, affectionate environment of tolerance and respect. As Spitz said, “When there is no attachment relationship, the child does not develop normally.” This attachment includes the imposition of rules set by students and the teacher.
With this ability to relate, the child has to socialize, acquiring norms of behavior, attitudes, friendliness, cooperation, assistance, and social habits.
As teachers, in coding and working, we aim to overcome challenges. We encourage the Pedagogy of Effort and Success of Vygotsky. We must establish an optimal distance between what the child knows and what we want them to learn so that what is offered can be overcome with some effort. For this, the organization of the environment must be flexible, ensuring the different rates of learning and student needs.
If children do not achieve the objectives, pre-primary education is a preventive and compensatory stage of inequalities, which can avoid developmental problems.
In the education system, particularly in Early Childhood Education, working with families is a methodological principle, offering information about the process and demanding their children’s learning as participation.
For organization, the classroom is divided into different areas and corners. Movement through the corners will be through a double-entry table, which will rotate the groups, but they may also pass freely.
The provision of children will be mostly in groups, encouraging peer relationships. We will provide guidelines for the amendment and confrontation of views, decision-making, distribution of responsibilities and tasks, and overcoming conflicts through dialogue and cooperation. In the group, I will consider the characteristics of children, such as those who are more introverted or extroverted, children with more developed curricula versus those with less developed curricula, and so on.
It is necessary to highlight the comprehensive approach, which we will start from when developing classroom activities in Early Childhood Education. Let’s describe the global approach.
The global perspective is essential for meaningful learning. The Education Law 2/2006, Article 14, referring to Early Childhood Education, states that educational content is organized into areas corresponding to areas of child development and experience, transmitted through global activities with interest and meaning for children.
The specific treatment of the comprehensive approach is as follows.
The comprehensive approach refers to a contextualized approach in which reality is presented and perceived, and how the student intends to study it.
Learning is global because it is learned through relationships between the individual and the environment, getting the outside world as a whole, which dissociates into different elements and sciences for study.
For Piaget, this way of knowing was syncretism, and Decroly called it globalization.
Globalization for children is based on their psychology, in the minds of children, where the relationship with the environment is present globally.
It is also based on educational theory, in going from concrete to abstract, from the known to the unknown.
This approach responds to the scientific method, where the teacher gives the student a global unity of scientific knowledge, to be established disciplines.
Therefore, we can say that the structuring of curriculum areas involves working in a connected way. Planning ensures the development of the child, as these areas working in preschool children discuss aspects of their person but are dealt with comprehensively.
The comprehensive approach can be worked on through lesson plans, projects, etc. I will describe global methods below.
- Through **centers of interest**, we present the child with different global issues and content.
- **Topics**, where we work on a variety of topics or events that the child has experienced.
- Through **project work**, where they make new creations, or this is a particular situation arising from the needs and interests of students, by working with families.
- And **teaching units**, which work on knowledge and activities on a significant issue for the student. A teaching unit is a unit of programming and teaching performance, shaped by a set of activities that take place in a certain time to achieve educational goals.
These procedures are based on the theories of Decroly or Dewey.
Dewey presented education as a process of experimentation and actions, relating attitudes to things. The teacher is a member of the group with the task of helping all build their own experience. He calls his method projects, which means the coordinated spontaneous activity of a group of students dedicated to the performance of work chosen by them:
- Consideration of any significant experience of the child’s life.
- Identifying a problem or difficulty from that experience.
- Finding solutions.
- Formulation of possible solutions.
- Verification of the hypothesis by doing.
Decroly (learning methods) identified the need to work in kindergarten through centers of interest in a logical order: a phase of observation, an association with logic, and expression. He also emphasizes globalization, taking into account the characteristics of the student’s synthetic thought.
Let’s analyze the phases of globalization according to Decroly.
Learning in the child must be composed of three phases: observation, association, and expression.
Observation is the first activity that will allow the global approach to the objects of study, after which, through mental activity, the acquisition of specific concepts will be reached. This observation should be brought before any learning object, which can be direct or indirect:
- Direct observation channeled by the teacher to students…