Early Years Education: Building a Foundation for Meaning

  

‘Brains are built, over time, from the bottom up’ (Harvard Center on the Developing Child ND, online).

'Over the course of the reception year, teachers should plan what it is they want children to learn... teachers’ judgements will largely be based on whether children are learning what has been taught' (The Early Years Foundation Stage 2022, p.8).

Everyone knows that to build a sturdy house, it has to rest on sturdy foundations. The question is, what does a creating a 'sturdy foundation' look like, when building a brain? Does it consist of flexible, practical experiences that are shared with peers and adults, enriched by language which draws each individual child into understanding? Or does it consist of a programme in which the agenda has already been firmly decided by the adult?

Children under six have spent only 72 months in the world; they therefore have a very limited pool of existing knowledge to draw upon to try to make sense of incoming information. Therefore, 'beginning at the end’ with highly fixed objectives about what adults require them to learn is problematic, because they are at such an early stage of building their cognitive architecture. 

The content of the teaching environment acts as the cement; if it is flexible enough for the child to be able to stick the 'knowledge' bricks to the foundation below, then what is added to the construction will be durable. But if the cement is weak, the bricks that the teacher attempts to lay will inevitably become unstable, and compromise the stability of the eventual 'house.'

Children are born with far more neurons than they will eventually retain in adulthood; however the connections or 'synapses' between these are much less dense. The early development of the brain involves an extensive neuronal connection programme as children interact with their environment and strengthen those synapses that are well used, whilst those that are rarely used shrivel and may eventually die.

 
The first picture above illustrates how a synaptic connection may initially appear, and the second how it develops as it is continually used over a long period of time, like a path that is well used by people walking across a patch of land.

As time goes by, the brain creates complex interconnections between synapses, rather like a road network. Consider a country lane that might be connected to a few other roads along its length, and then a motorway which is intricately interconnected to many other roads for hundreds of miles.

The developmental synaptic connection programme is a long project in human beings. As puberty arrives, the brain begins its last big project: pruning superfluous connections in the prefrontal cortex, and creating stronger/ more complex links between those that remain. This is the area of the brain which deals with impulse control and the management of social behaviour, meaning that the human brain is not fully neuronally mature until the individual is around 25 years of age. 

Some amount of plasticity remains in adult brains and new synaptic connections can be made on a lifelong basis, rather like renovations on a house. But the basic architecture is constructed in childhood and adolescence, with the foundations being staked in the first seven years of life, as the individual not only stores 'content' but slowly links concepts together in infinite networks through the intricate neuronal pathways that are built through experience within and upon the environment.

As language skills mature, these act as an accelerator, allowing people to share thoughts and eventually think more abstractly, picking their way deftly through sometimes baffling conversations... as long as meaning is shared. Developing shared meanings is a crucial element of early education, as children come into contact with a wider community, outside the family circle. Our Victorian ancestors knew this, even though they did not have access to our level of neurobiological understanding. Here, Lewis Carroll depicts an 'adult' Humpty Dumpty introducing  'child' Alice to the process.

 

The only way we are able to understand (and laugh at) the video above is because we have learned that words have more than one meaning, and when they are used incongruously in the wrong conversation, the person using them in this way looks ridiculous. This is not something that can be rote taught; it needs to be learned by taking part in rich, organic conversations across the early years of childhood.

The psychologist Suzanne Zeedyk proposes that what happens between infants and carers in one-to-one spontaneous interactions is a type of improvised symbolic 'dance', which she refers to as a 'jazz duet'. This is how children learn to take part in the vast majority of everyday conversations they will later have with others, because these will also be spontaneous rather than rehearsed; human beings have the evolved capacity for this type of deep, symbolic 'intersubjective' communication. Alongside the ability to make and use tools, it is the feature that has made us the dominant species on earth.

To give an analogy, as every jazz musician knows, in order to join in a 'jam' session meaningfully, you must initially learn how to play your instrument, and how to tune into the rhythms of others. But before this can be effectively accomplished, apprentice musicians  need a lot of scaffolded practice with experienced players in authentic situations, which gradually builds the necessary underpinning neuronal connections. 

Our current understanding of how the human brain constructs itself during the developmental period suggests that this happens via what is termed ‘embedded mental representation’- i.e. that we incrementally memorise and co-ordinate our experiences. This generates an increasing ability to organize thought, gradually resulting in the ability to manage incoming information and locate it within memory in increasingly sophisticated neural networks. This results in increasing ‘metacognition’: thinking about thinking.

As we become more expert at this we become able to use such networks to focus attention without becoming distracted by the intrusion of non-relevant thoughts. This requires ‘inhibitory behaviour’ and the younger children are, the more difficult they find this; their thoughts are far more susceptible to interference than those of adults, due to the immature networks across which they travel.

To return to the road analogy, the order in which we construct understanding requires that roads are built on footpaths and motorways are built on roads. Teaching that requires a young child to catch on to small chunks from highly complex concepts and the presumtion that they can be retained in long term memory does not draw upon the way that human brains actually work, particularly when the role that language plays is also considered.

When we further consider the neuronal immaturity of young children, the quest that is recently being undertaken by the British Government, to formulate a ‘baseline’ assessment for four year olds that could accurately predict future progress seems even more ridiculous, particularly when it is considered they intend to base future school rankings upon the data that they are gathering.

This not only suggests that many contemporary early education policies are shockingly ill-informed, but in terms of children’s natural neuronal difference from adults, also discriminatory and therefore contrary to their human rights. This could of course, eventually lead to claims for compensation for psychological damage suffered by a whole generation forced in early childhood into what had, at that time, already been identified as highly developmentally inappropriate situations. But surely, there is still just time to ensure that it does not come to this.

Bibliography

Brown, T. T., & Jernigan, T. L. (2012). Brain development during the preschool years. Neuropsychology Review, 22(4) 313–333. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11065-012-9214-1

Crone, A. and Ridderinkhof, R. (2011) The developing brain: From theory to neuroimaging and back. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 1 101–109

Carroll, L. (1871) Alice Through the Looking Glass. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12/pg12-images.html

DFE (2021) The Early Years Foundation Stage, 2022 handbook. London: DFE. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1024319/Early_years_foundation_stage_profile_handbook_2022.pdf 

Harvard Centre on the Developing Child (ND) Brain Architecture. Available at https://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/brain-architecture/

Jarvis, P. (2020) The Myth of Early Acceleration in S. Palmer (Ed) Play is the Way. Paisley: CCWB Press.

PBS (2012) The Secret Life of the Brain: the baby’s brain. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS5HUDVNbGs&feature=emb_logo 

Piaget, J. and Inhelder, B. (1969) The Psychology of the Child. Basic Books, New York.

Tierney, A. L., & Nelson, C. A. (2009). Brain Development and the Role of Experience in the Early Years. Zero to three 30 (2)

Zeedyk, M.S. (2006) From intersubjectivity to subjectivity: the transformative roles of emotional intimacy and imitation. Infant and Child Development. 15 (3).