Child‐centered Teaching, Redemption, and Educational Identities: A History of the Present

Baker, Bernadette

doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.1998.00155.x

Cited by 21 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Child development theory has deeply influenced the building of the concept of the child-centered curriculum (Backer, 1998;Elkind, 1989;Kliebard, 1995;Meade, 2000). Pioneers in child developmental theory, Jean Piaget, and Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, have powerfully influenced ECE teachersÕ beliefs about interacting with children, how they have set up learning environments, and their expectations for childrenÕs development since PiagetÕs theory became popular in 1960s and VygotskyÕs in 1980s in the USA.…”

Section: Piagetõs and Vygotskyõs Child Development Theories Upholdingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Tension between Teacher Control and Children’s Freedom in a Child-centered Classroom: Resolving the Practical Dilemma through a Closer Look at the Related Theories

Tzuo

2007

Early Childhood Educ J

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This article explores the meaning of child-centeredness in Early Childhood Education (ECE), by shedding light on the nuanced tensions between teacher control and childrenÕs freedom. While ECE professionals advocate the importance of childrenÕs individual interests and needs in education, they diverge somewhat in their perspectives about the teacherÕs role in education. This article manifests and tries to resolve this teaching dilemma through incorporating the related theories (Piaget, Vygotsky, Dewey, and Montessori) upholding and encompassing child-centeredness. The author contends that high teacher control and high childrenÕs freedom are not exclusive of one another: childrenÕs freedom is defined in an active way, as freedom to participate, rather than in a passive way, as freedom from any constrains. The paper concludes with a metaphor of ''impressionist painting'', which may offer some insights helpful to those who have struggled with the tension between teacher control and childrenÕs freedom in the context of progressive and critical pedagogy.

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Section: Piagetõs and Vygotskyõs Child Development Theories Upholdingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Tension between Teacher Control and Children’s Freedom in a Child-centered Classroom: Resolving the Practical Dilemma through a Closer Look at the Related Theories

Tzuo

2007

Early Childhood Educ J

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“…The teacher becomes both a ''lawgiver'' and ''redeemer'' (Baker 1998, p. 160) who determines and corrects the child's nature and helps his/her ''true nature'' to unfold. Constantly monitoring and managing the child's ''true'' nature and eliminating the perceived false nature, the teacher in Rousseau's pedagogy ''bends'' the child's wills and desires toward his/her own (Baker 1998). In Emile, Rousseau offers:…”

Section: Childhood As a Moment Of Innocence And Puritymentioning

confidence: 98%

“…From the 1880s to around 1910, a movement called Child-Study emerged to provide a scientific understanding of children's nature in order to help build schools around the child (Baker 1998). ''It is the first reform movement to use the word 'childhood' frequently and to delineate explicitly what it means'' (Baker 1998, p. 163).…”

Section: Childhood As the Primitive Stage Of Human Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Modern Construction of Childhood: What Does It Do to the Paradox of Modernity?

Zhao

2010

Stud Philos Educ

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The examination of the modern construction of subject is not over yet. Although many thinkers have exhausted its conceptual ambiguities and practical consequences, its impact is far from fully understood without an analysis of the construction of childhood for the future subject. In this essay, I problematize five constructions of childhood that emerged in the modern time and scrutinize the impasses of logic or conceptual ambiguities within, along with the practical consequences thereof. I explore how the modern construction of childhood is problematic in and of itself, as well as the light it sheds on the deeply embedded ambiguities and aporia (Wagner in A sociology of modernity: liberty and discipline. Routledge, New York 1994; Zhao in Educ Theory 57(1): 75-88 2007) in the construction of the modern subject. This paper will untangle the problems associated with each of these constructs and their respective implications for the making of the modern subject.

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“…The teaching strategies prescribed for engineering the ideal child posited an order for growth, for learning, for thinking, for doing in the curriculum, and reconstituted both the child's and the teacher's comportment as coming-to-be-but-not-quite-there-yet (Baker 1998b).`Growing up' was constituted as a journey, a movement to a di erent space, into a di erent body, and into a`new kind of being'Ða perception of existential di erence that suggested the establishment of high schools to house and engineer the newborn beings newly called`adolescents' (Hall 1911).…”

Section: Power-as-force and The Childmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recommendations for more formal, moral and widespread educational institutions sprang discursively from the attribution of power-as-capacity in a lesser form to a child's body. Children, and the reading of their upward physical movement as`growth', seemed the appropriate object on which to ground the problems of theorizing power, where power was conceived as locomotive, generative and causative of change in sensible appearances (Baker 1998b).…”

Section: Power-as-potential and The Childmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving on (part 2): power and the child in curriculum history

Baker¹

2001

J. Curric. Stud.

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This paper is the second in a two-part series that maps continuities and ruptures in conceptions of power and traces their e ects in educational discourse on`the child'. It delineates two post-Newtonian intellectual trajectories through which concepts of power' arrived at the theorization of`the child': the paradoxical bio-physical inscriptions of human-ness that accompanied mechanistic worldviews and the explanations for social motion in political philosophy. The intersection of pedagogical theories with`the child' and`power' is further traced from the latter 1800s to the present, where a Foucaultian analytics of power-as-e ects is reconsidered in regard to histories of motion. The analysis culminates in an examination of post-Newtonian (dis)continuities in the theorization of power, suggesting some productive paradoxes that inhabit turn of the 21st-century conceptualizations of the social.

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Child‐centered Teaching, Redemption, and Educational Identities: A History of the Present

Cited by 21 publications

References 3 publications

The Tension between Teacher Control and Children’s Freedom in a Child-centered Classroom: Resolving the Practical Dilemma through a Closer Look at the Related Theories

The Tension between Teacher Control and Children’s Freedom in a Child-centered Classroom: Resolving the Practical Dilemma through a Closer Look at the Related Theories

The Modern Construction of Childhood: What Does It Do to the Paradox of Modernity?

Moving on (part 2): power and the child in curriculum history

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