Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten : Where culture grows [1st ed.] 9783030597344, 9783030597351

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-x
Research Tandems in International Collaboration: Luxembourg–China (Shuangshuang Xu, Giuseppina Marsico)....Pages 1-7
Dialogues on Basic Educational Needs: East and West (Xiaowen Li, Shuangshuang Xu, Giuseppina Marsico)....Pages 9-15
Setting the Stage: Kindergarten in China as Beginning of Schooling (He Min, Yunfei Ji)....Pages 17-19
Cultural Objects at ECNU Kindergarten (Tabea Eimer)....Pages 21-33
Moral Education in a Shanghai Kindergarten—How Do Children Perceive Social Values and Norms? (Isabelle Périard, Junjie Liu)....Pages 35-59
Chinese Preschoolers’ Conflict Negotiation in Resource Limited Situations (Marina Sonntag, Shuangshuang Xu)....Pages 61-73
Small Images of a Big World: Children’s Drawings in a Chinese Kindergarten (Wanqiu Meng, Johannes Heuschkel)....Pages 75-92
The Role of LEGO in Numeracy Development: A Case Analysis (Tabea Eimer, Gabrijela Aleksić, Qian Zhang)....Pages 93-109
Children’s Construction of the Natural Numbers: Some Examples from a Cultural Background (Mariela Orozco)....Pages 111-116
The School as Semiotic Intercultural Arena (Luca Tateo)....Pages 117-128
Revisiting Peer Conflict from Sociocultural Perspective (Aruna Wu)....Pages 129-135
General Conclusions: United Research Efforts of the Young: Realizing Potentials (Jaan Valsiner)....Pages 137-146

Citation preview

Cultural Psychology of Education 12

Shuangshuang Xu Giuseppina Marsico   Editors

Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten Where Culture Grows

Cultural Psychology of Education Volume 12

Series Editor Giuseppina Marsico, DISUFF, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy Editorial Board Jaan Valsiner, Department of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark Nandita Chaudhary, Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India Maria Virginia Dazzani, Instituto de Psicologia, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil Xiao-Wen Li, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai Shi, China Harry Daniels, Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Nicolay Veresov, Monash University, Australia Wolff-Michael Roth, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada Yasuhiro Omi, Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan

This book series focuses on the development of new qualitative methodologies for educational psychology and interdisciplinary enrichment in ideas and practices. It publishes key ideas of methodology, different approaches to schooling, family, relationships and social negotiations of issues of educational processes. It presents new perspectives, such as dynamic systems theory, dialogical perspectives on the development of the self within educational contexts, and the role of various symbolic resources in educational processes. The series publishes research rooted in the cultural psychology framework, thus combining the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, education and history. Cultural psychology examines how human experience is organized culturally, through semiotic mediation, symbolic action, accumulation and exchange of inter-subjectively shared representations of the life-space. By taking this approach, the series breaks through the “ontological” conceptualization of education in which processes of education are localized in liminality. In this series, education is understood as goal-oriented personal movement that is at the core of societal change in all its different forms— from kindergarten to vocational school and lifelong learning. It restructures personal lives both inside school and outside the school. The cultural psychology approach to education fits the global processes of most countries becoming multi-cultural in their social orders, reflects the interdisciplinary nature of educational psychology, and informs the applications of educational psychology in a vast variety of cultural contexts. This book series: • Is the first to approach education from a cultural psychology perspective. • Offers an up-to-date exploration of recent work in cultural psychology of education. • Brings together new, novel, and innovative ideas. • Broadens the practical usability of different trends of cultural psychology of education. All proposals and manuscripts submitted to the Series will undergo at least two rounds of external peer review. This Series is indexed in Scopus and the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers (NSD).

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13768

Shuangshuang Xu Giuseppina Marsico •

Editors

Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten Where Culture Grows

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Editors Shuangshuang Xu Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark

Giuseppina Marsico Università degli Studi di Salerno Fisciano, Italy

ISSN 2364-6780 ISSN 2364-6799 (electronic) Cultural Psychology of Education ISBN 978-3-030-59734-4 ISBN 978-3-030-59735-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface of the Series Editor

Cultural Psychology of Schooling Beyond the Silk Road This book titled Where Culture Grows: Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten is innovative in many ways. First, in its content and, then, in its format. It is an in depth diving in the Shanghai kindergarten system (which is the most advanced educational proposal in the early childhood education of the entire China) made by a group of young researcher coming from Luxembourg. Aside of the apparently bizarre Luxembourg-China connection, the volume documented the efficacy of a new methodological tool called Research Tandems that has been tested for the first time in the occasion of the research visit of Luxembourgish young scholars to Shanghai in 2018. The Research tandem consisted in paring one insider (Chinese young scholar) with an outsider (the Luxembourg partner) to make observations in the Chinese educational context. The simple premise is that the difference in the cultural understanding helps both the outsider—for the evident reason of being guided into the culturally situated comprehension of local meanings—and the insider who may be forced to dissect the take-for-grant set of meanings in her own culture. This simple, but powerful research device has been very effective at the point that the research tandems committed themselves in joint writings. The results is this book, which is an insightful gallery of the cultural aspects of the early childhood education in China. This book nicely complements the reading of some of the previous volumes in the series like: Educational contexts and borders through a cultural lens—Looking inside. Viewing outside written by Marsico, Dazzani, Rsitum and Bastos (2015) or the more recent Hviid and Märtsin, work titled Culture in Education and Education in Culture. Tensioned Dialogues and Creative Constructions (2019). These books try—in a way or in another- to illuminate the critical dimensions of the educational context in the East and West of the globe. School, in fact, is at the crossroad in many societies. Schools work both as catalytic elements—sometimes

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propulsive, sometimes inhibitory—of specific social processes (Toomela & Valsiner, 2010) and as homeostatic function devoted to preserving the status-quo of society. The school institution in modern societies has an important role in the construction of the ideals of society and its organization. In some European and Latin America countries, education is meant to promote human development and citizenship and to provide qualified training for getting a work in the competitive and ever-changing job market. However, what kind of human is expected to form through the work of schooling? The type of human based on conformation/ formatting? What citizenship is about when exists a social inequality in accessing the basic rights of people? What is the meaning of work for society that inherits the separation between manual and intellectual work due to its slave tradition as in the Brazilian context? These elements are linked to a notion of the human being historically and culturally situated. Some socio-political circumstances (as dictatorships) did not favor the emergence of educational context in which dialogue and the manifestation of subjectivities were present (Freire, 1970). In order to face with this situation, new educational initiatives have emerged in different places in the world to envision new forms of schooling in which innovation and recognition of cultural and individual needs are better integrated. Educational innovations have been designed and implemented with the purpose of supporting participation within the school as a guiding principle for the educational practices to guarantee the academic knowledge while supporting human development.

The IBEF Vision Based on the Cultural Psychology of Education framework (Marsico, 2018; Valsiner, 2014) we intend to produce a robust theoretical understanding of the educational practices in different socio-cultural contexts in order to promote new sustainable paradigms in education. This has been the main goal that led to establish the International Centre of Excellence on Innovative Learning, Teaching Environments and Practices “IBEF—Ideas for the Basic Education of the Future”. IBEF is the utopia that comes through and is a milestone of the international programme promoted within the framework of Cultural Psychology of Education. This International Centre of Excellence is located at East China Normal University (Shanghai, China), that coordinates a large network of Universities all over the world (Aalborg University, DK; Oslo University, Norway, University of Salerno, Italy; Federal University of Bahia, Brazil and Luxembourg University among the others). IBEF builds upon already existing national and international excellence and joins researchers in the field of Cultural Psychology of Education. It is a high visibility of collaboration that seeks to have an international impact on research and society. The Centre of Excellence “Ideas for the Basic Education of the Future “on Innovative Learning, Teaching Environments and Practices, aims at looking beyond

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the current trends in basic education and at identifying the most innovative and edge ideas, to study and understand how to implement them on the long term. The Centre studies and disseminates innovative learning and teaching environments and practices for the future and has already an agenda of wide-ranging networking actions. One of the best result so far is the Research Tandems experience here so nicely documented. Salerno, Italy April 2020

Giuseppina Marsico

References Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Hviid, P., Märtsin, M. (Eds). (2019). Culture in education and education in culture. tensioned dialogues and creative constructions. In Cultural Psychology of Education (vol. 10, pp. v–vii) Cham, CH: Springer. Marsico, G., (2018). The challenges of the schooling from cultural psychology of education. Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Sciences,52(3),474–489 DOI: 10.1007/s12124018-9454-6. Marsico, G., Dazzani, V., Ristum, M. & Bastos A. C. (Eds). (2015). Educational contexts and borders through a cultural lens—Looking inside. Viewing outside. In Cultural Psychology of Education (Vol. 1). Geneve, Switzerland: Springer. Toomela, A., and Valsiner, J. (2010). Have sixty years really gone astray: Back to the future. In A. Toomela & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Methodological thinking in psychology: 60 years gone astray? (pp. 325–337). Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Publishers.

Contents

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Research Tandems in International Collaboration: Luxembourg–China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shuangshuang Xu and Giuseppina Marsico

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Dialogues on Basic Educational Needs: East and West . . . . . . . . . . Xiaowen Li, Shuangshuang Xu, and Giuseppina Marsico

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Setting the Stage: Kindergarten in China as Beginning of Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . He Min and Yunfei Ji

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Cultural Objects at ECNU Kindergarten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tabea Eimer

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Moral Education in a Shanghai Kindergarten—How Do Children Perceive Social Values and Norms? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Isabelle Périard and Junjie Liu

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Chinese Preschoolers’ Conflict Negotiation in Resource Limited Situations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marina Sonntag and Shuangshuang Xu

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Small Images of a Big World: Children’s Drawings in a Chinese Kindergarten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wanqiu Meng and Johannes Heuschkel

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The Role of LEGO in Numeracy Development: A Case Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tabea Eimer, Gabrijela Aleksić, and Qian Zhang

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Children’s Construction of the Natural Numbers: Some Examples from a Cultural Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Mariela Orozco

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Contents

10 The School as Semiotic Intercultural Arena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Luca Tateo 11 Revisiting Peer Conflict from Sociocultural Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Aruna Wu 12 General Conclusions: United Research Efforts of the Young: Realizing Potentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Jaan Valsiner

Chapter 1

Research Tandems in International Collaboration: Luxembourg–China Shuangshuang Xu and Giuseppina Marsico

This book comes from a long-lasting concern in constructing a cultural psychology of education by integrating international research efforts from a large variety of social and cultural background (Marsico, 2017; Valsiner, 2009). In the last years, the IBEF-Center of Ideas for the Basic Education of the Future (International Network on Innovative Learning, Teaching Environments and Practices)1 has been established. It is based in Shanghai and has universities and scholars from Luxembourg, Italy, Brazil, Denmark, Norway and China in the network. This book, as the first book publication born in the network, is mainly contributed by young scholars and master students from East China Normal University and University of Luxembourg’s joint work during their stay in a Chinese kindergarten in Shanghai for one and half months in the summer of 2018. In that summer, one Chinese student and one Luxembourg student paired with each other as a research tandem2 to conduct a research internship together. Research tandem in one specific local setting is the biggest characteristic of this project. The research tandem, as innovative research device, is simple. The idea is to form a couple of one insider (a Chinese student) with a foreigner (the Luxembourg psychology student) on the basis of common, previously explored research interests. In this process, both sides are exposed to the experience of “defamiliarization”: 1 https://www.ed.ecnu.edu.cn/en/?p=2901;

https://sites.google.com/unisa.it/gris/ibef?authuser=0. research tandem idea comes from prof. Luca Tateo (Oslo University, Norway) who first designed it as one of the main methodological tools within the IBEF.

2 The

S. Xu (B) Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] S. Xu · G. Marsico IBEF, Shanghai, China G. Marsico University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_1

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Luxembourg students are faced with totally different cultural and educational context, while Chinese students need to respond to their doubts and curiosity. Discussion and negotiation between students from the two backgrounds have continued throughout the whole research period. Both sides need to re-examine their cultural beliefs and premises, which have been taken for granted in their daily practice. This encountering has provided an opportunity for the “epoche” of phenomenology, which makes it possible to analyze deeply the conscious states of young children.

One Kindergarten as a Window of a Bigger World Educational institutions are never pure or simplified “ivory tower” isolated from other parts and connections of the society. Aimed at preparing young citizens for the future, educational institutions are always future-oriented and have its own image of “imagined definition of the child to-be” (Marsico & Tateo, 2018, p. 7). This image is socially constructed, and it evolves historically along other aspects of vivid social practices. In this sense, kindergarten can be regarded as a window of a much bigger social, cultural and historical world, in which human beings inhabit, develop and transcend themselves constantly. By asking and answering the question of “what young children should/should not learn in/outside kindergarten,” tension, uncertainty and ambivalence of complex social dynamics and forces can be revealed. From this perspective, entering into one specific Shanghai kindergarten is the same as entering into the complicated Chinese social reality, in which long historical tradition and strong motivation for a “modernized” future are fused together and continuously evolve itself into a vibrant and intricate landscape. Meanings and values consciously or unconsciously promoted and conducted in the kindergarten are semiotic devices and they mediate children and educator’s daily behaviors and activities, who are constantly navigating among different social institutions and crossing the border of kindergarten. Values and norms can be inconsistent or even ambivalent and compete with each other in the field of educational institution (Tateo, 2019). Social discourse containing these values and norms is generated in people’s daily social interaction and has its deep root in people’s real social practice. As a result of social practice, it gradually achieves its firm and clear expression in the field of ideology. At the same time, ideological concepts, terms and theories are imported into and appropriated by social discoursing practices. In this bidirectional processes, phenomena and practices are conceptualized by dual concepts of “Western-Chinese,” “New-Old,” “Scientific-Folk” or “Advanced-Behind”. The process of capitalism and globalization has dragged every country into the same game, and meanwhile it has ended the possibility of isolated development, which means it is impossible to advance development while keeping door closed. Societies have to learn to identify themselves and explore their unique developmental paths in the painful process of encountering otherness. Shanghai, as one of the biggest cities in China, has gone through huge and rapid social and economic changes since the “Reform and opening” policy in 1979. If we focus on the social

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reality constituting and bringing about unique needs, challenges and opportunities for preschool education, following but not exhausted social aspects should be referred to: (1) The process of urbanization has brought big population into the city, which makes kindergarten classes with large scales an unavoidable reality for kindergarten teachers and young children (He & Ji, 2020); (2) Families with two working parents and insufficiency of the social welfare system on pension and nursery have produced a new style of family structure: four grandparents–two parents—one child (Meng & Heuschkel, 2020). When entering into kindergarten, the child, who is used to communicating and interacting with adults, has to adapt themselves into a collective environment and learn to deal with peers of same age. (3) New middle class rises and requests for different symbols and life styles to strengthen their class identity. Class anxiety is rendered and upgraded under the operation of capitalism. As a result, preschool education has become a new commercial battle. Western educational models are imported both as cultural and commercial products into Chinese market for Chinese parents to choose as different possibilities for “better education”; (4) Education functions always as an effective way for class mobility in Chinese society, which makes education anxiety one of the biggest anxieties nowadays. On one side, kindergarten as institutions for preschool education has to receive and accept pressure from formal education, which makes the orientation of “preparation for school” stronger and stronger. On the other side, kindergartens should find out their own unique characteristics to identify, label and present themselves to the public in the commercial market. These two aspects have produced different degrees of integration between learning orientation and unique characteristics adopted by kindergartens. It can be seen that values and norms can be quite ambiguous and even ambivalent in one specific kindergarten.

Research Tandem as a Platform to Cultivate Research Intuition This book documented the first implementation (within the framework of Cultural Psychology of Education) of the research tandem as a methodological innovation. It is based on the assumption that diversity matters and it can be the key point for a meaningful cultural-based research. Young students from different cultural and academic backgrounds (students majoring in psychology and preschool education from East China Normal University and University of Luxembourg) were coupled into four pairs of research partners to work together in a kindergarten.3 The kindergarten we chose to enter was affiliated to the university. Children attending this kindergarten 3 They were constantly supervised by Chinese and International scholars over the period of their joint

work. A special thank goes to prof. He Min (ECNU, Shanghai), Xiao-wen Li (ECNU, Shanghai), Yunfei Ji (ECNU, Shanghai), Jaan Valsiner (Aalborg University and Luxembourg University), George Main (Luxembourg University) and Isabelle Albert (Luxembourg University) for their constant scaffolding work.

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came from the neighborhood, and many had their parent working in the university. Because of the summer vacation, all the regular activities were stopped, and there was only a small mix-aged class on run when the project started. Parents who were busy working and did not have much time taking care of their children at home could choose to send their children to this summer class. It was more flexible and relaxing both in the activity form and content in the summer class compared to regular classes during the semesters. There were no coherent teaching activities, as teachers took turns to look after the class and thus had big freedom in deciding how they want to organize the class. Usually, more structured collective teaching would be planned in the morning and the afternoons were for children’s free play after they get up from nap. The four pairs of research tandem also took turns to enter into the class, with two pairs a day, to make sure that children will not be disturbed too much with the appearance of the researchers in the classroom. The project had a shared focus on the process of children’s socialization in the kindergarten. Under the same focus, research tandems developed different angles to enter into the field: Different themes explored under different research methods. It is worth mentioning that, although Luxembourg students have already made a research proposal before coming to Shanghai, it was still very difficult and even painful to some extent to decide which aspect was worthy and realistic to work on in this specific kindergarten during their short stay in Shanghai: summer class without routine activities, decorations and activity corners removed in preparation for new semester and language barriers when trying to communicate with children and teachers. Luxembourg students had to understand and deal with that specific children group in the specific kindergarten in the specific period, and no existing theories about child development could directly help them to find out a good research question to complete their research internship. They had to rely on their curiosity and sensitivity. Communication within the research tandem became crucial to relate to the educational field. It was in the communication process between the research tandem that the ongoing phenomena were constructed and reconstructed as a social fact with certain terms, concepts and values. Chinese and Luxembourg students shared some common conceptual systems. For example, when seeing a teacher talking to a child, they would all label the phenomena as “teacher–child interaction” and put it into that certain category for later analysis. Under that shared category came different interpretations and underlying beliefs of Chinese and Luxembourg students: What is good/not good? What should/should not be done? It was often the case that both sides were caught up into a deeper thinking process after proposing a question and trying to answer that question. The setting of research tandem facilitates the students to closely examine the specific context along with its deep cultural and historical root to have a better understanding of the unfamiliar and defamiliar phenomenon. The ability of being sensitive and reflexive is crucial to conduct researches in cultural psychology, and research tandem provides a promising platform for young researchers to sharpen their professional intuitions. As Tateo, Español, Kullasepp, Marsico, and Palang (2018) have pointed out, a polyphonic epistemology can be a productive methodology for psychology research,

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as gazes from multiple researchers on the research field can multiply the process of meaning making of our research object. In the mutual gazes, the experiencing and meaning-making researchers are actually being in a web of relationships, which mediate and coordinate their gazing. This systemic epistemological approach is especially essential for researchers to enter into a familiar/unfamiliar research site. As in the mutual site, objects are in the continuous movement of coming near and coming far, being strange and being as usual. Tateo (2020) also emphasizes the importance of adopting a standing point on cultural psychology of education rather than cross-cultural psychology of education to really facilitate the power of systemic epistemological approach. In his analysis, the cross-cultural perspective is an adding of monological gaze on the research field, which can lead to comparative analysis, but can hardly go deep into the semiotic mediating level of the culture on human development. This book adopts the perspective of cultural psychology of semiotic mediation, which conceptualizes culture as belonging to the relating process between person and environment. From this perspective, individuals and social worlds mutually constitute each other by two processes of internalization and externalization (Valsiner, 2007). This theoretical framework differs from cross-cultural psychology, as in cross-cultural psychology, culture is conceptualized as belonging to persons, and persons are representative of certain cultural groups, which makes persons more or less passive. Distinguishing of these two theoretical frames is especially important in the area of kindergarten research, as it also concerns how we conceptualized children. Are children a whiteboard for culture to paint itself on? Or can children be active agents who are always in the process of creatively choosing and constructing guiding clues from culture? By adopting the perspective of cultural psychology of education, we are firmly keeping our research interest on the interactive border zone between the active child and its cultural guiding setting, which emphasizes on a dynamic analysis of the bidirectional process of internalization and externalization.

Brief Introduction of the Structure of the Book The book covers different aspects of children’s process of socialization and tries to understand children’s developmental dynamics by integrating both perspectives of kindergarten institution and children’s subjective experience. Chapter 2 provides the readers with insightful synthesis of the current debate on the mains educational purposes in the Eastern and Wester cultural settings. Chapter 3 gives an overview about Chinese kindergarten, which has characteristics of large-scale classes and a strong orientation toward learning and school preparation. It also presents kindergartens’ struggling to respect more about the child perspective and children’s free play. Chapters 4–8 are co-contributed by research tandems. Chapter 4 examines the implicit “speaking” of various kinds of explicit cultural objects decorated in the

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kindergarten and their role in inducing a holistic atmosphere and facilitating children’s internalization of cultural and social values and norms. This is often underestimated in developmental researches. Readers can also more or less form a picture of the institution identity of this specific kindergarten from their choice of cultural objects. Chapter 5 closely examines routine activities and uses picture books to investigate what kind of moral concepts are promoted and how the norms and values are constructed and reconstructed by educators and children in the kindergarten. It can be seen in this chapter that traditional cultural norms such as respecting authorities coexist with and get strengthened by values derived from the specific setting of the kindergarten. Chapter 6 uses projective tests to probe into multiple conflict contexts in children’s daily life and analyzes the strategies employed by Chinese children in the processes of conflict negotiation and renegotiation. This chapter also tries to understand the overall impression of “Chinese children being more prosocial” upon the new social reality of 4-2-1 family structure. Chapter 7 focuses on Chinese children’s perception and interpretation of family structure, relations and activities by inviting children to draw upon their families in kindergarten. From children’s drawings, interesting characteristics of new family structure are revealed. Chapter 8 compares two cases to have a deeper understanding of the bidirectional relationship between children’s skills in Lego construction and their numeracy development. Chapters 9, 10 and 11 are commentaries on the abovementioned works, where three international seniors (respectively, Mariela Orozco from Colombia, Luca Tateo from Norway and Aruna from China) get inspired form the young researchers and discuss how to foster the themes under investigation. The book ends with Chap. 12 written by Jaan Valsiner, which points out how science is a collective enterprise that can be very much benefitted by the early cultivation of ideas from passionate young researchers.

Conclusion and Future Development Education works toward a future-oriented image of “child-should-be,” while all the blessing and burdens from history coexist and function in the present context. Cultural psychology of education calls for a culture-inclusive understanding of the developing individual, in which framework individual development is context-bounded and is both enabled and constrained by social and cultural situations (Bruner, 2012). In this book, the specific context of a Shanghai kindergarten is closely examined and children’s subjective experiences, perceptions and meaning-making processes navigating in the kindergarten are investigated. By reading the book, readers will hopefully go through a constantly transforming process between familiarizing and defamiliarizing along with the research tandem and develop their own understanding of the complex landscape of the specific kindergarten and its children as developing subjects constantly living and transcending the context.

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References Bruner, J. (2012). What psychology should study. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 1(1), 5–13. https://doi.org/10.4471/ijep.2012.01 He, M., & Ji, Y. F. (2020). Setting the stage: kindergarten in China as beginning of schooling. In S. Xu & P. Marsico (Eds.),Where culture grows: social ecology of a Chinese kindergarten. Springer International Publishing. Meng, W. Q., & Heuschkel, J. (2020). Small images of a big world: children’s drawings in a Chinese kindergarten. In S. Xu & P. Marsico (Eds.),Where culture grows: social ecology of a Chinese kindergarten. Springer International Publishing. Marsico, G. (2017). Jerome S. Bruner: Manifesto for the future of education/Jerome S. Bruner: manifiesto por el futuro de la educación. Infancia y Aprendizaje, 40(4), 754–781. Marsico, G., & Tateo, L. (2018). Introduction: The construct of educational self. In The emergence of self in educational contexts (pp. 1–14). Cham: Springer. Tateo, L. (2019). Introduction: The inherent ambivalence of educational trajectories and the zone of proximal development with reduced potential. In L. Tateo (Ed.), Educational dilemmas: A cultural psychological perspective. London: Routledge. Tateo, L. (2020). The school as semiotic intercultural arena. In S. Xu & G. Marsico (Eds.), Where culture grows: Social ecology of a Chinese kindergarten. Switzerland: Springer. Tateo, L., Español, A., Kullasepp, K., Marsico, G., & Palang, H. (2018). Five gazes on the border: A collective auto-ethnographic writing. Human Arenas, 1(2), 113–133. Valsiner, J. (2007). Culture in minds and societies: Foundations of cultural psychology. New Delhi: Sage Publications India. Valsiner, J. (2009). Cultural psychology today: Innovations and oversights. Culture & Psychology, 15(1), 5–39.

Chapter 2

Dialogues on Basic Educational Needs: East and West Xiaowen Li, Shuangshuang Xu, and Giuseppina Marsico

Cultural evolvement in the Chinese context shares some commonality with other countries, such as the influence of informatization and globalization, under which capitalism and technology have become two main principles organizing social life. Meanwhile, it has its own unique characteristics derived from the cultural variety of vast territory and large population, one-child policy for controlling the population and rapid revolution, development and correction in this country. All these factors have converged and formed a chaotic state in the transition of cultural evolvement. Under the background of radical social transformation, neither traditional Chinese cultural systems nor Western values can be taken as ready-made standards for people to understand their social life practice. New practice calls for new values to understand itself and the re-constructing process of value systems can present itself as disorder to some extent. In our practice, we have observed some special problems, which deserve to be further discussed.

X. Li East China Normal University, Shanghai, China X. Li · S. Xu (B) · G. Marsico IBEF, Shanghai, China e-mail: [email protected] S. Xu Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark G. Marsico University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_2

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Basic Abilities in Children’s Daily Life Practice Our previous researches in Shanghai have found out that a lack of perspective-taking skills in interactional processes exists in different age groups from college students to kindergarten children in the Chinese setting. Popular college students can integrate perspectives of both sides and perceive others’ humors well in the interaction, while students using strategies of repression or aggression in the interaction cannot take others’ perspectives, nor can they sense humor in the interaction (Hua, 2014). In primary school, children diagnosed with ADHD have low ability of taking others’ perspectives and having dialogues with others (Wu, 2016). Weakness in perspectivetaking skills and goal orientation is also typical of children with behavioral problems in kindergarten (Xu, 2017). The series of above problems has raised our concern. When analyzing and inferring possible underlying reasons, we paid more and more attention to the practice in Chinese family and educational system. Tendency of utilitarianism of the educational process is more and more obvious in the context of Chinese families and schools. As “4-2-1” being the typical structure of Chinese family, the only child lives in a single apartment separated from other families and is usually surrounded by several adult family members. There are few opportunities for the child to practice his interpersonal skills and to take on responsibilities of housework. Parents apply Western cultures according to their own understandings and sometimes may ruin an otherwise clever plan. Some families only attend to the child’s physical needs and ignore his social and cultural development. Oppose to this kind of “free-range” rearing practice, others believe in the slogan of “Never letting your child lose at the starting point” and can be so anxious about the child’s intelligent development that they sign up so many extra classes for the child. When entering into formal school education, the deficiency of basic abilities cannot be compensated. In basic education, standardization and technicalization are regarded as being “scientific,” which takes the form of “scientific management” with analytical rationality as its key principle. Standardized exams bring about mechanical training in the learning process, which reduces the quality of the teaching process and harms students’ interest in learning. Humanity, which is naturally expressed and experienced in interactional processes, are now gradually replaced by the principle of technology. Being “human” is reduced to some tools and knowledge to be obtained from outside. For example, nowadays, parents would sign up for extra classes on “emotional management” to solve relational problems encountered by their children. Training classes for parents are becoming more and more popular. Concrete and sometimes even rigid instructions are provided to anxious parents. In these cases, flexibility in concrete contexts is disappearing and replaced by rigidity and extremization.

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“Consciousness” as the Key Issue in Deep Psychological Researches The problems concerning perspective-taking and goal orientation revealed in our previous researches have directed our research interest back to the most mysterious and subtle content in psychology: the research of consciousness. Different states of consciousness are involved in young children’s perspective-taking skills and playfulness. A narrow emphasis on scientific learning at a very young age and mechanical training would not only influence children’s cognitive development, but also damage the coherence of their personalities. Difference in conflict resolution and fullness of development can be seen in college students with different interpersonal skills. The development of humor sensing also influences college students’ meaning making of instant contexts. From a microlevel, specific angles and states of consciousness are involved in these processes. To study consciousness, present quantitative tools are far from enough. With “consciousness” as the main concern in research, Vygotsky (1987) emphasized a lot on the search and creation of methods: The search of method becomes one of the most important problems of the entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms of psychological activity. In this case, the method is simultaneously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result of the study. (p. 27)

In the searching for a method, it is essential for the researcher to be sensitive to target phenomenon. As Branco and Valsiner (1997) have pointed out, researchers’ intuitive experience contributes to the whole parts of the methodological cycles. The intuition of the researcher, on one hand, derives from professional training, while on the other hand depends on the degree of socialization/humanization of his senses. Studying consciousness requires researchers to be sensitive to practical problems, go deep into the reality and gradually sharpen himself in the research practice. If the researcher himself is lack of interpersonal practice, he would be unable to notice the target phenomenon, nor could he analyze the complex and multi-layered states of consciousness underlying the phenomenon. We have observed and noticed that nowadays lots of psychology students in China have grown up as the only child and have gone through school education designed for passing exams. Many of them do not have much interpersonal practice and experience, which makes it difficult for them to understand and apply psychological theories, as a thorough digestion of theories requires continuous grasping of real-life practice.

School and Its Societal Functions: The Institutionalized Dramaturgy of Education How to study all these problems that affect the contemporary educational scenario at a global level? We need a renewed perspective on the old educational problems. We think that to interprete school and its societal function as an institutionalized dramaturgy may help in understanding many school process and their

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psycho-social functions. Any educational institution from kindergarten to university can be analyzed as a theatrical stage where—among different stage decorations— different actors enter and exit, produce their performances, involve the participating audience (students) in these, and leave. The dramaturgy of education mimics the macro-theatralization of all of the given society at the given historical time. If one takes the classroom as a place where each student can build and stage her personality at the point of defining herself (Marsico, 2018; Marsico & Tateo, 2018), the dramatization ends up having a terrific relevance in the acquisition of the role of “student” and in structuring the class as a social group.1 The classroom, indeed, becomes the theater where pupils are asked to step into the assigned part: The floor is their stage, the walls are part of the scenography, the toys become props, the school aprons and the uniforms are the costumes of the dramatization and the teacher is the director. We could call it the “Theater of cultural reality,” a sort of representation— that takes place in the school system—of the culturally guided construction of an individual and collective self. Once the school context has been taken as the “Theater of cultural reality,” it is possible to interpret the data obtained from the observation conducted in schools (as that made, for example, by our research tandems) by paying attention to the construction of three fundamental school dimensions: “The pupil as actor and author,” “The class as theater company” and “The teacher as a director”. The Student as an Actor–Author Entering a new reality always constitutes an important moment in the identity construction of the child. Crossing the school threshold, however, does not imply automatically to become a pupil. The student is not yet a student, she is a child to whom the adults ask to become an actor, to perform the “part” and represent a new self in a new life context. It is a process of dramatization, regulated by the teacher-director, which finds its fulfillment in the school environment. In this way, the child becomes an actor, who not just repeats a pre-given script without any creative effort, but an “actor–author” who re-writes and re-signifies herself in the role of “pupil.” By observing school activities that are usually carried out in the first weeks of the first school year, it is clear how welcoming children is functional to the development of this new identity. The child is the canvas to work on, an original nucleus from which dramatization begins. For this reason, the very first reception activities in the kindergartens see pupils engaged in the presentation of themselves both orally (“I am a child, my name is Mark, I am 4 years old, my parents are called Paul and Anna”) or by drawing their family’s portrait. They are simple categories from which to start the school dramaturgy. They are the foundations of the characters of the dramatization. They are usually external characteristics that children are aware of and in which they can find an identity anchor to face a new reality (I am a boy, my name is Mark, I am 4 years old, etc.). These categories are then enriched, (especially in primary school), by the reference to psychological traits and personal inclinations (I am a good child, I like playing football). Then, a connection has progressively created in the classroom between 1 The authors want to thank Federica Pascaretta (University of Salerno) for her insightful suggestions

of the notion of dramatization in the school context.

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different presentations of the self (Komatsu, 2019) and the role of pupil (I am Mark, I am responsible, I am diligent etc.). However, the dramatization does not happen only in the classroom, rather it anticipates the same school activity: It is in the dressing rooms of the theater that the actor wears the costume of the character; it is in the family dimension that the child dresses the pupil’s clothes. Dressing up the uniform is a preparatory stage that widens the boundaries of dramatization, creating a bridge between school and family setting. The clothes are never semantically neutral and even those that the child has to wear to become a pupil mediate meanings: They symbolize respect and adherence to class norms and become an instrument for creating personal and collective cultures. Here, we may find an exemplification of Valsiner’s laminal model of internalization/externalization (Valsiner, 1997): Moral rules and messages must be internalized and integrated into the personal-cultural-intrapsychological world of the pupil; the same messages are, then, further transformed and externalized allowing action in the collective cultural world. The Class as Theater Company In kindergarten (and primary school) during the first days of the new school year, the dramatization for acquisition of the new role as a pupil goes hand in hand with the construction of the class as a group. In line with the traced metaphor, each pupil–actor–author is part of a larger group, a sort of “theater company.” Like the actors of a theater company, children coordinate their selves by staging a unique and spectacular representation. Building a group class is not always easy, but it is a necessary and even mandatory in some educational system. The teacher’s task is to connect individualities by developing students’ social and relational skills. Dramatizations serve as the scope of promoting a sense of “we-ness” and belonging. How does it happen? There are two different, but complementary ways: via collective and coordinates tasks (singing, making a joint draw, dancing, etc.) or via rigorous respect of daily routines that implies a coordinated distribution of responsibilities (like cleaning the classroom). Dramatization conveys hypergeneralized meanings, facilitates the understanding and integration of the school’s rules in the intrapersonal sphere of the child (Valsiner, 2014) and allows the action of the latter in the own extra-personal sphere. The Teacher as a Director Having outlined in the previous paragraphs the importance of developing the role of the pupil–actor–author and of the class as a theater company, we now turn our gaze to the last protagonist of the school dramatization: the teacher. In a school conceived as “Theater of cultural reality,” what can the role of the teacher be if not that of a director? To accomplish the functions that this role entails, the teachers use verbal and non-verbal communication methods: especially in the kindergartens, the use of emphasized utterances is common (“But you are really very gooooood! In a few days you will do everything alone”, “Look at the disorder in the classroom, you make the teacher almost crying,”) marked by theatrical gestures and accentuated by facial expressions. Thus, dramatization also affects the teachers.

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What is evident here is the “non-neutrality” of the teacher’s role. The teacher is deeply bounded by her culture. Socially shared values and constraints find in the teacher an ideal speaker in the school system. According to Vygotsky (1987), psychological development can be understood as a process of internalization of cultural forms and the teacher is not exempt from this mechanism. Since the birthday each individual is immersed in a world that pre-exists, what welcomes her is a cultural uterus with its myriad of practices and belief systems to be internalized. However, this process is not passive since it involves personal reinterpretation of collective culture. Therefore, the teacher is immersed in a socio-cultural system and his activity as a mediator between the symbolic-cultural systems and the individual mind of the pupil is deeply conditioned by the socio-cultural fabric. The very idea that the teacher has of the pupils derives from her socio-cultural system. The “imagined child” (in the teacher’s mind) is asked to be good, diligent and orderly disciplined. The teacher’s action remains circumscribed within a specific “window of possibilities” (Tateo, 2019): A culturally and historically determined window that defines what can be considered acceptable and what is not in the developmental trajectory. The idealization of the pupil as the diligent and submissive student excludes infinite other options in the construction of the “imagined child.” The teacher cannot escape from this influence, yet she may be aware of this ongoing process so that the window of possibility does not preclude the educational possibilities of each child. The teacher as director is, therefore, called to a further act of responsibility in supporting the identity construction of the pupil–actor–author within the school context. We do hope to have provided the reader with some coordinates to analyze the current debate about the educational needs in Eastern and Western societies, both of which are suffering from the lack of a robust theoretical framework to investigate the local specificities of the educational practices.

References Branco, A. U., & Valsiner, J. (1997). Changing methodologies: A co-constructivist study of goal orientations in social interactions. Psychology and Developing Societies, 9(1), 35–64. Hua, Y. J. (2014). The study towards college students’ types interaction and problems formulation on the perspective of achievement motivation and sense of humor, Master’s degree thesis. East China Normal University. Komatsu, K. (2019). Meaning-making for living. The emergence of the presentational self in children’s everyday dialogues. New York: Springer. Marsico, G. (2018). The challenges of the schooling from cultural psychology of education. Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Sciences, 52(3), 474–489. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124018-9454-6 Marsico, G., & Tateo, L. (Eds.). (2018). Cultural Psychology of Education: Vol. 8. The emergence of self in the educational contexts. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Tateo, L. (2019). Educational dilemmas. A cultural psychological perspective. London: Routledge. Valsiner, J. (1997). Culture and the development of children’s action. New York: Wiley. Valsiner, J. (2014). An invitation to cultural psychology. London: Sage.

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Vygotsky, L. (1987). The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky. Vol. 4: The history of the development of higher mental functions. New York: Plenum Press. Xu, S. S. (2017). An ecological evaluation and tentative intervention study of maladaptive children in kindergarten, Master’s degree thesis. East China Normal University. Wu, W. J. (2016). An ecological evaluation study and tentative intervention of ADHD students in primary school, Master’s degree thesis. East China Normal University.

Chapter 3

Setting the Stage: Kindergarten in China as Beginning of Schooling He Min and Yunfei Ji

“What is a Chinese kindergarten like?”, “What does that mean when a kid go into a Kindergarten in China?” The probably answer will be “a school for young kids!”, “If children go to kindergarten, that means they go to school, they need to adapt to life in the group, obey social rules in kindergarten and listen to teacher’s direction, they should learn from what teachers”. These points of view on Kindergarten not only in ordinary people’s mind but also write into Chinese national kindergarten educational regulations and also in practice. Firstly, school-liked kindergarten accept much more children than those home like. most kindergartens are large scale with much more children, usually a kindergarten with 200 children is smaller one, ordinary will accept 300–400 children, the biggest one can have more than 500 children. Similar aged groups in parallel classrooms, with about 30–50 young children in one group with 3 adults, usually two teachers and one nursery. The assumption seems young children need to reduce their movement and aim at primary school. Thus, play and individualized activities or group activities are short and tidily arranged as the collective teaching, although looks looser than the teaching activity. Teachers should prepare their lessons carefully and precisely every sentences he or she would speak, arrange or design the sections of activity. Children in kindergarten frequently ask why “we cannot play for longer time in kindergarten?” The answer from the adults will be: “because you come to learn to have ability”. Learning is highlighted in Chinese kindergarten, or why the parents should send their children to here? How can the young children to get prepared to enter into school also a big point. Since more and more early childhood education professions in China try to proposed integrative learning instead of fields divided teaching, most Chinese kindergartens try to implement theme activity with local government (educational committee) provide topics to help the teachers easily organize activities connect with the topic like the spring, in which children can talk about what they know H. Min (B) · Y. Ji East China Normal University, Shanghai, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_3

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about spring, where the sign of spring, what they feel. They can draw and paint something or their own thought of spring or do something like making nest for birds, decorating classroom with something have tings of spring or take care of seeds, observe it sprouting and recording the process of it’s growing, counting the dates and measuring the length of the stems, learn a song about spring is also an choice. In this way, children get experiences, knowledge and skills in different learning fields. Usually one topic in one month. In this manipulate and playful way, hope to balance young children’s nature and the requirement of learning from society. Still it’s hard for the teacher who will take care of more than 30 young children in on classroom. So some business software and procedure were developed by company to sale to the kindergartens and can share within one kindergarten that release teachers from large amount of work for preparation, following the electrical procedure or sometimes with fewer alter. Of course children can have some opportunity to do some individualized tasks or those with their peers, like exploration, drawing and painting, dramatic play and so on in corners, as well as some times for outdoor movement or play but the time is limited. All these we call connect with play which is different from the way of learning in primary school but still under teachers initiation and direction. Visitors from overseas keep on asking when Chinese children play in kindergarten, do they have time to play? Why Chinese don’t provide longer time for young kids to play? The answer is playful is play, and we try to provide play besides learning, or combined play with learning.

Playful Teaching and Learning Children are born to learn through plenty of informal way, playing, experiencing, communication, movement and so on. These ideas are mainly coming from western and influenced all of the world, Japanese get it firstly, combined learning with play. Chinese kindergarten also accept play, but the different way. If we can say, western countries kindergarten is play based, earlier westernized Japanese kindergarten is play based with learning, then Chinese kindergarten will be teaching and learning based with limited play. We try to develop playful courses but obviously lack free play. There have five fields of learning or development in Chinese National Kindergarten Educational guidelines (2001, 2012): health, language, social and emotion, science include mathematics and art. From 1996, national kindergarten regulation put play as the basic activity in kindergarten. Yet in practice, learning and teaching still powerful, still the main creed in Chinese early childhood education. Kindergartens use play, playful activity and collective teaching replace the strict learning products like in primary schools, but still, five fields teaching and learning is quite busy for young children and teachers, they rush from one section to another.

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Play is a tool for learning or teaching method, and lost it’s original meaning as the children’s own activity, by which children can initiate what they want to do, make judgments and decisions, express themselves and communicate with others.

A Revolution: Returning Play to Young Children From the late of 1980, preschool educational reform start to change school-like kindergarten, Western early childhood curriculum models were introduced into and some professionals realized that young children need more time to play, they push central government to clear and definite play as the basic activity in kindergarten. Some but still few kindergartens keep play as their specialization, children can make some choice and decision on what to do, how to do, with whom to do what, but is still time-limited. Many corner materials and decoration are planned and designed by teachers, with certain play rules which can be games, which in Chinese words means play but not free play. The different from teaching can be that we want children learn with delight and joy, reduce teacher-centered but still obviously teacher-controlled or teacher-given. In practice, it’s difficulty for teachers to arrange the free play due to the local government control specific things like the environment decoration, topics of the themes and schedule, as well as they evaluate teacher by her collective teaching, environment creation include material providing, nursery work and some action research, as well as class scale as 30 at least from 4 years old children. From an ecological point of view, there needs to be more support to kindergarten teachers like space, less classroom scale, less un-educational tasks but autonomy and psychological knowledge to understand young children. To summarize—kindergarten in China is more like a garden for young children. Still we are on the way to restore the richness of play into the setting.

Chapter 4

Cultural Objects at ECNU Kindergarten Tabea Eimer

Cultural objects are meant to transmit cultural knowledge such as ideals, values, and symbols. To know one’s own culture enables people not only to understand people within that culture better, but it also allows an intercultural understanding. Moreover, it defines someone’s identification and the evolutionary identity such as ancestral values. In a study conducted in the US by Johnson (1980), cardboard and paper-maché turkeys have been found in several public school classrooms. They represent the holiday of thanksgiving that is not celebrated in all parts of the world and is therefore part of the national culture. Further, cultural knowledge can create an understanding of how it influences one’s own values, views, actions, and sophisticated relations with the social world. Cultural objects or material artifacts can be “an integral part of the process of sociocultural transmission” (Johnson, 1980, p. 173). Objects, artifacts, language, and behavior are means through which norms, beliefs, values, and roles can be conveyed. Therefore, it can be seen as “a mechanism for socialization and enculturation into national society and culture” (Johnson, 1980, p. 174). Cultural objects can be used as a meaning-making unit or as simple colorful decorations (Granly & Maagerø, 2012). When looking at Chinese traditional cultural values, some elements are of great importance in relation to education: emphasizing ethical and moral self-cultivation, stressing collectivism, worshiping traditions, and adoring authorities (Wang & Mao, 1996). This study was particularly interested in the objects connected to culture displayed at ECNU kindergarten. The focus was put on their location, the cultural meaning it was supposed to convey and the function that it has. We had to work under seasonal limits of the Chinese educational system. Our project took place during summer time, and all objects and decorations had been taken down in the classrooms, and only the ones in the hallways were displayed. Hallways are, however, often underestimated for their role that they can play in education. They can be as much of an educational T. Eimer (B) University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_4

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setting as a classroom, especially for young children since they tend to explore all of their surroundings, rather than being selective on the importance a place can play. In that case, they can be a tool for secondary education as opposed to the direct and primary education happening inside the classroom. For instance, if the color red and its importance and meaning are discussed in class, the continuous exposure with that color in the hallways can further manifest that knowledge. The objects are placed in the halls all around the kindergarten on all floors and in the stairways. The children are generally in their classroom throughout the day. The time they spend in the hallways is when they walk through them in the morning on their way to class and occasionally, when they walk through them as a group to go outside and go upstairs to the nap room every afternoon. Therefore, the time the children spend in the hallways is very limited. Some objects in the kindergarten are specifically meant to educate about the Chinese culture. We have taken the opportunity and assessed all the objects and materials connected to culture in the hallways of the kindergarten. The objects related to culture that were present in the hallways at ECNU kindergarten have been photographed, and a Chinese has given information on how he would interpret their meaning. Additionally, it was taken into consideration what the general and historical meaning of each of the objects is.

The Objects at ECNU Kindergarten Categories The objects displayed at ECNU kindergarten have been categorized into five different groups: artifacts, linguistic landscape, wall objects, drawings, and play. Artifacts can be defined as an object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest (“Artifact,” n.d.) as it comes from Latin and literally translates from arte (by skill) and factum (something made). An example at ECNU is the Yueqin, also called Chinese Lute or Moon Guitar (Fig. 4.1). It is one of the most famous traditional Chinese instruments still used in contemporary Chinese music with a very high cultural value. The Yueqin was placed on the wall in the all-purpose room at 1.20–1.50 m above the wall in one of the corners with music lines drawn behind it. Another example for an artifact is the Chinese knots, which were placed above the door to the classroom (Fig. 4.2). They are part of Chinese folk art and have their origin in the Tang and Song Dynasty (Charles, 1996). Nowadays, they are a decorative handicraft that is supposed to ward off evil spirits. They are commonly made out of red yarn, which is considered to be the color of luck in Chinese culture. A linguistic landscape is per definition the “visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region” (Landry & Bourhis, 1997, p. 23). In this case, objects that contain Chinese characters which are included

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Fig. 4.1 Chinese Lute Guitar. Photo Eimer

Fig. 4.2 Chinese knotting. Photo Eimer

into this category. An example is a paper roll like picture frame with a jingle written in traditional and simplified characters (Fig. 4.3). On the left side is orange writing written from left to right in five lines. On the right is black writing from top to bottom in a single line. The category of wall objects includes objects placed on the walls with cultural elements displayed at ECNU kindergarten. On one of the staircases was a representation of “Journey to the West” by Wu Cheng’en which is one of four great classical

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Fig. 4.3 Jingle. Photo Eimer

novels of the Chinese literature written during the Ming Dynasty (Wu, 2012). The four characters Tang Sanzang, Sun Wukong, Zhu Baje, and Sha Wujing are represented in a child-friendly manner. Even though this story is intended for adults, the idea is introduced to the children in the way of child-friendly figures. It is not clear if this story is part of a classroom lesson during the regular school year at ECNU kindergarten. Many different drawings in the traditional Chinese drawing style can be found at ECNU kindergarten, especially of people representing different ethnic groups. Most of the time, a combination of a drawing and a poem were displayed to convey a certain message. During kindergarten, it is often expected that children are able to recite stories and poems as it is believed that reciting the classics makes a person a great learner (Wang & Mao, 1996). Figure 4.4 shows a farmer working on the field in the heat with the sun represented as an orange ball. The poem talks about hardworking farmers and that people should cherish what they eat. The entire message shows the hard-working farmer that is essential to produce food and to be grateful for what they do. It is a big part of the Chinese culture to adore authorities and respect the elderly (Wang & Mao, 1996). In this case, respect for the working people that provide food is asked for. The drawings are rather big (about 1.50 m from bottom to top) with their bottom line at about 1 m distance from the floor or higher. The drawing of the farmer was placed at the bottom of the staircase. There are many

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Fig. 4.4 Hard-working farmer. Photo Eimer

other examples showing lakes and lotus that are part of everyday life of the Chinese people (Figs. 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7). The category play means the incorporation of Chinese artifacts in objects that the children can interact with physically. One example is the dragon that serves as the head of the entrance to climbing frame outside (Fig. 4.8). The dragon is deeply embedded into Chinese culture and stands for strength, power, and good Fig. 4.5 Drawing of a lake with swans. Photo Eimer

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Fig. 4.6 Drawing of a lake with lotus and birds. Photo Eimer

Fig. 4.7 Drawing of lotus. Photo Eimer

luck. As opposed to most western cultures, the dragon is a good creature. Especially, considering the climbing frame, strength, and power seem like a fitting symbol to use as these can be difficult to use as a child, and physical as well as mental strength might be necessary to overcome the obstacle.

Function of the Objects There are many different aspects that might play a role when looking at the function of the cultural objects at ECNU kindergarten. Generally, the kindergarten displays a large variety of cultural objects that are high in quality and effort. ECNU kindergarten puts a big emphasis on not only the education of traditional Chinese culture, but also on writing. Especially, the drawings are detailed and represent traditional Chinese drawings. Many of them include writing in form of a small poem, but writing is also present on its own. The displacement

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Fig. 4.8 Dragon on outdoor climbing-frame. Photo Eimer

drawings artifacts wall objects non -cultural objects

14 Classroom

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Entrance

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Drama/Music room

10 11 12

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First floor

Fig. 4.9 Approximate map of the kindergarten’s first floor. Numbers indicate figure numbers of objects referred to in the text

of the objects is very diverse, and all possibilities are used: high up and low on the walls, the ceiling, and the doorframes. Figure 4.9 shows an approximate map of the first floor of ECNU kindergarten to give an example of the setup. The entrance area is decorated with non-cultural

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objects such as a turtle. When one walks further down the hall, some more noncultural drawings can be seen before entering the music and drama room. Here, drawings of different ethnic groups with instruments are displayed above the big 2 m high and 3 m wide mirror (Figs. 4.10, 4.11, and 4.12). Also, instruments are placed on the wall with music lines behind them (Fig. 4.13). Further, there is a display cabinet with more instruments that are all specific for Chinese culture. Behind the music room is a hall that leads to the classroom. In the doorframe, Chinese knots are hanging down which require adults to walk through them with their head when entering the classroom (Fig. 4.2). The children cannot reach them unless a rather tall child would jump up. Next to the classroom is a staircase leading up to the second floor. On the walls of the staircase is a drawing of mountains in traditional Chinese style (Fig. 4.14). Generally, more traditional Chinese drawings can be found on the walls of the second floor. There are two staircases, one in the front

Fig. 4.10 Drawings of different ethnic groups. Photo Eimer

Fig. 4.11 Drawings of different ethnic groups. Photo Eimer

4 Cultural Objects at ECNU Kindergarten Fig. 4.12 Drawings of different ethnic groups. Photo Eimer

Fig. 4.13 Traditional Chinese instruments. Photo Eimer Fig. 4.14 Drawing in traditional Chinese style. Photo Eimer

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Fig. 4.15 Further drawing of the staircase area. Photo Eimer

of the building and one in the back of the building that are leading to the next floor. Most of them have drawings on the walls (Fig. 4.15). On the walls of one staircase, the four characters from the story “Journey to the West” are hung up (Fig. 4.16). The second floor shows a lot of drawings, but also poems that have either been written directly on the wall or a displayed in a picture frame (Fig. 4.17). On the third floor, most of the artifacts are displayed in little wood frames (Fig. 4.18). Some of them are Chinese, others are gifts from researchers and other visitors that have been to the kindergarten. Moreover, pictures of staff, events, and the history of the kindergarten are displayed on this floor. The true function of the objects is not clear from the first thought. A recent study has asked children visiting Chinese public kindergartens to rate their environment (Chen & Wang, 2018). They generally had positive attitudes toward the functions of non-decorative materials. However, they rated decorations on the wall less positive. Especially, when the decorations had no clear role in the daily activities, they were rated more negatively as the purpose and function were not clear to the children. Moreover, some children complained that they could not see the decoration clearly as it was placed too high. This is inline with our observation at ECNU kindergarten: Fig. 4.16 Characters of “Journey to the West”. Photo Eimer

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Fig. 4.17 Second floor of ECNU kindergarten. Photo Eimer

Fig. 4.18 Artifact displayed in a wooden frame. Photo Eimer

Many of the objects are rather placed on an adult’s eye level. The same result was obtained in a study conducted in Norway, where the placement of objects appeared “to be more suitable for adults than for children because the texts are often in a physically high position from a child’s perspective” (Granly & Maagerø, 2012, p. 380). In order to be solely of educational purpose for the children, the objects would need to be displayed in a child-friendly manner. Especially, the objects from the category drawings are very big and require the children to look up.

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Since the children do not spend much time in the hallways and these are not a daily part of teaching tools, an active meaning-making of these objects seems to be limited. Here, the mere exposure effect comes into play (Zajonc, 1968). A more positive attitude can be created by repeated exposure to a certain stimulus, which has to be accessible to the individual’s perception. This would be the case of peripheral exposure at ECNU kindergarten. Even though there is not necessarily direct interaction with these objects, they are part of what is seen by the children every day.

Conclusions Generally, the objects create an atmosphere within the Chinese culture. They can serve as passage zones (Marsico, He, & Valsiner, 2018) for implicit education. Even though the children do not spend a lot of time in the halls, the use of colors and style of drawings can be part of an implicit education that does not intend for the children to interact with them directly. Just for the children, to take a quick look at an object will create a learning process of familiarization. By explicitly choosing objects and drawings that are typical and representative for the culture and not random drawings that will appeal to a child, a conscious educational scheme can be created in which the children can identify within the Chinese culture. They can reinforce a national identity with the idea to form that identity of a child in the early years. Corridors should be seen as more than a functional setting, but a space to which decoration emphasizes the set of meanings and values, as well as a place that affects the way humans project into the environment (Cornejo, Marsico, & Valsiner, 2018). As expressed by Valsiner (2018), cultural objects fill the peripheral sensory system with images of cultural suggestions which is an act of constructive externalization. Therefore, the corridors are transferred into “culturally meaningful architectural spaces that act as psychological tools of semiotic mediation” (Marsico et al., 2018, p. 75). It is therefore not crucially necessary for a person to consciously notice an object. The repeated exposure to any object, but especially to an appealing one, can already have an effect on a person’s identity and form the basis for the formally learned knowledge in the later school years. Another aspect concerning the function of the objects can be the representativeness of the kindergarten toward parents and other people visiting. Especially, parents that consider sending their children to the kindergarten can see all the effort and creativity that have been put into making the halls look inviting and educational. It creates a very welcoming, warm, and “homely” atmosphere in which an educational effort can be recognized. Further, it should be considered what the children are faced with outside of the kindergarten on a daily basis. In the modern world of today, many of the children watch modern cartoons, play educational games on a tablet, or use contemporary toys and games. Therefore, the exposure to traditional Chinese items is diminished. ECNU kindergarten is dealing with that gap between traditional and modern Chinese

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culture by incorporating both in their kindergarten, realizing that children are already faced with the modern items, but lack exposure to the traditional ones. The traditional objects are therefore overly represented in the hallways to fill that gap.

References Artifact. (n.d.). Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary (11th ed.). Retrieved from https://www.mer riam-webster.com/dictionary/artifact Charles, W. (Ed.). (1996). History and science of knots (Vol. 11). World Scientific. Chen, H., & Wang, X. (2018). Children’s evaluation of the physical environment quality in kindergarten: A case study from China. International Journal of Early Childhood, 50(2), 175–192. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-018-0219-7 Cornejo, C., Marsico, G., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.). (2018). I activate you to affect me (Vol. 2). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing. Granly, A., & Maagerø, E. (2012). Multimodal texts in kindergarten rooms. Education Inquiry, 3(3), 371–386. https://doi.org/10.3402/edui.v3i3.22041 Johnson, N. B. (1980). The material culture of public school classrooms: The symbolic integration of local schools and national culture. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 11(3), 173–190. Landry, R., & Bourhis, R. Y. (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), 23–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/026 1927X970161002 Marsico, G., He, M., & Valsiner, J. (2018). Arenas for implicit education: Looking at leftovers. Eesti Haridusteaduste Ajakiri. Estonian Journal of Education, 6(1), 67–76. https://doi.org/10. 12697/eha.2018.6.1.03b Valsiner, J. (2018). Dialogical relationship between open and closed infinities. In G. Marsico & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Beyond the mind: Cultural dynamics of the psyche (pp. 229–244). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing. Wang, J., & Mao, S. (1996). Culture and the kindergarten curriculum in the People’s Republic of China. Early Child Development and Care, 123(1), 143–156. Wu, C. (2012). The journey to the west (Revised ed.). University of Chicago Press. Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025848

Chapter 5

Moral Education in a Shanghai Kindergarten—How Do Children Perceive Social Values and Norms? Isabelle Périard and Junjie Liu

Moral education is one of the main components in kindergarten and school teaching. For instance, social values and norms can be taught during a lesson in kindergarten, but they can also be transmitted through other ways: rules and instructions in daily kindergarten life, as well as learning material such as books or movies can support the moral education. In addition, learning surroundings such as decoration or music can play an important role. In order to understand the behavior and living of an individual culture in a specific place like the Shanghaian kindergarten, it is indispensable to have a closer look at their moral concepts, in order to develop a deeper understanding for these. Regarding these facts, the central questions of our research is in which way these concepts are transmitted to children, and how children internalize them. Social values can be defined as general beliefs about what is good and what is bad, whereas social norms can be derived from those values, specifying how to behave in a specific situation (Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2019). Rules in a kindergarten can help children to develop such values and to form their behavior in order to comply with relevant norms. As moral education is highly influenced by the cultural background and environment, we should have a look at some basic moral concepts that are popular in Chinese society: One important element is the teachings of Confucius. They contain principles for social relations that are based on the five main values of benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, filial piety, and virtue (Allinson, 1989). According to Chen (2001), social harmony, respect for parents and one’s family are essential values in Confucianism. Moreover, looking at the concepts of Buddhism, mercy, thriftiness, and humility are important values for social interaction. Furthermore, the importance of collectivism and one’s dedication to a group of people or one’s family is a strong I. Périard University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg J. Liu (B) East China Normal University, Shanghai, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_5

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belief in Chinese culture, even though it is not only originated from religion (Chen, 2001). For instance, an individual is expected to sacrifice his personal desire in order to serve a large group or his family as a whole. With the foundations of kindergartens in 1949, the People’s Republic of China included some of the traditional values in the education curricula. According to Wang and Mao (1996), education was highly influenced by four main beliefs: worshiping traditions, adoring authorities, stressing collectivism, and emphasizing ethical and moral self-cultivation. For instance, the Chinese tradition was honored by reading classical literature from Confucius to kindergarten kids and a reproduction of the content by the children. As a result, mechanical memorizing became a popular teaching and learning method in China. Adoring the authority and stressing collectivism was important in kindergarten education, as children were expected to devote themselves to their parents and teachers and had to get used to a hierarchical structure of Chinese society. In addition, they were supposed to put collective benefits over their individual needs. A good child should be honest and tolerant, and should not question, what he is told by the teacher. As a consequence, children lost their critical mind and were limited in their development of creativity. Wang and Mao (1996) also described a reform in kindergarten education starting in the 1980s. Due to new developments in national policy in China, the country passed a modernization process and approached an open door policy. Influences from Western cultures lead to new values, such as respecting the child as an individual with personal choices and interests, as well as encouraging creativity. Even though those new Western ideas had changed the educational guidelines, traditional beliefs such as adoring authority remained an important value. The current education curricula, which were released in 2016, focused on four main items, which must be regarded in kindergarten education (Ministry of education of the People’s Republic of China, 2016). Firstly, children have to learn essential living habits, such as taking care of their body hygiene, keeping their surroundings clean, and developing civilized eating habits. Secondly, children have to familiarize with learning habits, such as participating in activities, being friendly with other children, ask questions and develop self-confidence, learn to express thoughts and feelings, master expression and reading habits, and enjoy exploring new learning material. Thirdly, children are expected to develop civilized etiquette, which comprises to love and respect their parents, teachers, and the elderly, as well as to like kindergarten and other children. Children are also asked to comply with collective rules, to help those in trouble, to be honest, polite, and brave and to work in a friendly way with peers, to avoid being noisy and to listen to advices, as well as to learn to love the motherland and to respect and honor the Chinese flag. The fourth main element of the curricula deals with safety consciousness. Children need to learn how to protect themselves, how to behave in traffic, and how to escape from natural disasters. Starting from the cultural and political background of a kindergarten in Shanghai, we were interested in how the moral education in a Shanghaian kindergarten would actually look like. How does moral education take place and how do children perceive moral values and norms? In order to find answers to those questions, we observed kindergarten children aged 4–6 years for a period of five weeks during summer

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classes. The first part of this chapter will deal with our observation of social values, norms, and rules that were expressed in the everyday life of kindergarten and in the children’s learning material. Moreover, we conducted an analysis of one specific picture book, where we examined presented social concepts, values, and norms. The picture story was read to the kindergarten children in order to analyze their understanding and internalization of social values and norms. This analysis can be found in the second part of this chapter.

Observation of Values, Norms, and Rules in Everyday Kindergarten Life Throughout the day in the kindergarten, we observed and analyzed all kind of indices that provided insight into the prevailing values, norms, and rules in the kindergarten. For example, we examined the daily structure in the kindergarten and analyzed daily routines, like practices in class and habits in the classroom. We also looked at the themes or issues that were discussed during the lessons. In addition, we collected directions and instructions that were given to the children by the teachers. There was a special focus on rules of social interaction between children, as well as between children and teachers. Furthermore, we inspected books and short movies that were provided or presented in the kindergarten in order to investigate what kind of moral concepts the children were confronted with through their learning material.

Daily Structure and Routines At the beginning of the day, around 8.30 a.m., the children had to enter the site of the kindergarten by passing through a safety gate where they had to do a quick health check. Only if the result was satisfying (e.g., no increased body temperature), the child was allowed to enter the kindergarten. When entering the classroom, children had about half an hour of free time, which means they could either play with toys, freely move around in the room, or read books (Fig. 5.1). After the free playtime in the morning, there was a daily classroom teaching of one to two hours. Before starting the class, the children had to set up chairs in the shape of a U. Optical orientation lines on the ground were indicating the required positions for the chairs. When starting the class, the teacher usually read out the list of the kindergarten pupils, and each child had to confirm their attendance when hearing its name. Usually, the classes consisted of singing, drawing, or handicraft lessons, or lections given by the teacher. During drawing or music classes, the teacher normally presented a model of the desired picture or music piece, and the children had to copy it. During thematic classroom teachings, the teacher would normally explain the main content and would ask children from time to time to contribute to the class

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Fig. 5.1 Children lining up on orientation lines. Photo Tabea Eimer (2018)

discussion. After finishing the lesson, the pupils had to arrange the chairs in a specific order by stacking one over another. During morning classes, the children could also collectively go to a specific playing area, which was situated in another room. Pupils were allowed to freely move around in this area, but also had to do common pauses that were indicated by the teacher in order to calm down from time to time. Whenever children were leaving the classroom, they had to line up on specific orientation lines until all the kids were ready to go. During the whole morning, children sometimes were instructed to go to drink water. This could happen either collectively with the whole class or in small groups. Children had to line up in front of a water dispenser, to withdraw water from it and to drink it next to the dispenser (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2 Signs on the wall next to the water dispenser. Photo Tabea Eimer (2018)

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After the morning classes and eventual time in the playing area, children usually had another 30 min to play around freely in the classroom. From time to time, children also watched some cartoons or short movies at that moment. Afterward, there was a special time around 11 a.m. that was dedicated to a common lunch in the classroom. Therefore, children had to sit in a fixed seating order. During the whole lunchtime, children were not allowed to talk to each other, since they had to concentrate on their meal process. Children were told to finish their plate or at least try all the different ingredients of the lunch and to not be picky with vegetables. After finishing one’s plate, the children had to bring their used plates to the common food station in the classroom. Thereupon, they were allowed to freely play around in the classroom until all the children had finished their meals. Subsequently, children had a nap time lasting a few hours. Therefore, children and educators had to go to a bedroom, where every children had its own bed place. After the nap time, children had a small snack time in the classroom and some free time to play, until their parents picked them up at around 4–5 p.m.

Themes During Lessons One theme that had a central role in the everyday kindergarten life was music. During lessons, teachers often taught the children how to sing a specific song, how to clap a specific rhythm, or how to do a tongue twister. When a child mastered to copy a music piece correctly, the teacher praised it in front of the class, and other children were applauding. Moreover, the kindergarten also disposed of specific instruments as decoration objects that showed the importance of music in education (cross-reference Tabea). During another lesson, the teacher announced a talent show, meaning that every child could present something it is good at, such as citing a poem, singing a song or presenting a dance. The teacher praised the children for their performance, and all the other pupils were applauding after the show (Fig. 5.3). Another theme that was discussed several times during classes and during free play was the issue of security in everyday life. An example would be a lesson about the impact of the sun on human. In this case, the teacher presented the sun as something dangerous or harmful. The teacher gave advice to the kids, such as using a fan or taking a shower in an appropriate temperature in order to protect oneself from the sun. Afterward, children had to fulfill a corresponding drawing exercise: To draw a red sun (symbolizing the heat of it) with green clothes, which should cool the sun down. Security issues were also discussed with the children when they went to play outside on the playground. The educator urged them not to run too fast or to be careful in the climbing frame, as they might get hurt when they fall down. Another recurring theme was personal hygiene and cleanliness. Teachers repeatedly explained to the children how they need to wash and dry their hands correctly. In addition, the teacher collectively showed to the children how to use a handkerchief in an appropriate way. Furthermore, pupils had a collective moment to go to

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Fig. 5.3 Image on the wall indicating to be silent. Photo Tabea Eimer (2018)

the toilet. Therefore, the educator chose small groups of children and sent one group after another to the bathroom.

Directions and Rules of Social Interaction Teachers communicated different social norms and rules to their pupils. One important norm was to not be noisy in the classroom and to listen to other people when they were speaking. For instance, during the classroom teaching, children were asked to be very silent. When they wished to contribute something to the discussion in class, they had to wait for the teacher’s call to speak and stand up when talking in front of the group. Whenever children were too loud or noisy, it might happen that those children had to sit separately from the rest of the group or even next to the teacher in front of the class. Moreover, there was an emphasis on respecting the speech of other people and looking at the teacher when she was talking. When a child interrupted another child’s or the teacher’s speech, it eventually should remain silent for the rest of the classroom session and was not allowed to contribute anything anymore to the discussion in class. The teacher even demonstrated a special sitting position (back straight, knees together, and hands placed on knees) in order to be calm and attentive. It also happened that teachers announced

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to report the child’s behavior to its main class teacher. Another technique which teachers used in order to calm children down was to exclude them from the activity, which the rest of the class was doing at a specific moment. For instance, when the class was playing in the playing area, a kid that had been noisy beforehand, first had to wait a few moments until it was allowed to play along with the other children. In order to calm down children during free play, the teacher sometimes used a specific clapping rhythm, which was the signal for the children to become silent and listen up. In other situations, the teacher used a special clapping rhythm that leads to a specific song known by the pupils. The children joined the rhythm and sang along with the rest of the group and came together. It also happened that the teacher praised those children in front of the class who were the first ones to tidy up their toys. Following, other children were applauding to those kids and started to tidy up as well. Another social norm that was visible during the classes was to establish a relation of sharing and helping between the children. For instance, during handicraft classes, older children were placed next to younger children to enable them to cooperate to fulfill the task. Moreover, children were asked to friendly share handicraft materials such as scissors. The teacher explicitly taught them to respect other children and to be patient while waiting for the device they needed.

Short Movies The short movies that were presented to the children during our survey period can be divided into movies that induced explicit knowledge to the children and other movies that taught the children moral concepts in a rather indirect, implicit way. To start with the knowledge-inducing movies, there were mostly short episodes that taught children numbers and simple calculations, as well as Chinese characters. For the latter one, the movies contained either short scenes that explained the meaning of the character or a specific shape, or image was shown that was transformed into the corresponding character. During this movie session, we observed children that repeated the information they were watching which seemed like they wished to memorize them, even though they haven’t received any instructions to do so. Another short movie explained the different members of a family, starting with great-grandparents and finishing with great-grandchildren. The short movies that educated moral concepts in a rather implicit way, mostly contained teachings about social values. There were several scenes that depicted actions of sharing as something positive. For instance, figures in a cartoon were sharing a cake or several toys. To support the message of that short movie, a song that motivated to share objects with your friends was played at the end. In another short movie, the concept of helping each other was displayed as something valuable and exemplary. In this example, scenes were presented in which older children were helping younger children to read a book and to use a swing.

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Picture Books In order to examine the impact of moral concepts from picture books, we inspected the bookshelf in the classroom of the group that we observed. Also, we checked the library room of the ECNU kindergarten, which hold a collection of books available for all of the classes in that kindergarten. During this examination, we only included books in our analysis that contained concepts of social values. We found three books that were predominantly dealing with those moral concepts. The book Jumping rope by Xiao (2013) discusses the topics duty and responsibility that people have in the society which they are living in. The story takes place in a fictive world, in which many animals are living together. Every single animal has a special task or profession, like being a police officer or a firefighter, or a milkman. One day, some animals start to do rope skipping, which rapidly becomes the main attraction for all the other animals in that place. The animals keep rope skipping during the whole day. Consequently, no one can fulfill his or her profession anymore, which is the reason why the whole community finds itself in a chaotic state. The animals realize that they need to get back to their jobs if they want the societal system to work. Finally, everyone is doing his or her tasks again, which leads to a functional everyday life. This story can teach children the importance of duties, and that it is essential for the functioning of a society that everyone is fulfilling his or her task reliably. At the end of the picture book, the author also explains the main messages of the books, which is mainly, that you should find a balance between work and free time. Adults should take time to play with their children, and children should try to understand the work of their parents. The picture book Zhu family story by Brown (2009) deals with the subjects of gender discrimination and respecting the mother. Firstly, the picture book presents the family Zhu that consists of the parents Mr. and Mrs. Zhu and their two sons. The mother has to do the whole household by herself whereas her husband and her kids continuously demand her to prepare meals for them. One day, the mother is secretly leaving the house with only a short note saying “You are pigs.” The following days, the father and his two kids struggle at home trying to cook for themselves. As they are looking for food leftover all over the house in order to feed themselves, their heads turn into pig heads. Once the mother is coming back to the house, her family is ready to help her with all the work at home. Finally, the husband and sons are doing the laundry, cleaning the dishes, and helping their mother to cook. Additionally, Mrs. Zhu fixes the car of the family. According to the author, this story book teaches children the masculine side of women, since the mother is fixing the car, which is generally considered as a task for men. It could therefore explain and teach gender equality to children. Moreover, this story book teaches children to respect the mother and to help her in the household. It also demonstrates the family as a network in which the different members should support each other.

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The picture book “David gets in trouble” by Shannon (2002) deals with naughtiness. The storybook is divided in several situations that are displayed on one double page each. In all the situations, David has done something wrong or rude, like breaking the window with a baseball bat or going to school without trousers. Instead of feeling ashamed for his actions, he completely denies his wrongdoings and continuously pretends that he has not done anything wrong or he did not know that what he was doing was wrong. One night, he suddenly wakes up during the night admitting to his mom that he feels guilty. David is apologizing for his behavior. The book ends with a picture showing David in his bed with his mom’s hand tenderly caressing his cheek. David says “I love you, mom.” This book teaches children that they have to take responsibility for their mistakes. It depicts honesty as an important value in children’s everyday life. The story also explains the principle of bad conscience. Even if David seems to succeed with his excuses, he finally cannot support his inner feeling anymore that is telling him that he has done something wrong. In addition to this, the story shows that honest excuses can set aside bad behavior which one has shown in the past. It also depicts the relation between mother and child as something unrestricted, as despite all the wrongdoings of the son, the mother still treats him in a loving way.

Discussion of Observations If we look at the entire picture of the rules, norms, and values that we could explicitly or indirectly observe during our survey period, we can consider some of the moral concepts as recurring and highly influencing the children’s education. To start with the general framework, we can conclude that the way of interaction in the kindergarten had a strong collectivistic orientation. Most time of the day, the children fulfilled activities in a large group, like singing, drawing, having a lesson, moving around in the playing area, etc. In doing so, they did not only do the same kind of activity simultaneously, but actually often did the exact same tasks (e.g., all drawing the same picture). Also, children probably got the impression that it is important for every single member to comply with the group in order to enable the group’s benefit. For instance, when children were lining up on orientation lines in the classroom, every single child had to do this correctly in order to be able to leave the classroom as a group. This way, children also learned to carry out their duties which? They had to their group. The concept of duties was also taught in the story book Jumping Rope (Xiao, 2013), which illustrates the idea as an extreme scenario, stating that society would not function anymore, if the members neglected their obligations for the sake of their amusement. Nevertheless, we have to note that in the kindergarten group, all children have the exact same tasks and do not fulfill special roles as depicted in the storybook Jumping Rope. Despite the collectivistic orientation in this kindergarten, children were also considered as individuals having personal strengths and behavior patterns. For instance, the teacher encouraged the children’s individual capacities when she

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promoted the talent show. Also, children who did something particularly commendable were praised individually in front of the group. The concept of family was demonstrated to children as something honorable and very meaningful. Children learned about different roles of family members through a short movie. Also, two of the storybooks David gets in trouble (Shannon, 2002), Stories from the Zhu family (Brown, 2009) depict family as something respectable and essential in life. Family is presented as something that never breaks apart even though family members do mistakes and wrongdoings. Moreover, social harmony outside of family life was an essential value that was transmitted to the pupils. The children learned to support each other, for example, during handicrafts classes. In addition, the picture book stories from the Zhu family and several short movies put the value of helping each other and sharing goods with each other as something indispensable in life. We could also claim that the concepts of justice and fairness played a role in everyday life in kindergarten. For instance, when kids were not listening to other people’s speeches, they were equally punished. Moreover, when children did not calm down, they were restricted from playing with the others. Furthermore, respecting peers was a very prevalent value in kindergarten education. Children were constantly asked to be friendly with each other and to respect the other children’s contributions to the class discussion. In addition, being silent in class was a very predominant norm. Despite all the values, norms and rules that taught children how to interact with their social environment; they also learned how to take care of themselves. This was realized through the development of healthy eating and drinking habits, and regular hygienic interventions. Additionally, the measures taken for safety such as the health check in the morning and the lessons about protection against the sun can be considered as security measures for the population on the one hand and a useful protection measure for the individual on the other hand. All in all, we can conclude that collectivistic orientation, social harmony, and acting in favor of the group were the most striking concepts that we could observe during summer classes in this kindergarten group. We have to bear in mind that contents might change once the children follow their regular schedule during the school year. Especially, knowledge-related issues, such as traditional Chinese cultures, writings, and readings might play a role that we were not able to observe. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the children’s perception of values, norms, and rules they are confronted with, we conducted a research with the story book David gets in trouble by Shannon (2002). A further discussion of this book, as well as the results of our interviews with the kindergarten children can be found in the second part of this chapter.

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Theme Interpretation of David Gets in Trouble (By David Shannon) Picture Books as an Instrument to Assess Children According to Piaget’s theory, children in kindergartens are mainly at the stage of concrete image thinking (Liu & Deng, 2013). Therefore, picture stories with rich colors, images, and texts naturally become a common form of early reading in kindergartens. Not only do picture books meet the characteristics of children’s physical and mental development, but they are also deeply loved by them. In addition, they often contain some social values. In many kindergartens, after reading picture books with children, teachers do ask children, “What do you think this story tells us?” Afterward, the teacher will explain the truth or values from the picture book from her/his perspective. Normally, picture books do not directly tell the moral message, but invite children to understand and identify the main idea of the story, which afterward might lead to a thinking process about values. In China, teachers or parents often ignore children’s ideas and are used to impose their ideas on children under the slogan “I’m all for your good.” Children are often passive recipients whose initiative is not given a chance to develop. For instance, parents normally choose the topic of the picture book according to their own needs to educate children. However, relevant studies have found that in the moral education activity of picture books, adults often replace children’s moral judgments with their own moral judgments, ignoring that the appreciation of picture books often has different understandings and feelings due to individual factors such as individual cognitive level, imagination, gender, previous life, and reading experience (Zheng, 2011). Adults tend to ignore children’s thoughts and reactions and tend to instill their own ideas into children. Most studies on the interpretation of picture books mainly focus on primary school students and few studies on the interpretation of picture books from the perspective of younger children. Day (1996) used interviews and group discussions to listen to the voices of the third- and fourth-grade students, understood the contents of picture books they had noticed, and realized that the style of art and text affected the meaning perceived by students (Day, 1996). Mantei and Kervin (2015) surveyed fourth-grade (9–10 years old) students’ explanations of the information conveyed in the pictorial books using the pictorial books without letters as research tools. The study found that students interpret a cultural custom, such as sitting on the floor, as poverty; they still think that Africa is a poor country, while Australia is a rich, civilized, and superior country. Students from multicultural areas have a superficial understanding of the world’s people. Researchers point out that teachers should seize the opportunity to explore limited concepts and expand students’ and their own cultural awareness (Mantei & Kervin, 2015). There are also researches on young children, such as Zheng and Liu (2013), which use wordless picture books as reading materials to make an in-depth and detailed analysis of children’s picture comprehension ability in large classes (Zheng & Liu, 2013). Zhou and Li (2016) analyzed the characteristics

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of children’s observation, imagination, and language expression in the process of reading picture books from a psychological perspective (Zhou & Li, 2016). Han (2017) used one-to-one semi-structured interviews and analysis of children’s works to understand the theme interpretation of the picture book story for children aged 5–6 and the methods and strategies these children used to interpret the theme of the picture book. Since children are often more authentic, realistic, and tend to think in a simple way, it is very necessary and valuable to do research about picture books with a focus on children. Therefore, we selected the picture book “David gets in trouble” by Shannon (2002) as our research material. Our idea was to firstly examine the level of understanding of this picture book by children since comprehension is necessary in order to enable the children to proceed with a thinking process about the content of the stories. Secondly, we were interested in the internalization of moral concepts that the children might have withdrawn from the story. We wanted to investigate whether pupils had distinct opinions about David’s behavior or how those opinions have developed through their education.

Interviewing Children The research method adopted in this study is mainly the interview method. Through a series of interview questions and follow-up questions to understand children’s understanding of the content of the picture book, we hope to gain understanding of their behavior and meaning construction. Specifically, the following questions were studied: (1) Children’s understanding of David’s behavior and behavioral results; (2) Children’s interpretation of David’s personality characteristics; (3) Children’s understanding of the theme of the picture book story and the understanding of moral concepts. In order to analyze the development of social norms, we also asked children, what kind of ideas their close relatives or educators would have about David and his character. More specifically, we mainly asked the following questions: Can you tell me what you are most interested in the story? How do you feel after listening to this story?/Do you have anything to say? Do you like this story? Why? Do you like David in the story? Why? What kind of kid do you think he is? Do you think that naughty is good/not good? Why? Do you think the adults at home or kindergarten teachers will like David in the story? Why? Do you think kindergarten kids will like David? Why? What would you do if you accidentally got into trouble in your life?

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Do you have any questions about the story? The children’s narratives were recorded and transcribed in time on the same day. In the process of transcription, we have tried our best to restore children’s language and mood words or words that can express their emotions, in order to be able to deeply analyze children’s understanding of this picture book. A total of 17 children aged 4–6 years in the kindergarten summer class in Shanghai were selected. The children had not read the test picture book beforehand. The researcher and the child read the picture book together, telling the child the text on each page, and asking the child to describe and explain the events on the pictures. The research material selected in this study is one of the works of the American author David Shannon’s selection of the world’s best-selling picture books series, David gets in trouble (2002). The reasons for choosing this book are mainly: (1) Suitable for young children’s age characteristics. This picture book is moderate in length, with only a small amount of text on each page. It mainly conveys information to readers in the form of rich pictures, which conform to the age characteristics of children aged 4–6 years. (2) The content of picture book is close to children’s daily life, so as to avoid the influence of content beyond children’s life experience on research results. (3) The story contains different types of David’s behavior and behavioral results, which is consistent with the research purpose of this study. (4) As each page comprises a new situation, children can easily follow the story book, even if they would not understand several situations.

Children’s Understanding of David’s Behavior and Behavioral Outcomes In this picture book, David shows a variety of behaviors, and different behaviors lead to different results. For example, David skated at home and knocked the table down. He forgot to wear his trousers and went out. He said that his homework was taken away by the puppy, dragged the cat’s tail, made a face when taking photos, and so on. The researchers also had their own interpretations and ideas when reading this picture book. After reading and interviewing with the children, the children gave us a lot of surprises with their unique perspectives. Children’s understanding of meaning is influenced by visual perception and other factors, including the development of experience, concepts, and knowledge (Yu, 2012). Therefore, they have different thinking characteristics, ideas, and unique life experiences from adults. They have richer, more interesting, and strong personal characteristics to understand and construct David’s behavior and its results. Now, the interpretation of children is presented as follows:

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Young Children Can Accurately Observe the Behavior of the Characters, but Not the Results Caused by the Behaviors The study found that almost all children could observe David’s behaviors in this picture book. For example, children correctly observed that David is skateboarding, playing baseball, etc., but nearly half of the children were not able to fully tell the results of David’s behaviors. Some of the children could only notice the complete content of the picture after being questioned by the researchers. For example, David knocked down the table by skateboarding, but some children understood this situation as following: Interviewer Child 1 Interviewer Child 1

David said that I didn’t mean it. What is David doing? Skateboarding at home. And then? Then, he played and fell down.

Another child only focused on David’s skateboarding behavior: Interviewer David said I didn’t mean it. What’s David doing? Child 2 Play. These two children could observe David’s skateboarding behavior, but they could not notice the result or the relationship between the behavior and the result caused by David’s skateboarding at home. According to Piaget’s theory, children in the preoperation stage only pay attention to or concentrate on one aspect of a situation at the same time (Liu & Deng, 2013), so some children have inadequate understanding of the characters in this picture book, which will also affect their understanding of the theme of this picture book. At the same time, according to Piaget’s research, children only pay attention to the external results of behaviors and do not consider the motivation of behaviors. Their right and wrong standards depend on whether they obey the orders or regulations of adults (Liu & Deng, 2013). Interestingly, a third child was not only able to observe the results of David’s behavior, but he was also able to think about motivation (whether intentional or not). He pointed out that David hit the table while skateboarding, but that David did not do this on purpose: Interviewer Child 3 Interviewer Child 3 Interviewer Child 3

What did David do? Skateboarding at home. And then? Then, he knocked over the table. Do you think he did it on purpose? He did not do it on purpose.

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How David’s Behavior Links with Everyday Experience An important limitation of reading picture books seems to be a reaction to what Sipe calls the “personalized impulse.” Through this impulse, children can connect stories to their own lives by linking “life to text” or “text to life” (Sipe, 2000). One page of the picture book shows David looking angry and saying, “do I have to eat?” When reading this page to children, most of them immediately say “must eat,” “you must eat.” These unthinking answers from young children are inseparable from the daily education of parents and teachers in Chinese families and kindergartens. Studies have pointed out that more than 97% of parents of young children agree that dietary problems are very important for children’s growth and development and attach importance to their children’s dietary problems (Gu & Gao, 2014). In restaurants or kindergartens, we often hear parents or teachers with children say to their children, “Eat all, don’t pick food,” “A child who doesn’t pick food is a good child.” It can be seen that this subtle influence of adults on children’s diet in daily life will also have a certain impact on children’s understanding of the picture book content.

Being Able to Look at David’s Behavior from the Perspective of Others When reading the page about David pulling the cat’s tail for children, all the children can answer that the kitten doesn’t like David pulling its tail. Some children can also tell the reasons why the kitten doesn’t like it, such as “it is painful,” “the kitten wants to run away,” “because it likes running by itself,” “the kitten’s mouth is open,” “because the kitten’s teeth are sharp, and it will bite David,” “because it is painful, If I have a tail, I don’t like that and I think it does too.” From the above-mentioned children’s answers, we can also see that they can think and respond to this question from the perspective of the kitten. Some children relate to their own life experience and think that the kitten will feel pain or run away. Some other children speculated based on the expression of the kitten and finally stated that the kitten did not like to be pulled by the tail. Other children had similar speculations based on the fact that the cat’s mouth was open or that the cat’s teeth are sharp, and it would bite David. Piaget’s test shows that children are realists. Children only admit what is realistic and do not admit what is hypothetical. They are unwilling and unable to reason on the basis of hypothetical premises. Children’s reasoning can not be separated from reality (Liu, 1999). However, from the above-mentioned children’s answers, the researchers found that a child can assume that he or she would not like to be pulled if he or she had a tail, because it would hurt so much and speculates that the kitten would not like to be pulled either. It is striking that this child is not only able to admit assumptions that do not correspond to reality, but is also able to make inferences based on them.

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Interpretation of David’s Personality Characteristics by Children Aged 4–6 Years Old According to Fang Fuxi’s point of view, children’s knowledge, experience and reasoning process of “individual” includes two aspects: One is the cognition of individual behavior (so-called behavioral perception); the other is the cognition of individual’s psychological process and psychological characteristics (so-called human perception) (Fang, 1986). This study attempts to explore children’s understanding of David’s personality characteristics by asking them their understanding of this picture book stories. When asked about their understanding or evaluation of David, nine young children thought that David was a naughty child. Two children thought that he had done bad things, and that he did not perform in a good way. One child thought David was disobedient, another child thought David was funny; one child thought that David forgot things every day; one child thought that David was a bad child; One child thought David was a good friend; one child thought David often got into trouble. When children were asked whether being naughty is something good or bad, they merely stated it as a bad behavior. Moreover, they assumed that their parents or kindergarten teacher would not like David, as he is a naughty boy. Additionally, half of the children stated that other kindergarten children would not David neither. Interestingly, almost half of the children claimed that their grandparents might like him. The evaluation of roles in this picture book can also reflect the characteristics of children’s cognitive development of personality characteristics. The results show that the recognition of personality characteristics of children aged 4–6 shows the following characteristics:

Evaluation Based on the Performance, Status, or Behavior of the Characters That Can Be Observed in the Book Five children interpreted David’s behavior only from the surface of his performance, state, or behavior shown in the picture book and thought his behavior or state was very funny. For example, one child pointed out that he liked the page of David eating dog food, because he thought it was very funny, which was the reason why he liked this story and David. Some children thought that David was a bad kid because he had eaten up all the dog food. The children were only able to evaluate characters based on what is happening on the surface or based on the performance of the characters. In other cases, the children would only consider David’s action in order to judge his character. For instance, in one situation, David went to school and forgot to wear pants. The children would say that David often forgot things which showed a lack of understanding David’s actual way of acting. At the same time, 12 children were able to interpret David’s naughty message, thinking that David often caused trouble, did bad things, behaved badly, was very naughty and would get into trouble.

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Simple and General Perception of David From the results of interviews, most children’s understanding of David is relatively simple and general. Usually, they were not able to combine the whole picture book content in order to make a comprehensive interpretation of David. They sometimes simply divided David’s character into two categories, one is naughty, tricky, mischievous, disobedient, and the other one is funny. They were not able to look at the entire picture, and their ideas were often based on partial impressions. Additionally, some young children pointed out that David is very naughty, but totally ignored his apology and his love for his mother at the end of the book. They could not go further and say whether or not there was any change in David’s perception after he had apologized for his actions.

Children’s Understanding of the Themes of the Picture Book Story In the picture book, there are various themes or concepts that can be discovered. On one hand, the author deals with the topic of honesty and sincerity. It also talks about responsibility and admitting mistakes, and about the capacity of deciding what is wrong and what is right. Additionally, the author deals with the concept of family and an ever-loving relation between mother and child. According to the story content of the picture book and children’s answers to interview questions, children’s understanding of the theme of the picture book is mainly divided into two aspects: social development and emotional needs (Han, 2017).

Social Development The process of social development is the process of socialization. In the process of socialization, young children gradually learn to know themselves and understand others through the interaction of people and things in the social environment and then learn all the attitudes, concepts, and behaviors conforming to social norms such as how to treat people and objects, abide by rules, and care for others in the interaction with others (Chen & Yong, 2007). From the results of children’s interpretation of the theme of this picture book, it can be found that children’s interpretation of social theme can be divided into admitting mistakes, causing trouble/getting into trouble.

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Admit Mistakes Four children did not ignore the plot that David said sorry at the end of the book. However, the four children had different interpretations of this plot. The interpretation of the first child is the simplest, only noticing the objective fact that David said he was sorry, which is a simple retelling of the contents of this picture book without a deep interpretation. The second child reflected that she did not agree with David’s behavior. She thought it was not good to do something wrong but said that she did not do it by herself. Her words reflected that she thought that she should admit her mistake when she did something wrong: Interviewer Child 5 Interviewer Child 5 Interviewer Child 5

Do you think teachers will like child like David? No. Why not? Because it is not good to do things like him. Why is it not so good? That … he did something wrong and said that he didn’t do it.

The third child directly said that he should admit his mistake if he did something wrong: Interviewer Child 3 Interviewer Child 3 Interviewer Child 3 Interviewer Child 3

What happened to him when he got into trouble? When he made a mistake, he said it wasn’t me. He said I didn’t do it, and then? David will admit it himself. And then, he admitted it? Finally, he admitted it. And then, he finally have to admit it, right? Well, Yeah, admit mistake.

The fourth child not only thinks that we should admit mistakes, but say sorry: Interviewer Child 4 Interviewer Child 4

He said sorry. Why would he say sorry? Because he made a mistake, he said he was sorry. Why did he say sorry? Maybe he was sorry because he didn’t listen to adults.

Although the four children did not ignore David’s final apology, it can be seen that there are differences in the interpretation of the four children. The first child simply stated the fact that David finally apologized; the second child was able to rise to the perspective of right and wrong, believing that it is not good to not admit mistakes. The third and fourth children directly pointed out that mistakes should be admitted and apologized.

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Cause Trouble/Get in Trouble During the interview, researchers found that seven children all interpreted the meaning that David often causes trouble, gets into trouble, or does bad things. These seven children not only interpret from the books that David often causes trouble, gets into trouble and does bad things, but also use this as a criterion to judge a person: Interviewer Why don’t you like David? Child 1 He caused a lot of trouble. In addition, in the interview, researchers found that when children were asked whether their parents, teachers, or peers would like David, almost all of the children thought that if David got into trouble, made trouble, or did something bad, their family members or teachers and their peers would not like him. Children’s judgment of other people’s problems often based on self-judgment (Shi, 2006). That is, the words of others are actually expressing their own voices. The expression “parents or teachers don’t like David” essentially means that children have accepted the idea that adults don’t like naughty children. Think carefully about the family environment in which children live, it is not difficult to find that many children have been influenced by the values of “being a good child” since childhood. Parents often say to children, “Be obedient in kindergarten today.” Or when children obey the instructions of parents or teachers, parents or teachers often say “you are so good.” It can also be seen from children’s interpretation of the content of this picture book that the idea of being a good child has been absorbed by children. When other young children can only judge David or this picture book based on one-sided performance, we have unexpectedly found that one child has been able to look at the problem from a developmental perspective and was able to analyze the problem “in two parts.” Seeing the advantages of the object that is negated by himself, and the shortcomings of the object that is affirmed by himself (Li, 1984). Being able to grasp the theme of the picture book as a whole, not only see the trouble David caused, but also see David apologizing for his behavior. Interviewer Child 2 Interviewer Child 2 Interviewer Child 2

What kind of kid do you think David is? A kid who did something wrong, but he said he was sorry. Oh, what kind of kid is this? Your cell phone. What kind of kid is he when he does something wrong and says he’s sorry? a good child.

Emotional Needs Emotion is the experience of people’s attitude toward objective things, and the reflection of whether people’s needs are satisfied. Early childhood is the key period and sensitive period of human emotion development. Good emotion is the embodiment

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of children’s healthy personality and an important part of children’s physical and mental development (Sun, 2013). The emotion between children and their relatives plays an important role in their emotional development. Some children interpret the content of emotional needs from this picture book, mainly from the perspective of their mothers. From the children’s interpretation of the theme of this picture book, we can see its positive impact on the development of children’s emotions.

Loving Mom During the interview, two young children’s interpretations of the theme were placed on “Mom, I Love You,” which showed the children’s emotional experience of the story character. One young child thought that it was good for David to say I love you to his mother: Interviewer Child 1 Interviewer Child 1

Why do you think the kindergarten kids don’t like David? Because he only did a good job in this page (saying “mom, I love you”). You don’t think he did a good job of anything else, do you? Yes, except for this page.

Another young child feels David’s love for her mother from this picture book, because David likes her mother and wants to tell her that he loves her: Interviewer Child 2 Interviewer Child 2

And then, he said mom, I love you. Whose hand is this? This is mom’s hand. Why does he say that? David likes his mother and said this.

Unable to Determine Theme—Describing Elements We discovered that four of all children were not able to express their understanding of the theme of this picture book. Some of them were only describing pictures on an optical basis, and others simply stated that they did not know what the story is about. One child was only able to simply describe some elements of David or some segments in this picture book and could not summarize the picture book according to his own understanding: Interviewer Think about it. Is there anything in this book that interests you the most? Child 8 I’m kind of interested in David wearing these clothes, hats, and pants, and these shoes, socks, and pants are kind of cool, and this (pointing to baseball) I think this is kind of … Interviewer What is it? Child 8 It’s a little round. It’s wired up. Interviewer Is there anything else you’re interested in?

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Child 8 No. Interviewer Do you know what kind of story this tells? Child 8 I don’t know. In the third picture, he forgot to wear pants. “I don’t know” seems to be the most conservative and error-free response to any question. During the interview process, a small number of children failed to interpret the theme of “David gets in trouble” on the basis of understanding the story content of this picture book. Even after the researcher changed the way of inquiring, these children still did not know what this picture book was mainly about. They often responded to the questions raised by the researcher by saying “I do not know,” shaking their heads or being silent: Interviewer What is the story about? Can you tell me something about it? Child 11 No, I don’t remember. Interviewer Don’t you remember at all? She shook her head. Interviewer Child 11 Interviewer Child 11

Do you know whose story this is about? She pointed to David on the cover and said: his story. And then, what did he do in the story? I don’t know.

Conclusions According to the children’s answers to the research questions, the 4–6-year-old children showed different characteristics to the behavior and personality characteristics of the character in this picture book and the theme of this picture book. Reflecting the uniqueness of children’s interpretations of this picture book, they can be summarized as follows:

4–6-Year-Old Children Interpret This Picture Book from Multiple Perspectives The results showed that children aged 4–6 had a higher consistency in their interpretation of this picture book, such as their understanding of David’s behavior and personality characteristics. In addition to 2–4-year-olds, other young children can observe David’s behavior and behavioral outcomes and consider David to be a naughty child, or use other similar words to express their understanding of David, such as doing bad things, getting into trouble, and so on. However, their understanding of the theme and content of this picture book is very different, and they have their own unique views. Thirteen children are able to interpret the theme of this picture book, which are divided into two types: social development and emotional needs. Each direction

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is divided into different sub-directions. As can be seen from the number of themes interpreted, children aged 4–6 do not agree on the interpretation of the theme of this picture book. Children interpret the themes of this picture book from multiple perspectives, presenting a diversified phenomenon. We believe that there are two reasons for this phenomenon: The first one is the way the theme is presented. In David gets in trouble, the authors do not directly point out the theme in this picture book, but adopt a relatively concealed way, which naturally emerges as the storyline develops. This kind of presentation provides sufficient freedom and space for young children to use their imagination. The second reason is the characteristics of young children themselves. Each child’s life experience is different, and its understanding of the content of this picture book has a strong subjective color. Therefore, we can observe this phenomenon, in which children interpret this picture book from multiple angles.

Most 4–6-Year-Old children’s Interpretation of the Content of This Picture Book is Superficial 4–6 years old children’s interpretation of the theme of this picture book presents a diversified feature, but behind the diversified theme, we found out, that although young children can construct a personal interpretation of the content of this picture book; most children’s interpretation of this picture book content is superficial. Studies have found that between the ages of 4 and 6, children’s understanding of events, actions, and role states always lags behind their understanding of picture images (Li, Zhou, Liu, & Gao, 2011). This is consistent with the research results of this study. Most children’s interpretation of David is consistent and accurate, while the interpretation of the meaning the author wants to convey behind the picture book that is diversified. Among them, most children’s interpretation of the content of this picture book only stays on David’s behavior and the results of his behavior, which indicates that children’s interpretation may be intuitive and related to life experience. They can understand that David is naughty, but they can’t relate the whole picture book in order to interpret the theme.

Moral Education Through This Picture Book is Restricted Coming back to our main question, which is to understand the moral education of the kindergarten children, we have to conclude that this book only partly contributes to it. Even though the picture books contains several moral values and concepts that could be taught to the children, it seems that the cognitive and emotional development of the majority of the children still needs time to progress before they can actually understand all the contents of the book. Only few of the children understood the

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concept of apologizing, or having a loving mom, which can be regarded as the essential message from this story. Nevertheless, many children have the basic attitude to say that it is not good to be naughty. This looks like children might already have internalized daily rules, probably from authorities like their parents or teachers, but did not understand the complete value behind those rules. We also have to bear in mind that picture books like this one could have a stronger pedagogical impact on children, if an adult would read and explain the story to the child. Unfortunately, here, again we would be confronted with the main issue that we discussed at the beginning of this sub-chapter, namely having adults that impose their understanding of a story to a child.

Appendix: Picture Book David Gets in Trouble by Shannon (2002)

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Literature Allinson, R. E. (1989). Understanding the Chinese mind: The philosophical roots. Brown, A. (2009). Zhu family story (pp. 1–48) (K. Qianhua, Trans.). Hebei: Hebei Education Press. (安东尼·布朗. 朱家故事. 柯倩华, 译. 河北: 河北教育出版社, 2009: 1–48.) Chen, Y. (2001). Chinese values, health and nursing. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 36(2), 270–273. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2648.2001.01968.x Chen, Y., & Yong, J. (2007). Psychology of early childhood education (p. 136). Beijing: Beijing Normal University Press. Day, K. S. (1996). The challenge of style in reading picture books. Children’s Literature in Education, 27(3), 153–166. Fang, F. (1986). A brief introduction to children’s social cognitive development. Psychological Dynamics, 01. Gu, R., & Gao, J. (2014). Parents’ concept and behavior of infant dietary nutrition education. Pre-School Education Research, 09. Han, W. (2017). Thematic interpretation and strategic study of picture-book stories by children aged 5–6. Northeast China: Shenyang Normal University. Li, B. (1984). Report on the development stage of children’s moral judgment (part I). Shanxi Education Scientific Research Communication, 04. Li, L., Zhou, J., Liu, B., & Gao, X. (2011). Study on reading comprehension of preschool children’s picture story books. China Special Education, 02. Liu, X. (1999). Philosophy of children’s spirit (p. 75). Nanjing: Nanjing Normal University Press. Liu, J., & Deng, C. (2013). Child development psychology (pp. 87, 275). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press. Mantei, J., & Kervin, L. (2015). Examining the interpretations children share from their reading of an almost wordless picture book during independent reading time. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China. (2016). Working regulations of kindergartens. Shannon, D. (2002). David gets in trouble. New York, NY: The Blue Sky Press. Shi, A. (2006). Interpretation of children’s “substitute sound”. Preschool Education Research. Sipe, L. R. (2000). The construction of literary understanding by first and second graders in oral response to picture storybook read-alouds. Reading Research Quarterly, 35(2), 252–275. Sun, J. (2013). On the promotion of children’s emotional development by children’s literature and its optimization strategies. Education Culture BBS, 06. Wang, J., & Mao, S. (1996). Culture and the kindergarten curriculum in the People’s Republic of China. Early Child Development and Care, 123(1), 143–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/030044396 1230110 Xiao, M. (2013). Jumping rope (pp. 1–37). Zhejiang: Zhejiang Children’s Publishing House. (萧 袤. 跳绳去. 浙江:浙江少年儿童出版社, 2013: 1–37.) Yu, X. (2012). Exploring visual perception and children’s interpretations of picture books. Library and Information Science Research, 34(4), 292–299. Zheng, H. (2011). Research on moral judgment of children aged 5–6 in reading picture books. Nanjing: Nanjing Normal University. Zheng, L., & Liu, S. (2013). Research on picture comprehension level in picture book reading for children aged 5–6 years. Early Education (Educational and Scientific Research Edition), 11. Zhou, H., & Li, C. (2016). Interpretation of the psychological process of children’s picture book reading-taking “the meal of meal” as an example. Journal of Suzhou Education Institute, 03.

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Weblink “Social Values and Norms.” (2019). Encyclopedia of Sociology. Retrieved April 26, 2019 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-tra nscripts-and-maps/social-values-and-norms

Chapter 6

Chinese Preschoolers’ Conflict Negotiation in Resource Limited Situations Marina Sonntag and Shuangshuang Xu

Conflicts are generally defined as the situation in which one person protests or resists another’s action (Hay, 1984), with incompatible behaviors, needs, or goals of both sides (Laursen & Hafen, 2010). From a developmental point of view, conflicts are necessary to a child’s growth. For young children, peer conflict and its negotiating process contribute a lot to the development of children’s social and moral competences. A developing young individual is necessarily exposed to little quarrels to learn how, later in life, he/she can deal with disputes of greater impact at an adolescent and adult age. Quarrels give individuals in general the opportunity to assume their own opinions and needs and may lead to enhancement of their self-confidence. In sum, peer conflicts provide precious opportunities for preschool children to practice and develop their interpersonal skills of recognizing, appreciating, and integrating other’s perspectives and needs, especially in the early developmental years.

Preschoolers’ Peer Conflicts in Kindergartens When looking into preschooler’s peer conflicts, Tian (2010) summarized them into four different types: • possession of resources, including possession of objects, space, and social intrusiveness • disagreement of opinions M. Sonntag (B) University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg e-mail: [email protected] S. Xu Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark IBEF, Shanghai, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_6

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• maintenance of rules, including play, daily life, and teaching rules • deliberate provocation, including action and verbal provocation. Among the four types, resource-related conflicts, e.g., violation of turn-taking or sharing, are the most common type in preschoolers (Killen & Turiel, 1991). Conflicts caused by resource distribution can be seen in all grades throughout the kindergarten. This is because resources, such as roles and objects, are frequently put forward for negotiation and renegotiation in children’s moving in and out of play and other interactive situations. As the child develops from junior to senior grade in kindergarten, the main type of peer conflicts also varies according to the interest and competence of young children (Huang, 2007; Tian, 2010). For junior graders, conflicts are centered around objects of interest, and as a result, distribution of resources is the most common situation to induce a conflict. For children in the middle grade, more conflicts come from maintenance of rules and deliberate provocation, as after one year in the kindergarten, young children are more and more familiar with daily rules, and they are more competent in dealing with interpersonal conflicts. Maintaining and breaking rules become the focus in their interaction. For senior graders, most conflicts are derived from disagreement in play and games. Senior graders spend relatively less time on negotiating and resolving conflicts on resource distribution, rule maintenance, and deliberate provocation than on opinion disagreement. It can be seen that, from junior to senior grade, the focus of young children’s interpersonal conflicts has gone through a series of changes: from resource distribution to rules and finally reaching at the level of negotiating opinions.

Preschoolers’ Conflict Solving Strategies: Categories and Variations Lots of researches have been conducted to investigate the strategies children use to solve conflicts with each other. Iskandar, Laursen, Finkelstein, and Fredrickson (1995) divided the strategies into three different kinds: negotiating, power assertion, and disengagement. Zou (2013) proposed five types of strategies used by preschoolers: competition, compromising, avoidance, insistence, and seeking for help. Xue (2014) provided a more detailed description of 13 different types of conflict solving strategies: negotiation, explanation, apology, being modest, asking for peer’s help, asking for teacher’s help, compromising, verbal dispute, violent fighting, verbal attack, body attack, threatening, and crying. Chen and his colleagues (2001) used insistence and non-insistence to summarize children’s behaviors in a conflicting situation. Insistent behaviors include direct coercive behaviors and indirect reference of rules, authority, and peer pressure, while non-insistent behaviors vary from passive withdrawing, to negotiation and cooperation. In this framework, insistence is considered as lacking interpersonal skills to coordinate different needs and perspectives of the two sides in the conflict situation.

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Another similar dimension used to categorize preschoolers’ conflict solving strategies is the concern for self and other, with Blake and Mouton’s dual concern model as an example. In this model, five strategies of dominating, avoiding, integrating, obligating, and compromising are labeled out according to their specific level on the two dimensions of concern for self and concern for other. Following this vein, Zong and Shi (2010) also summarized preschoolers’ strategies into four types: insisting on his/her own interest, letting others to play, taking turns to play and cooperate with each other to play together. Some researchers also divide the type of strategies according to the result of conflict. For example, Xue (2014) used categories of positive, neutral, and negative strategies to summarize the 13 strategies found in her research. Among the different types of strategies, Peng (2016) discovered that neutral strategies such as seeking help and compromising are the most frequently used ones by the children, while negative strategies being the second most. Positive strategies such as negotiation and being modest are the least used ones. Socially competent behavior is usually regarded as the ones associated with prosocial behaviors, such as being modest, cooperative, and friendly. Shantz (1987) proposed that when dealing with conflict situations, children may utilize various strategies combining different forms of strategies. Putallaz and Sheppard (1992) believe the level of social competence determines children’s choice of strategies, and the more competent the child is, the more flexible his behavior, thoughts, and strategies would be across different situations. Children’s choice of strategies also varies according to the specific type of conflicting situation, which makes it hard to investigate the child’s developmental level by examining what strategy the child is utilizing. He (2010) discovered that in the conflicting situations of object access and deliberate provocation, young children mainly use strategies of crying and physical violence to solve the conflict, while negotiation and avoidance are the most frequently ones used in conflicts related to play situation. Zhang’s research (2013) also revealed that conflicting situations influence a lot on young children’s employment of specific strategies. In conflicts over objects and interference, reporting to authorities and attacking are the two most used strategies; in the conflicting situation of verbal provocation, preschoolers mainly utilize negotiation, while in the conflicts induced by joining into activities, young children used to endure themselves or avoid conflicts. Walker et al. also revealed situational dependence in their research. Especially, they found that situation of peer group entry is relatively difficult to deal with for young children, as children may not know what to do. Another situational factor influencing preschool children’s choice of strategies is the partner’s strategy. Usually, partner’s physical reactions will be followed by similar physical ones (Ross & Conant, 1992), and partner’s verbal justification would induce more complex reactions from the other side (Tamm, Tõugu, & Tulviste, 2014; Thornberg, 2006). Also, insistence has a high possibility to result in insistent responses (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981). Different models have been introduced when trying to explain the situated dependence of children’s strategy using in conflict situation. The social information processing model proposed that children use social clues to

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identify, interpret, and select actions in conflict situations (Crick & Dodge, 1994). Rubin and Krasnor’s (1986) social script model suggested that particular types of social scripts will be evoked by specific cues in the conflict situation. In unfamiliar or novel situations, children lack corresponding scripts to refer to and will examine the situation to select and even create new goals and strategies. Both of two models emphasize the influence of the affordance of social structure and clues on children’s processing process in conflict situations.

Conflict Negotiation and Resolution in Chinese Kindergartens Children’s ability of conflict management and negotiation also presents cultural dependence. Chen and Rubin (1992) have discovered that Canadian children presented more social behaviors, while Chinese children adopted more agonistic ones when facing conflicts. In a comparative study of co-operation and conflict within a Chinese and a Canadian kindergarten, Orlick, Zhou, and Partington (1990) report that 85% of 5-year-old Chinese behave more cooperatively than 5-year-old Canadian children (22%). Also, according to Caldwell (1975), Chinese children do not show any antisocial behaviors in public—researchers have been impressed by the self-discipline and peacefulness of Chinese children: During our three weeks in China, we saw thousands of young children, in schools, in their neighborhoods, in parks, and on city streets. Almost never did we see any antisocial behavior. (Caldwell, 1975) Chinese children never push one another, never grab a toy from another child, do not have any hostile interaction among themselves or with adults. (Sidel, 1972) Of everything, I witnessed in China; I was most impressed with the young children. They seemed amazingly self-assured and self-disciplined. They demonstrated a concern for one another which is rare in other cultures. (Orlick, 1978)

French et al. (2011) referenced Markus and Lin (1999), who presented an independent and interdependent view of self, considering meaning and addressing the conflict. The independent worldview sees “conflict as an impingement of the self and [it] seeks to resolve conflicts by using assertive engagement and attempts to find correct solutions” (Markus & Lin, 1999). According to Markus, western people tend to consider conflicts as a threat to the self and thus want to resolve those conflicts by showing what they are capable of. The interdependent view of self claims that the conflict is interpreted as a relationship issue. Interdependent people, especially in China, view it “as more important to minimize the disturbance and maintain valued relationships than to resolve the specific issue of contention” (Markus & Lin, 1999). It is considered as very important to behave in a way that the relationship is as harmonious as possible. Both parties are involved in working on it. For example, the employer might attend the employee’s wedding while the employee follows the superior’s orders at work. If, however, a conflict arises, the resolution of it is rather

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avoided, and the focus is put on the positive sides of the relationship. So, they “may be more likely to use withdrawal, mediation or appeal to authority to deal with conflict situations” (Prentice & Miller, 1999). Another interdependent model in Costa Rica sees conflict as a sort of prison in which the individuals are trapped. To get out of this trap, they seek for discussions and dialog. Usually, it is not well seen when a third person intervenes to resolve the conflict (Prentice & Miller, 1999). Last but not least, there is the contemporary Hawaiian culture that is interdependent and that claims that a conflict arises from so-called blocked pathways that disturb the “flowing affect” connecting people to one another. This culture considers the conflict as an entanglement, and it is quite common that a respected old person plays the role of the mediator to facilitate the disentanglement (Prentice & Miller, 1999).

The Present Research: Research Questions and Methods The dimension of “independent and interdependent” is a relatively rough criterion to distinguish the characteristics of western and eastern cultures. As a typical representative of eastern culture, China has gone through huge and profound changes since the policy of reformation and opening up. The change of people’s social life practice also calls for re-examination of old value systems and urgent exploration of new ones. With western ideas and values being introduced in and starting to debate and merge with original Chinese values, it becomes hard to use the concept of “interdependence” to accurately summarize and reflect the modern practice of Chinese people. Back to the scope of our research topic, the one child policy has brought about a new family structure: 4-2-1, which means a constitution of four grandparents, two parents, and only one child is very common nowadays. Within this structure, the only child becomes the focus of adults’ attention and has few opportunities to interact with his peers, and it may lead to a series of problems in interpersonal. As a result of lacking peer interaction at home, young children may face problems with social skills when entering the kindergarten. Under this new reality, one should ask: Do Chinese preschool children still present more prosocial behaviors in conflict situations as expected by the culture? This research focuses on the following questions: 1. How is the conflict negotiated and resolved in the four specific conflict situations? By what strategy? Do Chinese preschoolers adopt more prosocial and interpersonal strategies? 2. How is the conflict situation interpreted by the young children? What rules and norms do they refer to and apply to negotiate with each other and solve the conflict? 3. How are cultural values and expectations learned and internalized by children? In order to investigate the research questions, observations and projective tests with hypothetical situations are employed to investigate children’s skills of conflict

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resolution and negotiation. Four conflict situations are chosen for the projective test. In the four situations, the interacting partner gives out different strategies: limited resources of roles in play without given strategy, limited resources of object with physical aggression, peer group entry with verbal aggression, and misunderstanding of intentions with verbal aggression. The four hypothetical situations are listed as follows: 1. In free play time, Tiantian and Lele both want to sit on that cute blue chair. Tiantian takes the chair first, and he pushes Lele down to the ground. What would happen next? 2. Doudou and Maomao are playing Lego in the construction corner. Xiaoyu wants to join them. But Doudou says: “You are bad in construction. We do not want to play with you.” What would happen next? 3. In the doll house, the children are role playing the story Snow White. Both Lele and Doudou want to play the role of Snow White. What would happen next? 4. Mingming and Xingxing are drawing together. Xingxing draws a beautiful garden with a sun, and she likes it so much. Mingming thinks Xingxing’s sun is too small, so he helps to make it bigger. Xingxing becomes angry and says to Mingming: “You ruined my drawing!” What would happen next? This test was supposed to enable us to dig deeper into the mindset of the children, and to see whether their opinions about a conflict on ownership are compatible with their reactions that they showed during an occurring conflict. Originally our idea was to read those situations three times, so that we could do intrapersonal and interpersonal comparisons. However, after the second time, they already were upset about the situations and would not give any propositions anymore. Of course, we understood that they did not want to continue, so we stopped the testing prematurely.

Result Analysis First Impression from Observation During the internship, the Luxembourgish researcher, especially observed the children’s behaviors with focus on conflict and how they would resolve them. In the first days after the arrival in Shanghai, the researcher did a very general observation and did not select what she wrote down on her notes. This was a way to finally decide which topic would be further investigated. Later, this also enabled researcher to prepare a few questions to facilitate the observation. For example, “What is the conflict about?” or “Is a teacher involved in the conflict resolution?” or “Is there physical violence to resolve it?” Most of the time it came to non-verbal negotiation. In the following some examples can be found: One conflict starts during free play. Girl A comes to the researcher and wants to draw something on researcher’s notebook. Two other boys come and want to draw

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something as well, so one of them takes the pen away from her. She does not like that and takes it back and continues to draw. One boy leaves. For him, it was not interesting anymore, since he could not draw immediately something, so he decided to go play somewhere else. He somehow sacrificed the opportunity to draw on the notebook, so that she could continue. The other boy waits until she is done with drawing and then takes the pen to draw something himself. Here, again it is the boy who is patient. However, it might be a sort of negotiation. She can continue to draw as she pleases. At the same time, he stands behind her and can see step by step what she is drawing. That means that if she draws something that does not look well at the first shot, then he sees it and could in a way use it against her, when needed. No one cried even though there was a little bit of squirminess. It is not ended through discussion, but through non-verbal negotiation. To the boy, the drawing may not be so important than it was to the girl, so he left them. The other boy might have been more patient or did not want to start a conflict, and so waited until she was done. The conflict was ended quite easily since the boy left the group. The next conflict is about two children who both want to have a box and pull at it at the same time. The girl gets a little bit angry then they both stop pulling at it. At the same moment, the boy next to them says something to the teacher and points at them. Both still discuss a little bit but then they get along with each other. Maybe the children realized and they raised the attention of the class and did not want to be seen fighting, so they stopped it. Here, both agree on the fact that it is more important not to raise attention rather than having the box. The last example of conflict starts when B takes Lego away from C and hides it behind his back. C raises his arms up and down in the air, tells him something, and looks annoyed. After a short time, B gives the Legos back to C. Here, the boy demonstrates his dissatisfaction and negotiate with boy B. He lets him wait a little bit, for him to play with it and finally gives it back to C. It was quite surprising to see from the examples how peaceful a child would react when another child took a toy from him. In most of the observations, children accepted that the toy was now in another’s child hands, even if they try to get it back for a short while. On the one hand, it makes sense considering the cultural background which asks for group thinking. On the other hand, since most children grew up alone with their parents, they might not be used yet to share their toys. Seen from this perspective it is impressive that they learned to adapt to an environment in which it is well seen not to raise attention, and in which it is normal to share.

Findings from the Projective Test When analyzing the results from the projective test, we realized the children had at least five different ways to resolve the conflict situations. In the following, you can find examples of the five different resolutions that they presented in the test.

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Way number 1 The children want to end the conflict with a fight until one of them wins Situation that was presented to the child: In free play time, Tiantian and Lele both want to sit on that cute blue chair. Tiantian takes the chair first and he pushes Lele down to the ground. What would happen next? Following discussion arose from it: Child Teacher Child Teacher

Push him down. Yes, he pushed Lele to the ground. (silent for a while) This is harder than last time. It means that both children want to sit in one chair. One of them does it first. He pushes the other one to the ground. Child Well, I guess it hurts. Teacher hurts, then? Child They will fight. Teacher Will they fight all the time? Child They will do it again. Teacher Once more? Grab chairs? Child Yes. Way number 2 Some children proposed that the characters in the situation negotiate with each other, but those children do not know how the characters finally came to the peaceful solution Situation presented to the child: In free play time, Tiantian and Lele both want to sit on that cute blue chair. Tiantian takes the chair first, and he pushes Lele down to the ground. What would happen next? Following discussion arose from it: Child Teacher Child Teacher Child

Then, there will be a fight. Why fight? Because he pushed him off the chair. What will happen in the end? After they finish, they will be modest.

Way number 3 The children are aware of the rules of good behavior and know how to resolve the conflict Situation presented to the child: Doudou and Maomao are playing Lego in the construction corner. Xiaoyu wants to join them. But Doudou says: “You are bad in construction. We do not want to play with you.” What would happen next?

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Child

And then Xiaoyu would say: “These building blocks are for all of us to play together.” Teacher And then? Child And then … Teacher What would Doudou do? Child Doudou may give extra blocks to her. Way number 4 The children show a certain integration of rules of morality Situation presented to the child: In free play time, Tiantian and Lele both want to sit on that cute blue chair. Tiantian takes the chair first, and he pushes Lele down to the ground. What would happen next? Child Teacher Child Teacher Child Teacher Child Teacher Child Teacher Child

Crying? Who is crying? Is Lele pushed to the ground? Yes. Then, Lele is crying, Tiantian still sit on the chair. He will soon understand. Who. Sitting on a chair. Understand what? Can’t push others. What will happen next? Said I’m sorry.

Way number 5 The children do not know what to answer Situation presented to the child: In free play time, Tiantian and Lele both want to sit on that cute blue chair. Tiantian takes the chair first, and he pushes Lele down to the ground. What would happen next? Child Teacher Child Teacher Child Teacher Child Teacher Child Teacher Child Teacher Child

I don’t know. Just try. I don’t know. And then what would Tiantian do? I don’t know. What would Lele do? I don’t know. What would Lele do? Would cry. What would happen after Lele’s cry? I don’t know. Would Tiantian say something? I don’t know.

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Summary: Access of Resources as a Dynamic Negotiation of Ownership and Possession “Ownership” and “possession” are two important concepts closely relating to access of resources. Rodgon and Rashman (1976) found out that children develop quite early a sense for ownership. By age two, most of them already use possessive language, for example. Also, by age three, they can recognize their own property and remember the property of others (Gelman, Manczak, & Noles, 2012). According to Friedman, Van de Vondervoort, Defeyter, and Neary (2013) and Gelman et al. (2012), children consider objects as belonging to themselves and to others by monitoring the historical path of the objects and not only by remembering what it looks like. Also, they use gender stereotypes (Malcolm, Defeyter, & Friedman, 2014) and creative labor, so when someone changes the appearance of the object (modeling clay, for example) (Kanngiesser, Gjersoe, & Hood, 2010) to identify who is the owner of an object. The capacity of children to understand property transfers develops more slowly and requires contextual support (Blake & Harris, 2009). Also, preschool children can make the difference between ownership and possession. It has been found that they defend the possession of an object with even more conviction when they own it. Ross (1996) discovered that children use adequate claims when it comes to express ownership (“I want it; it’s mine!”) and possession (“But I was playing with it!”). Even though they seem to understand the sense of ownership quite fast, they take a little more time to understand property transfers, for example, to offer a gift to someone. More than that they need contextual support to grasp the event and its legitimacy. They start to show adult-like understanding for it at age five, when they are in a context they already know very well, for example, a birthday party (Kanngiesser et al., 2010). Caplan, Vespo, Pederson, and Hay (1991) discovered that conflict between children often occur over a disputed property. However, the conflict rather arises because one child lost the control of access of the object, even though it was ignored by that child until now. When individuals share an object, they do not entirely own it. This gives the advantage that both take care of it and prevent the object to get destroyed. The possession of an object is more respected by another child the longer a child holds the object in his hands (Bronson, 1981; Winegar & Renninger, 1989). At home, the sense of ownership is endorsed more strongly from parents when their child is conflicting about the property of an object with his sibling than when he is arguing with a peer (Ross, 1996). In the collective setting of Chinese kindergarten, no clear boundary or rules are given regarding the ownership and possession of kindergarten resources. A process of negotiation is continuously required. When it comes to a negotiation between two people, everyone is supposed to make a step toward the other and to satisfy the other’s need. Within a negotiation everyone is supposed to make concessions and is supposed to avoid starting a conflict. In the projective test, a lot of children are answering with “they will fight,” “they are having bad habits.” Only a few propose the characters may negotiate “Lele, consult with Tiantian,” “Lele asked: “Tiantian, you can, can I sit for a while on the blue chair?”” An interesting aspect to focus on

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now is to explain why the children’s behavior is mostly not compatible with what they answered in the projective tests. Of course, it is difficult to give one and only explanation. So here are a few plausible thinking processes they might have had while they heard the conflict situations. Indeed, it is possible that they make the difference between fictive and non-fictive events. In a fictive story, it seems to make more sense that there are quarrels because the author can write whatever he wants since it does not hurt anybody. The projective test is also fictive, and consequently, the children bare to let the characters fight with each other. This leads to the next explanation. In most families, children learn that it is more important to avoid a conflict, even if there are some issues within the relationship. Conflict avoidance does not let any space to discussions or direct confrontation with the conflict. However, maybe a few children would feel more comfortable if they could talk about an interpersonal issue and be indeed confronted with it. So, in the projective test, they resolve the conflict how they would wish to resolve it in real life.

References Blake, P. R., & Harris, P. L. (2009). Children’s understanding of ownership transfers. Cognitive Development, 24(2), 133–145. Bronson, W. C. (1981). Toddlers’ behaviors with agemates: Issues of interaction, cognition, and affect. In Monographs on infancy. Caldwell, B. (1975). The Chinese kindergarten. In W. Kessen (Ed.), Childhood in China. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Caplan, M., Vespo, J., Pedersen, J., & Hay, D. F. (1991). Conflict and its resolution in small groups of one- and two-year-olds. Child Development, 62(6), 1513–1524. Chen, X., & Rubin, K. H. (1992). Correlates of peer acceptance in a Chinese sample of six-year-olds. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 15(2), 259–273. Chen, D. W., Fein, G. G., Killen, M., & Tam, H.-P. (2001). Peer conflicts of preschool children: Issues, resolution, incidence, and age-related patterns. Early Education and Development, 12(4), 523–544. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15566935eed1204_3 Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1994). A review and reformulation of social information-processing mechanisms in children’s social adjustment. Psychological Bulletin, 115, 74–101. Eisenberg, A. R., & Garvey, C. (1981). Children’s use of verbal strategies in resolving conflicts. Discourse Processes, 4, 149–170. French, D. C., Chen, X., Chung, J., Li, M., Chen, H., & Li, D. (2011). Four children and one toy: Chinese and Canadian children faced with potential conflict over a limited resource. Child Development, 82(3), 830–841. Friedman, O., Van de Vondervoort, J. W., Defeyter, M. A., & Neary, K. R. (2013). First possession, history, and young children’s ownership judgments. Child Development, 84(5), 1519–1525. Gelman, S. A., Manczak, E. M., & Noles, N. S. (2012). The nonobvious basis of ownership: Preschool children trace the history and value of owned objects. Child Development, 83(5), 1732–1747. Hay, D. F. (1984). Social conflict in early childhood. Annals of Child Development, 1, 1–44. He, G. H. (2010). A study on attributions and the corresponding strategies made by children on the collision from the peers (Master’s thesis). Northwest Normal University (in Chinese). Huang, S. M. (2007). Observation and analysis of peer conflicts of 3–6 years old children. Journal of Yichun University, 29(1), 266–268 (in Chinese).

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Iskandar, N., Laursen, B., Finkelstein, B., & Fredrickson, L. (1995). Conflict resolution among preschool children: The appeal of negotiation in hypothetical disputes. Early Education and Development, 6(4), 359–376. Kanngiesser, P., Gjersoe, N., & Hood, B. M. (2010). The effect of creative labor on property-transfer by preschool children and adults. Psychological Science, 21(9), 1236–1241. Killen, M., & Turiel, E. (1991). Conflict resolution in preschool social interactions. Early Education and Development, 2, 240–255. Laursen, B., & Hafen, A. (2010). Future directions in the study of close relationships: Conflict is bad (except when it’s not). Social Development, 19, 858–872. Malcolm, S., Defeyter, M. A., & Friedman, O. (2014). Children and adults use gender and age stereotypes in ownership judgments. Journal of Cognition and Development, 15(1), 123–135. Markus, H. R., & Lin, L. R. (1999). Conflictways: Cultural diversity in the meanings and practices of conflict. In D. A. Prentice & D. T. Miller (Eds.), Cultural divides: Understanding and overcoming group conflict (pp. 302–333). New York, NY, US: Russell Sage Foundation. Orlick, T. D. (1978). Winning through co-operation. Washington: Acropolis Hooks. Orlick, T., Zhou, Q. Y., & Partington, J. (1990). Co-operation and conflict within Chinese and Canadian kindergarten settings. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, 22(1), 20. Peng, G. Y. (2016). The research on the characteristics and strategies of 4–5 years old children’s peer conflict (Master’s thesis). Harbin Normal University (in Chinese). Prentice, D., & Miller, D. (Eds.). (1999). Cultural divides: Understanding and overcoming group conflict. Russell Sage Foundation. Putallaz, M., & Sheppard, B. H. (1992). Conflict management and social competence. In C. U. Shantz & W. W. Hartup (Eds.), Conflict in child and adolescent development (pp. 330–355). New York: Cambridge University Press. Rodgon, M. M., & Rashman, S. E. (1976). Expression of owner-owned relationships among holophrastic 14–32-month-old children. Child Development, 47, 1219–1222. Ross, H. S. (1996). Negotiating principles of entitlement in sibling property disputes. Developmental Psychology, 32(1), 90. Ross, H. S., & Conant, C. L. (1992). The social structure of early conflict: Interaction, relationships, and alliances. In C. U. Shantz & W. W. Hartup (Eds.), Conflict in child and adolescent (pp. 153– 185). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rubin, K. H., & Krasnor, L. R. (1986). Social-cognitive and social behavioural perspectives on problem solving. In M. Perlmutter (Ed.), Cognitive perspectives on children’s social and behavioral development (pp. 1–68). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Shantz, C. U. (1987). Conflicts between children. Child Development, 58, 283–305. Sidel, R. (1972). Women and child care in China. New York: Hill and Wang. Tamm, A., Tõugu, P., & Tulviste, T. (2014). The influence of individual and situational factors on children’s choice of a conflict management strategy. Early Education & Development, 25(1), 93–109. Thornberg, R. (2006). The situated nature of preschool children’s conflict strategies. Educational Psychology, 26, 109–126. Tian, C. D. (2010). A study on senior group children’s peer conflict (Master’s thesis). Hebei University (in Chinese). Winegar, L. T., & Renninger, K. A. (1989). Object conflict and sharing in the preschool: Further evidence for a prior possession rule. Xue, Y. Y. (2014). The research on peer conflict of the 4–5 years old children in learning areas (Master’s thesis). Northeast Normal University (in Chinese). Zhang, T. T. (2013). The children peer conflict resolution strategy and the relationship with selfcontrol—The research on the different conflict situations (Master’s thesis). Southeast University (in Chinese).

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Zong, A. D., & Shi, L. J. (2010). Research on problem-solving strategies of 3–5 years old children in the story context of interpersonal conflicts. Journal of Shanghai Educational Research, 11, 83–85 (in Chinese). Zou, Q. H. (2013). The research on the relationships among sense of humor, peer conflict resolution strategy and peer status (Master’s thesis). Liaoning Normal University.

Chapter 7

Small Images of a Big World: Children’s Drawings in a Chinese Kindergarten Wanqiu Meng and Johannes Heuschkel

In order to collect and explore children’s experiences and perspectives, a number of researchers experimenting with different creative methodologies in participatory research have analysed drawings. Young children can glean symbolic information from their own drawings and the drawings of others even when the actual graphic products are extremely lean or abstract (Gross & Hayne, 1999). Children will tailor the type of information they employ to show happiness and sadness differently depending on who they are drawing for (child or adult) (Burkitt, Watling, & Murray, 2011) and formulate the size of the drawings according to the significance of a topic (Thomas, Chaigne, & Fox, 2011). Human figure drawings (HFD) are quick, inexpensive and non-threatening to children. Developmental changes in children’s drawings of human figures reflect their ability of diachronic thinking (Cox & Hodsoll, 2011) and differentiation (Silk & Thomas, 2011). As assessment tools, HFD have been widely used by clinicians, psychologists and comparative educators. Clatworthy, Simon, and Tiedeman (1999) and Aminabadi (2011) demonstrated that drawing was a useful measure of children’s emotional status in hospitalized settings in a way that is easier, familiar and more enjoyable for the child patient. HFD is also an effective tool for comparative research, which can compare the performance of children of different nationalities and genders (e.g. Cox, 2010). Cox, Koyasu, Hiranuma, and Perara (2010) found children with severe learning difficulties’ responses in drawings reflect a developmental delay rather than a disorder of the complex skills involved. However, the HFD was not a valid instrument for differentiating aggressive and non-aggressive children of 4and 5-year old. The probable reason is that their lack of developmental maturity W. Meng (B) Shanghai Normal University Tianhua College, Shanghai, China e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] J. Heuschkel University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_7

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in cognition and in visual-motor coordination impacts their drawing capabilities (Norford & Barakat, 1990). Most children do not have the ability yet to express their needs, motivations and feelings about their family situation. Therefore, drawings are a critical way to understand their world. In this chapter, we offer some observations on Chinese children’s family drawings, focusing on the process of drawing, the content of drawings and the children’s interpretation. We aim to figure out the significant features of children’s family drawings, discuss the family activities, parenting style and provide a selection of drawings for the readers own interpretation.

Social Background of Chinese Family In order to understand the roots of the modern Chinese family, we present a brief social background that examines the impact of the socialization process on the family.

Chinese Modern Family Structure of “4-2-1” According to the “The 6th National Population Census Main Data Bulletin (No. 1)” published by the National Bureau of Statistics, the average population of each household has been reduced from 3.44 in 2000 to 3.10 in 2010. In the transitional period of China, the family structure has undergone dramatic changes, showing a trend of miniaturization, nuclearization and diversification. The modern family structure of “4-2-1”—four elderly people (maternal grandparents, paternal grandparents), two middle-aged core persons (parents) and a young member of the family (one child)—became commonplace (He & Wang, 2015). This common family structure was formed under the influence of the one-child policy. Family planning is a basic national policy of the People’s Republic of China, that is, planning fertility according to population policies. At the early stage of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Chinese population growth was basically spontaneous and unplanned, and the birth rate continued to increase. With the emergence of the first birth peak after the founding of New China, the contradiction between the unplanned and blind growth of population and the planned development of national economy began to emerge. During this period, Chinese leaders have realized the reality of large population and gradually realized that birth control is the fundamental way to solve this problem. In September 1980, at the third session of the fifth National People’s Congress, the state council pointed out that “except in sparsely populated minority areas, it should be generally advocated that a couple have only one child in order to control the population growth rate as soon as possible”. In September 1982, the 12th national congress of the communist party of China decided that “Family planning is a basic state policy of our country”. The main significance is

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to effectively control the over-rapid growth of the population in order to prevent the excessive growth of the population from directly affecting the contradiction between the economic growth and the shortage of environment and resources, to undermine social harmony and stability. Until 1 January 2016, the revised Law on Population and Family Planning of the People’s Republic of China states: “The State advocates one couple to have two children”.1 The one-child policy that has been in place for more than 30 years has been terminated.

Cross-Generational Education According to a survey conducted in Shanghai, the rate of grandparents living with infants and children is 76.5% and the rate of their participation in parenting is as high as 88.9%. The ratio of taking them as the main supporters reached 53.3% (Chen, 2007). According to the Wenhui Daily on 12 March 2010, a nationwide survey showed that in Beijing, about 70% of children receive cross-generational education; while in Shanghai, 88.9% of children aged 0–6 are currently raised by grandparents; the number of children receiving cross-generational education in Guangzhou has accounted for half of the total population (Sun, 2010). China is one of the few countries in the world with cross-generational education. The factors that promote the cross-generational education can be summarized into five aspects. 1. The deep-rooted family ethics. The Chinese are influenced by the traditional Confucian cultural and generally agree that the elderly is used to support their grandchildren. In addition to objective requirements, the care of grandchildren also has a certain degree of subjective will and even a sense of responsibility. 2. The pace of high-speed life. Due to the rapid socio-economic development, huge workload and severe work pressures make young parents often busy with their work and have no time to take care of their children or even raise their children normally. 3. The hidden results under the one-child policy. With the promotion of the onechild policy, the first generation of only child has gradually become parents. They have no brothers or sisters. They are overwhelmed in parenting and need the help of their elders. 4. The direct consequences of the left-behind family in rural areas. There are a large number of peasants working in cities in China, which has led to the “the hollow phenomenon” of rural families, and the grandparents and grandchildren who stayed in rural homes have become the main group of cross-generation education in China (Li, 2010). 5. The mechanism of child care institutions is not sound. The public services provided by the government and the society are limited. For example, the care of 1 Retrieved

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infants and young children aged 0–3 is difficult to enter the child care institutions (He & Wang, 2015; Zhao, 2017). In general, the cross-generation education in China is in a relatively stable social background. The contact between the grandchildren and grandparents leads to a healthy, stable family structure (Li, 2017).

Chinese Children’s Drawings in Kindergarten Context During the University of Luxembourg and East China Normal University Summer Internships Program at the Kindergarten of the ECNU in Shanghai, we set up the following task: The children were instructed by the teacher to “draw their family doing something”. To complete this task, the children need between 5 and 25 min. When the children finished, they were instructed to describe what they had drawn and to write name and age on the back of the paper. Name and description were later translated into English by Chinese students. This process was completed four times. Every “drawing session” was designed as a collective group activity. This means every child was given the same task and the teacher observed the children closely. During the drawing process, interaction between teachers and children was minimal. When interaction took place, it was mostly teachers and Chinese tandem students asking, “what are you drawing?” to write the answer on the children’s drawing (Fig. 7.1). Fig. 7.1 Set-up provided by the teacher for collective drawing sessions

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We have collected a total of 40 family drawings, with children’s descriptions of the picture.

General Observations During the six weeks of research, we discovered recurring patterns in the way and style children were drawing their families. First, children tend to get inspired by what the other children around them are drawing. This can be explained by learning theories such as model learning (Bandura & Walters, 1977). In Fig. 7.2, the girl on the right divided her picture in eight compartments. Then, she drew different scenes of her family doing something. This behaviour was not initiated by the instructors but emerged from the child. The girl on the left got inspired and divided her picture as well in eight compartments. In Fig. 7.3 the boy on the upper left started to draw his family and objects in blue and red. The boy on the right not only matches shape but also colour.

Fig. 7.2 Girl on the left “copies” girl on the right

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Fig. 7.3 Boy on the right matches colour and shape of boy on the upper left

The second observation was that age is not always reliable predictor for a child’s drawing skills. This can be explained by differences in extracurricular training. For example, some children regularly took drawing classes, while other children focused on different activities such as sport. These extracurricular trainings may explain why a 4-year old has better drawing skills than a 6-year old as shown in Figs. 7.4 and 7.5. The third observation was that grandparents were included in the drawings as part of the family. This observation can be explained to the modern family structure Fig. 7.4 A drawing from a 4-year-old girl. The drawing is complex and divers in colour and shape

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Fig. 7.5 A drawing from a 6-year-old boy

of “4-2-1” as mentioned in the chapter on social background of Chinese families (Fig. 7.6).

Fig. 7.6 Grandmother is doing exercise—drawing by a 6-year-old girl

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Family Activities in Children’s Drawings Children love drawing their family. As the family represents an integral part of a child’s life, it is easy for them to engage in memories and take those experiences as a template for their drawings. Every child has some sort of concept of what “family” means to them. By asking to draw their family, their concept of family becomes visually represented on a piece of paper. The first section of this chapter considers family activities as a crucial variable that influences the content of family drawings. Children have different feelings and experiences for their families. Through analysing the content of the picture, combined with children’s descriptions, we use two methods to classify the paintings. Firstly, Parten (1932)’s pioneering way of classifying children’s play according to their level of social participation. The paintings were divided into two types, solitary activities and interactive activities. Solitary activities means there is one character present in the painting, or different characters doing their own things with no interaction. Interactive activity painting means there are two or more characters doing similar or same activities together. The proportions of different forms of interaction among family members are shown in Table 7.1. Table 7.1 shows, in reference to family role relevance, family and children have less interaction when they are together. Secondly, according to the theme of family living content, we divided the paintings into four types: imaginary activities, daily life activities, natural play and outdoor sports. We have collected a total of 40 pictures. One girl divided her piece of paper into eight squares and drew eight activities involving three types, including daily life activities, nature play and outdoor sports. Therefore, in order to calculate the proportion of different activities, we count a total of 42 activities in the children’s drawings. The proportions of different types of content for family member activities are shown in Table 7.2. Table 7.1 Proportion of different forms of interaction among family members

N

Percentage (%)

Solitary activities

25

62.5

Interactive activities

15

37.5

Total

40

100

Table 7.2 Proportion of four types of activities

N

Percentage

Daily life activities

21

50

Outdoor sports

12

28.6

Natural play

5

11.9

Imaginary activities

4

9.5

42

100

Total

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Table 7.2 shows, referring to family living content, that daily life activities account for half of the total, imaginary activities and nature play are less in quantity. Then we introduce four types of family drawings in order of proportion.

Daily Life Activities The pictures describe the routine activities in daily life and classified as daily life activities. Children usually introduce what each family member would normally do in their own minds, generally referring to the life on weekday evenings. For example, (see Fig. 7.7). 1. Dad is lying on the bed and playing his phone. He is playing the “flip and flip” (one popular mobile phone app game). Mom is cooking. I’m doing homework as soon as I come back home, from 6: 00 to 10:00 (six-year-old boy). 2. Mom is cooking. Grandma is watching TV. I am buying food with mom. I am walking outside with dad (six-year-old boy). We have carried out the frequency of different kinds of daily life activities in children’s drawings. The activities mentioned by the children and more than once are shown in Table 7.3. Among daily life activities, doing housework was mentioned 15 times. In addition to one picture of the grandmother washing clothes, one picture of father cooking and one picture of the babysitter cooking, the remaining 12 times are all mothers doing housework, including cooking, mopping and washing clothes. Using electronic equipment was mentioned 10 times, including mobile phones/iPad/computer/TV. Family members using electronic equipment include parents, grandparents and siblings. They all are using electronic devices by themselves and have no interaction with others. The role of father was mentioned most frequently and there are five pictures saying that “Dad is playing a mobile phone”.

Fig. 7.7 Two examples of daily life activities

84 Table 7.3 Frequency of different kinds of daily life activities

W. Meng and J. Heuschkel N Do housework

15

Use electronic equipment

10

Play toys

6

Sleep

5

Shop

4

Check the weather

2

Walk

2

Fig. 7.8 Two examples of outdoor sports

Outdoor Sports The pictures show a person doing sports or playing outdoor equipment in an outdoor venue are classified as outdoor sports (Fig. 7.8). 1. I’m swimming with mom (four-year-old girl). 2. My dad wants to challenge the ladder in the park (the higher one), I want to climb a small ladder and then slide down (six-year-old boy).

Natural Play Activities that show interaction with plants or animals in nature are defined as natural play activities. For example, (see Fig. 7.9). 1. Mom is looking at ants. I’m looking at flies. We all use magnifying glass. We use a magnifying glass to look at the water droplets on the grass. We are also holding little cherries. We are very happy with the bright sunshine (five-year-old girl). 2. I am catching a dragonfly with my family (five-year-old girl).

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Fig. 7.9 Two examples of natural activities

Fig. 7.10 Two examples of imaginary activity

Imaginary Activities Activities that occur in unrealistic life, full of imagination, belong into the category of imaginary activities. For example, (see Fig. 7.10). 1. I am hiding in a mushroom with my parents on a rainy day (six-year-old boy). 2. Mom and Dad are messing around (four-year-old girl).

Word Frequency Analysis of Descriptions of Children’s Drawings As the research took place from 13 July 2018 until 26 August 2018, many children were on vacation and the classes were attended irregularly. In total, we collected drawings from 20 children. There were eight 4-year olds, six 5-year olds and four 6-year olds. For two children, the age was missing in the data set. But only 9 of 20

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attended all three drawing sessions. In the analysis, we used drawings from all 20 children, regardless how many times they participated in a drawing session. After the 3rd session, some children started to remark that they had drawn this topic for already three time and their motivation dropped. The 4th session was therefore excluded from the sample. To understand what words were used by the children to describe their pictures, the English descriptions of 40 drawings were extracted and divided by age groups (4-, 5- and 6-year olds). The word frequency analysis showed that “mother” was the most frequently mentioned word for all age groups, showing that mother is still the primary caregiver (Jiang, 2018). The second most frequently mentioned word was “I or me”. Interestingly, the prevalence increased with age. The 4-year olds mentioned “I” or “me” only two times. The 5-year olds mentioned it 7 times and 6-year olds mentioned “I” or “me” 10 times. This reflects the increasing self-awareness known from developmental psychology (Rochat, 2003). “Father” was mentioned 5 times less in total than “mother” and is the 3rd most frequently mentioned word. As described in “The imbalance in intra-household labor division” (Jiang, 2018), this reflects the less participator nature of the father in the education and daily life of a Chinese child. “Playing” (12), “Sister” (9), “Cooking” (8), “Swimming” (7) and “Pool” (6) followed the frequency distribution. As described in the chapter “Using electronic devices affect parent–child interaction”, the usage of mobile devices such as smartphones is also represented in the word frequency analysis. The term “Phone” was used five times by the children (Table 7.4). Table 7.4 Word frequency of 40 children’s descriptions about their drawings. One subject was removed due to overlong descriptions

ALL CHILDREN (CORRECTED) 5 years

6 years

All children

7

5 4

4

2 2

3 3

3

M OTHER

I/ME

SIS T ER

COOK I NGSW I M M I NG

0

0

1

2

2

2

3

PLAYING

2

3

FATHER

4

5 3

4

4

5

6

6

7

7

8

9

10

10

12

15

19

20

4 years

P OOL

P H ONE

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Discussion Due to the different family background and life experience, children produced different drawings. Through classification and analysis, we found some striking features. Next, we will discuss three typical, pervasive issues of family activities reflected in children’s drawings.

The Imbalance in Intra-Household Labor Division In the drawings of daily life activities, we see that the housework is mostly undertaken by the mother. In fact, these children are all in dual-income families. But the mothers had to do the housework after work while the fathers are resting. According to a survey, “Citizens’ awareness of the protection of women’s rights (2016)” conducted by the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics, in married families in Shanghai, both men and women share the housework and female citizens generally spend more time on housework than male citizens. According to the survey data, 25.6% of married female citizens spend more than two hours a day on housework, which is 14.0 percentage points higher than that of married male citizens. When asked whether they are satisfied with the current division of housework, 94.2% of male citizens said they are satisfied, 9.0 percentage points higher than women. Another 13.0% of female citizens were dissatisfied, 9.9 percentage points higher than men.2 Chinese traditional culture has strict requirements for the division of roles of parents in the family. The so-called: men working outside and women working inside, means that the main task of men is to work outside, while women are mainly responsible for raising children at home. This is a well-known pattern. With the development of the feminist movement, a large number of women flooded into the labour market. However, going to work has not changed the traditional mindset of “men working outside and women working inside”. Modern women still have to bear most or even all of the family labour (Jiang, 2015; Tang, 2014; Wang, 2016; Wu, 2011). The imbalance of family division is also reflected in family education. There exists an ambivalent side to the fathers’ role in Chinese cultural history. On the one hand, China is influenced by Confucian culture and has a tradition that values the education of the father. The traditional children’s enlightenment book, The Three Character Classics, tells the unchanging philosophy in a simple and plain vernacular, which is popular and widely circulated. One of them: “Zi bu jiao, fu zhi guo” It means that it is the fathers’ fault to just feed the children and not to educate them. On the other hand, Chinese traditional culture has strict requirements for the division of roles of parents in the family. In the traditional family education, there is an educational structure of “The kind mother and strict father”. The father mainly exists as the economic pillar, but not the main body of early childhood education, which seriously affects his investment in the family education (Guo, 2017). Under the combined effect of these 2 Retrieved

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two opposite traditional social demands, the status of fathers in family education has become a paradox. On the one hand, importance is attached to the participation of fathers, but on the other hand, there are numerous obstacles on the participation of fathers (Li, 2016; Zhao, 2010). Jiang (2018) used questionnaires to survey 500 fathers of children aged 3–6 in Shandong province. The data shows that 84.1% of children’s fathers thought father involvement was very important in children education. However, mothers are still the main caregivers of young children. They are all over the world and it will stay so. Zhang and Zheng (2017) analysed the gender differences in the role of parents in family education through questionnaires. In the surveyed families, “the most important provider of family education for children” and “the family member who spends the most time with children”, the mother of the child accounts for “66.6%” and “60.1%”, respectively, much higher than other family members. The father of the child only accounts for “25.2%” and “13.8%”, respectively. Now the social division of labour tends to be gender equal and the times require the father to reposition himself. We call on fathers to increase his investment in family and participate in children’s education.

Using Electronic Devices Affect Parent–Child Interaction In the activities of children’s daily life, electronic devices frequently appear. The drawings show that family members do not interact with other members when using electronic devices and fathers were the most frequent users of electronic devices among all family members. With the continuous development of Internet technology, humans stepped into the age of information. The twenty-first century is the era of information and also the era of the Internet. A comparative study of China, the USA, Japan and South Korea found that all four countries have parents (guardians) who sometimes communicate with their children while playing with their mobile phones, with China having the highest proportion (40.4%) (Sun & Su, 2019) Jiang (2018) interviewed 90 children about their evaluation of fathers’ participation in reality and their description of the ideal image of fathers. When the children were asked, “What do you like to do with your father? What do you do when you are with Dad?” The general answer was “I hope dad will bring me out to play, get close to nature, play games”, etc. But in reality, some dads, even if they have time to spend with their children, they are mostly watching TV at home, playing with mobile phones or and taking children out to attend the gatherings of the adults. The frequency and duration of parent’s use of electronic media has a significant impact on the quality of parent–child interaction, especially in response, interaction and intimacy. The more frequently parents use electronic media, the longer they use it every day, the worse their responsiveness, interaction and intimacy will be, and the lower the quality of parent–child interaction will be (Li, 2018). In parent–child

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relationship, screen time was correlated with negative refusal, positive refusal and interference (Xing et al., 2019).

Natural Play Is Relative Ignored in Family Activities As is shown in Table 7.2, more families tend to choose outdoor sports activities (28.6%) and fewer families choose natural play activities (11.9%). In China, not only families, also kindergartens relatively ignore natural play. Children spend most of the time in building, manipulating materials, playing with outdoor equipment and movement outdoors. The natural landscape has qualities to meet the children’s needs for a stimulating and varied play environment (Fjørtoft & Sageie, 2000). Through outdoor play and the exploration of natural elements, it is possible to promote education in its broadest sense. Sticks, rocks, flowers, soil, water, etc., are explored with curiosity and drive to learn, as they offer countless possibilities for play (Bento & Dias, 2017). Nature preschool has become popular in Scandinavian countries (Lysklett & Berger, 2017). Norwegians are strongly attached to nature and prefer outdoor leisure activities (Borge, Nordhagen, & Lie, 2003). A nationwide parental survey shows: forests are the most common outdoor space in residential areas in Norway. In all, 97% of parent state that their children have access to forests within walking or cycling distance from home. When it comes to suitability for play, 88% state that their child, in general, has good or very good opportunities for play in nearby nature (Gundersen, Skar, O’Brien, Wold, & Follo, 2016). Wang, Woolley, Tang, Liu, and Luo (2018) found through an online questionnaire that over 87% of the parents in Chengdu, southwestern city of China, understood and recognized the benefits of natural elements within a playground. Vegetation and water were the most popular elements followed by sand and stone, landform and then insects and small animals. Wang et al. believe that the function of natural play and its aesthetics is generally accepted in urban area. However, rapid urbanization in many cities of the world, particularly in China, has resulted in the provision of playgrounds for children being given little consideration for the opportunities they can provide for contact with nature, which is not only desirable but considered to be a human need (Kaplan, 1995). Urbanization has resulted in children being separated from contact with nature. Big gaps exist between needs and reality in natural playground planning and design (Wang et al., 2018). Although children prefer outdoor activities, it seems that they actually spend more time on static, indoor activities (Lupu, Norel, & Lauren¸tiu, 2013).

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Conclusion In this chapter, we attempted to figure out the significant features of children’s family drawings. Due to the limitation of children’s language and cognitive ability, the method of human figure drawings was taken into account. The empirical results presented here are based on our first analysis of the social background of Chinese family, which focuses on Chinese modern family structure and cross-generation education. During the process of drawing, we found: (1) Children tend to get inspired by what the other children around them are drawing. (2) Age is not always reliable predictor for a child’s drawing skills. (3) Grandparents were included in the drawings as part of the family. Further analyses are needed to better understand the family situation from children’s perspectives. On this basis, we analysed the picture content and children’s own interpretation of their family drawings. Two methods were used to analysis the paintings. According to the level of social participation, the paintings were divided into solitary activity paintings and interactive activity paintings. Children’s drawings showed that in reference to family role relevance, family members have less interaction when they are together. According to the theme of family living content, the paintings were divided into imaginary activities, daily life activities, natural play activities and outdoor sports. Three typical, pervasive issues of family activities reflected in children’ drawings were discussed. (1) The imbalance in intrahousehold labor division. (2) Using electronic devices affect parent–child interaction. (3) Natural play is relative ignored in family activities.

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Chapter 8

The Role of LEGO in Numeracy Development: A Case Analysis Tabea Eimer, Gabrijela Aleksi´c, and Qian Zhang

Numeracy is connected to numerous everyday-life tasks and impacts people socially, financially, and professionally in the role of parents, patients, or as a citizen. It can be necessary when buying a house, making investments or simply organizing one’s time. Numeracy has been shown as a predictor for later professional achievement (Parsons & Bynner, 1997). That shows the need for the inclusion of numeracy development into the education system as it additionally is connected to later mathematics achievements (Nath & Szücs, 2014). In order to do so, specific tools have to be identified that support the development of numeracy. One of these tools is LEGO. This study aims at investigating the connection of LEGO and numeracy development on the basis of a case analysis.

Definitions The UNESCO has published a definition of numeracy describing it as “[…] the ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide. More broadly, it means the knowledge and skills required to effectively manage and respond to mathematical demands posed by diverse situations, involving objects, pictures, numbers, symbols, formulas, diagrams, maps, graphs, tables and text. Encompassing the ability to order and sort, count, estimate, compute, measure, and follow a model, it involves responding to information about mathematical ideas” (Burnett, 2005, p. 421). This definition will serve as a base for the concept of numeracy used in this chapter. T. Eimer (B) · G. Aleksi´c University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg e-mail: [email protected] Q. Zhang East China Normal University, Shanghai, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_8

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LEGO is defined as “a brand name for a toy for children consisting of small plastic bricks and other pieces that can be joined together to make models of many different objects” (“Lego | Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary”, 2013). The company itself describes its mission to provide a high-quality toy that supports the development of creativity, imagination, fun, and learning (Sandgaard, 2016). LEGO has been shown to be a predictor for later school achievement in mathematics (Wolfgang, Stannard, & Jones, 2003). Moreover, constructional ability is positively correlated to spatial ability (Brosnan, 1998). This study intends to investigate the role of LEGO as a construction toy in numeracy development. More specifically, constructional ability will be put into the context with mathematical performance and home numeracy.

General Development in the Preschool Age A key aspect concerning development at the preschool age is related to fantasy and play (Mähler, 2007). Children start to discover that the real and mental worlds are separate which leads to great joy in making up fantasy worlds and inventing objects and ideas that are not existent in the real world. At that stage of development, there are two worlds existing: the realistic–naturalistic and the magical–animist. Especially when not around adults, children become very creative. They move from functional play to symbolic play such as pretend play, pretend, or make believe. While symbolic play can also appear in children as young as 18–24 months, plots that are more complex appear progressively with the development of speech and fantasy play and imaginative play emerges. During preschool years, significant transformations can be observed among children due to peer interaction, teacher–child interaction, and formal education. This development in speech helps the children to interact with their environment as well as express themselves in terms of emotions—positive and negative—more elaborately. Moreover, they are faced with novel stimuli coming from the environment, which has increased in complexity compared to the familiar environment at home (Mähler, 2007). According to Piaget, children in preschool are considered to be in the preoperational stage, which is mainly composed of symbolic thought (Inhelder, Chipman, & Zwingmann, 1976). A very significant transformation in relation to numeracy development is conservation. Children are progressively able to take more than one physical parameter into account (Inhelder et al., 1976). The socio-emotional development is connected to the expansion of the area range of the child but also of the change in contact with primary caretakers and attachment figures. Children are faced with a prolonged separation from their parents and are now surrounded by numerous other children of their age. They start to play along other children, have interactive play, learn how to cooperate and are faced with conflicts, sharing, competition, and a need to communicate their feelings. There are three major achievements at the preschool age: cooperation in play, prosocial behavior,

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and the ability for empathy and building friendships. Friendships become relatively stable, which means they are more than peer-relationships. There is more intense social activity, more frequent and more constructive resolution of conflicts and more effective task managing (Mähler, 2007).

Mathematical Development Mathematical development is of significant importance for the concerned topic. According to Krajewski’s model, the development of basic numerical skills happens in coordinated steps and on different levels (Krajewski & Ennemoser, 2013). At first, children have a vague idea of quantities and start to understand how to differentiate between a little and a lot. In parallel, they learn number words and start to develop an understanding for numbers. On the second level, children start to understand that quantities and number words are linked and that quantities can be expressed in numbers. At that time, they have a very imprecise understanding of the concept of amounts. As an example, they understand that 3 is a little, 20 are many, and 100 are a lot. Later, they understand that every amount can be counted to an exact number. On a third level, a connection between the quantity relation and amount concept is drawn. Relations between or within a quantity are understood to be discrete amounts that can be expressed in the form of numbers. That forms the base for understanding addition and subtraction (Krajewski & Ennemoser, 2013).

Numeracy Development and the Chinese Number System What has to be taken into consideration is the buildup of the Chinese number system. Geary, Bow-Thomas, Liu, and Siegler (1996) have reported that Chinese children have a clear advantage over American children in terms of digit span, addition, and arithmetic strategy questionnaire. Already in kindergarten, Chinese children showed to be more efficient in their selection of strategies. They preferred to solve addition problems by using the min strategy which means counting on from the larger of two addends (Geary et al., 1996). Therefore, they performed more accurate and faster than American children. Chinese and American children’s performance on novel mathematical problems has been studied by Siegler and Mu (2008). They showed that even on kindergarten-level, Chinese children showed to be one to two years more advanced in school in mathematics abilities than American children. This advantage can partially be explained by linguistic features of number words and counting systems in different languages. One aspect is the structure of number words which, in Chinese, gives an easy insight into the underlying Base 10 systems (Göbel, Shaki, & Fischer, 2011). In Chinese, most number words are built up from 1 to 10. Eleven is expressed as 10-1, fifteen as 10-5, 23 as 2-10-3. Additional words will be 100 and 1000, but the key aspect is, that children will understand much quicker

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how the system is built up and can therefore solve arithmetical problems sooner. Another aspect is the length of number words (Göbel et al., 2011). Chinese number words are rather short with only one syllable, which “influences pronunciation speed and thus limits digit span because shorter names allow for mental rehearsal of more items” (Göbel et al., 2011, p. 556). Memory span in Chinese lies at about nine digits, while the average in English lies at only seven digits (Dehaene, 1997). The memory span is determined by how many words can be repeated in less than two seconds and is therefore simplified by the short Chinese words. According to Dowker (2005), regular number systems and a clear and consistent representation of the base system are of great importance. Mandarin offers a highly regular system while English is rather irregular and uses new labels for new decades: “An explicit and regular structure might lead to a better and earlier understanding of the structure of the number system” (Göbel et al., 2011, p. 556). Jordan, Kaplan, Ramineni, and Locuniak (2009) have shown the importance of early numeracy competence for children’s learning trajectories in elementary school mathematics. Mathematics performance level and rate of growth in third grade was predicted by number competence in kindergarten.

LEGO and Numeracy Development The prominent advantage in LEGO lies within its great range of possibility for construction and in their freedom to form constructions that represent a certain imagination. It does not limit the user to build certain objects such as animals or humans, but anything that is on their mind which can be constructed using fantasy and creativity. Taking that into account, it gives great possibilities to children to integrate their internally created magical worlds into games and construct what is on their mind. That can be a mental image created based on the real world or it can be a completely new mental creation. The goal is therefore to promote instead of determine a constructive orientation. It requires spatial imagination and knowledge to put a mental image into an actual construction made out of LEGO as these blocks cannot represent certain gestalts such as animals, but fantasy is needed to make them look like it and to find proportions that somehow fit to what a child intends to build.

Studies A study conducted on 3-year olds found that building a model according to instructions was correlated to early mathematics ability (Farmer et al., 2013). Moreover, structural balance of a block building activity was correlated to mathematics performance in adolescents (Casey, Pezaris, & Bassi, 2012). The underlying mechanisms

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have not been defined, but construction play has been suggested to develop logicomathematical skills (Nath & Szücs, 2014). Several studies have found a relationship between performance on construction play and mathematics performance (Nath & Szücs, 2014; Stannard, Wolfgang, Jones, & Phelps, 2001) and spatial abilities (Caldera et al., 1999; Robert & Héroux, 2004). Wolfgang et al. (2003) have been able to show a statistical relationship between early LEGO performance among preschool and achievement in mathematics that was not seen during the elementary school years, but later developing at the middle and high school level. Several measurements were included for this project: LEGO play was observed during several session in which up to four children were playing at one table with a given set of LEGO blocks (namely DUPLO). One playing session lasted up to forty minutes and was included into the daily summer schedule of the kindergarten.

China Education Policy on Mathematical Cognition The Chinese Education Policy states three major developments on mathematical cognition at the age of 3–6-year olds (Ministry of Education, P. R. of China, 2012). The first one states that the children start to perceive mathematics in life useful and interesting. It is followed by the perception and understanding of the relationship of numbers and quantity and the perception of shapes and spatial relationships. All of these have been broken down to the development during each year and give certain educational advice. Looking at the last development described (shapes and spatial relationships), it is stated, that children should be encouraged and supported to be engaged in construction games or production activities using materials in various shapes such as bricks, cartons, and puzzles. Children’s experience should be enriched by spatial orientation recognition. The policy explicitly gives education advice in order to support specific developments.

Objectives of the Study This study wants to investigate the connection between LEGO play, home numeracy, and math abilities of two individual cases that represent extremes on two ends of the spectrum by triangulating the information that has been collected about them.

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Context: Opportunity for Construction Play at the ECNU Kindergarten At the ECNU kindergarten, free playtime during the summer was offered until 9 a.m. with four separate tables. Each table had a different kind of construction toy placed in a container. Here, ECNU kindergarten puts an effort into the implementation of educational advice from the Education Policy. The encouragement in the use of construction games is included into the daily (summer) routine. Children were free to choose one of the tables and play. As an alternative, they were free to pick up a book and read. At approximately 9 a.m., toys were asked to be put away and a group lesson instructed by the teacher started. LEGO was chosen due to its popularity in the general public across countries and its wide range of flexibility in use as opposed to the other construction toys that had a more fixed intention of proper use. Moreover, it was already included into the daily routine which posed less of a disturbance from the side of the researchers. The observation of LEGO play took place between 8 and 9 a.m. The researcher took a chair and sat at the end of the table with some distance, videotaping the entire table. After each playing session, each child was asked a few question related to their construction. The summer class had a size of 23 children with an attendance of 13–20 children varying every day. Ten of these children participated in our study. Seven out of the ten children were male, the other three were female. The age ranged from four years and one month to five years and eleven months with a mean age of five years and two months. A focus was put on two children in particular. The one child, we will call her Yu Yan, is a girl of five years and eleven months. Both of her parents have a post-secondary school academic education and work as teaching and administrative staff. Yu Yan has a younger sibling of three years and six months. She and her parents are Chinese and speak Mandarin at home. The second child, a boy of four years and five months, will be called Zhang Wei within the context of this study. His parents also have a post-secondary school academic education. His father works as a lecturer at the University and his mother works in the financial sector. Zhang Wei has a younger sibling of three years and six months. Again, Mandarin is the home language. In the following, all measurements taken in this study are explained in more detail. A video of children playing LEGO was taken on six days with a maximum time of 30 min and five children at a time during free play. After each observed playing session, each child was asked several questions related to their construction: What did you build? What can it be used for? Why did you chose these colors? Did you make a plan before you started using the LEGO bricks? In order to assess the children’s mathematical skills, the performance indicators in primary schools (PIPS; Tymms, 1999) was chosen. The math test includes two sections in which the children compare sizes and amounts as well as identify them, and read numbers ranging from one to three digits. Further, they are asked to solve addition and subtraction problems. The maximum score possible is 58 points.

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Additionally, the attitudes section was included in which the children give their attitudes with the help of three smiley-emoticons (sad, neutral, happy) to certain activities such as reading, counting, and going to preschool. During the time the research was conducted, the parents were asked to fill out a questionnaire about home numeracy (LeFevre et al., 2009) in order to assess the frequency of certain activities connected to numeracy and literacy happening at home, but also to find out about the parents attitudes towards mathematics and reading.

Results In the following, the observational findings will be presented first. Yu Yan was chosen for closer observation due to her high performance in the math test and complex LEGO building ability compared to the other children. Her score was 53 out of possible 58 points. The mean of all the children was a score of 45. Zhang Wei was chosen as an extreme on the other end of the spectrum. He stood out from the other children due to very simple LEGO constructions and low performance on the math test compared to the other children (score of 18). In this context, Yu Yan and Zhang Wei will be compared in terms of complexity of their construction and their use or play with that construction as well as their self-report on it in the context of their math test results and the information derived from the home numeracy questionnaire. In the end, all the information from the observation, math test and parent questionnaire will be triangulated.

Yu Yan’s Case Observation was focused on a specific day where Yu Yan sits at the LEGO-table with Zhang Wei and two other boys. In what follows, we will describe a scene in which Yu Yan builds a construction using LEGO. Figure 8.1 shows what the girl’s construction looked like when observation started. The girl, we will call her Yu Yan, has put together approximately 20 LEGO blocks in various colors, shapes, and sizes. Note that blocks are not necessarily put together directly on top of each other, but also on the edges. Moreover, bigger blocks are occasionally put on top of smaller ones. Yu Yan looks focused onto her construction, assembles more blocks, and tries to put them into several spots before she decides for one. She talks to herself quietly at times and frequently turns her construction in an attempt to find a proper spot for the blocks. Once she decides to leave a block in a spot, she presses it several times to make it stay. A few times, her construction starts to fall apart, so she puts the big parts back together before adding new blocks. She then takes a break working on her construction and talks to the other children who are arguing about who gets to use one of the block. She goes back to fixing her construction in places she notices that some blocks are lose. Then, she starts

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Fig. 8.1 Yu Yan’s construction of a ship in its middle stage. Photo

moving the other boy’s toy and puts a block onto his construction. Yu Yan proceeds to look at her construction and touches different parts while listening to the other children which are having a discussion about one of the blocks. She takes off three blocks of her construction in order to place them somewhere else. Again, she takes one block at a time, tries different spots before she decides for a final one. The other children at the table start fighting over one of the boy’s construction, Yu Yan stays uninvolved and starts to play with her construction by taking one block and making an arm movement from one part of her construction away from it. She then asks us what will be played today at the kindergarten before we stop the observation for several minutes. The entire sequence of the description above has taken place during 12 min, and Fig. 8.2 shows the final construction. Before Yu Yan takes her construction apart, the researchers ask her what she has built and she explains that it is a ship with a controller, and umbrella, a button to open and close the umbrella, a cabin, and a diving board to jump into the water. Her plan was to build a boat because Fig. 8.2 Yu Yan’s construction of a ship in its final stage. Photo

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Fig. 8.3 Yu Yan’s construction of an elephant. Photo

she saw someone making a ship a few days before. To the question why she chose these colors, she answers that she chose darker colors because lighter ones are not appropriate for a ship. Picking up the observation again after several minutes, Yu Yan has taken her construction apart and started building something new. Figure 8.3 shows what she starts with. While she took her toy apart, two other boys from the table had started a collaborative construction and are now taking Yu Yan’s blocks while they are still laying on the table. She is left with about 13 blocks. She rapidly adds blocks to her construction. When one of the boys starts taking blocks from her construction, she protests and steals one block back. She is now talking to the other two boys very briefly. Yu Yan takes several blocks off her construction again and reassembles them together in a different way. Then, she takes all the blocks apart again and puts the blocks that she will later put on top together first, pressing them together tightly before she proceeds. She puts together a second construction where she notices that it is not standing flat on the ground, so she moves it from front to back several times (Fig. 8.3). She gets hold of the palm tree (Fig. 8.4) which the boys have used before and is now left with three small constructions. She stops building them and starts to play. One orange block is taken out of the stem of the tree with one of the constructions that has four base blocks in the corners with a base put on top which is higher on the one side. Yu Yan moves the other construction (Fig. 8.5) over to the stem. She turns it so the construction shown in Fig. 8.3 which is moved into the stem, then the construction is moved in two small circles. The orange block is put back into the stem and both constructions are moved in turns. Occasionally, a block falls off and Yu Yan fixes that before continuing to play. Next, she removes the two lower (yellow) blocks of one construction (Fig. 8.5) and moves it around the table.

102 Fig. 8.4 Tree stem with an orange block placed inside by Yu Yan. Photo

Fig. 8.5 Yu Yan’s construction of a snake. Photo

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It is directly followed by the other construction. Yu Yan puts the two yellow base blocks back underneath the construction. One boy steals several blocks from her, she gets them back and puts them back onto her construction. The entire sequence takes about nine minutes. Yu Yan later explains: She is retelling a story from a cartoon that she watched. The one construction is a snake with two feet, the other one is an elephant. The tree stem is a cabinet where the elephant stores fluffy candy. The snake wants to steal the candy, so the elephant protects it by putting sticky material on the leg of the table which is where the snake is coming from. As a result, the snake loses its legs and cannot steal the candy anymore.

Zhang Wei’s Case Zhang Wei is playing LEGO on the same day as Yu Yan. When he joins the table, he immediately takes out four bricks from the box and attaches them to each other within one minute, putting the blocks directly on top of each other (Fig. 8.6). He then appears to pretend he has a gun in his hand for around 10 s before he proceeds to look at his construction, holding it in his hand and investigating holes with his finger. He talks to the other children, putting his construction on the table for half a minute and picks it up again. While doing so, he talks to the other two boys sitting at the table and then proceeds by talking to himself. His construction is moved in his hands, put into his mouth and Zhang Wei puts his finger inside the wholes at the Fig. 8.6 Zhang Wei’s construction. Photo

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bottom. The boy sitting across from him steals his construction and gives it to the other boy. Zhang Wei protests and first tries to reach for his toy, argues with the boys and reaches for it again. The boys hand the toy back and forth between each other before they give it back to him. He smiles when he gets it back and proceeds to turn it in his hand before making it touch the boy’s construction. The boy sitting across from him again steals part of his blocks for a few seconds for two more times before the teacher notices and asks the other boy to return the blocks. A few minutes later, Zhang Wei still moves his construction in his hand and says something to the other boys who ignore him. When he reaches over with his toy, the boy sitting diagonal to him steals the top part, but returns it soon after due to the protest of Zhang Wei. He keeps moving in his chair with his construction in his hand, touching it with his mouth, putting it on the table, standing up, sitting back down while smiling a lot. It seems like he is trying to interact with the other children, but they do not react. When asked what he has built, he proudly shows his construction and explains that he has first built a weapon. Afterwards he made an antenna because a fire has broken the other one so he needed to build a new one. A lot of what Zhang Wei is expressing could not be understood by the researcher and context information is missing in order to understand his explanation.

Differences in Observation of the Two Children When observing the children at ECNU working on their LEGO construction, some differences between the children can be observed. As an example, we can see in Figs. 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5, a construction that has taken Yu Yan approximately 7 min to build. Thus, there is the first observable difference which is the duration of the building activity. She started building, picked up more blocks one after another, and added them to her construction. When she was asked what she has built, she explained that she has built an elephant and a snake. The snake is coming up from the leg of the table and wants to steal candy from the elephant, but the elephant wants to keep his candy and puts slimy material on the table leg in order to prevent the snake from coming up. As a contrast, Zhang Wei of four years and five months spends approximately one minutes building his structure of four blocks. He proudly moves the construction in his hands for the rest of the playtime (about 30 min). When asked about what he has built, he explains that it is an antenna because the other one broke in a fire. From this comparison, we can see that there is a difference in duration of six minutes and a difference of 9–16 blocks. Moreover, Yu Yan has built two constructions during that playtime. Her construction is far more complex in terms of attachment of blocks to one another. She explored on where it is possible to put blocks and adds blocks in different positions on top of each other as opposed to Zhang Wei who only puts bricks of equal size directly on top of each other.

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In the next section, we will compare the findings from the observation with the math test and parent questionnaire to have a fuller picture of children’s building activity.

Comparing Observations with the Math Test and Parent Questionnaires Looking at Yu Yan’s math test results, it can be said that she was high performing on the math test (PIPS) and has positive attitudes toward building models out of LEGO or other construction toys and a neutral attitude towards counting. Her parents agree that play is important for the development of a child. Moreover, Yu Yan is exposed to LEGO or other construction toys almost daily. Her parents believe that especially toys in which patterns can be discovered, that stimulate interest, aesthetics, and social competence are important for the development of a child. At home, mathematics are encouraged through games, the quantity of snacks that Yu Yan likes, homework, as well as apps and games on a tablet. Her parents belief that it is important as a caregiver to focus on mathematics because math foundations have a great influence on the child’s development. They report that she is able to count until 100. Activities that the parents see as important in developing mathematical knowledge are to recognize digits, adding and deducting as well as space construction. Yu Yan’s first construction has a rather complex structure without a general pattern. There might be an idea of buildup for a ship on her mind. All kinds of colors and sizes of blocks can be found whereas the other children make rather symmetrical constructions with repeated appearance of certain building block sizes. She is the only one at the table that only attaches half of one block on top of another, which makes it stick out. In addition, she is very thorough in adding a block properly by double pressing on it. Another aspect that cannot be observed with the other children on the day of observation is that Yu Yan is constantly trying to adapt and improve her construction. The other children build something and start to play, but Yu Yan works on her construction extremely long without using it much as a toy to play with. Her second construction has a different character. As described before, she is constructing an elephant and a snake. One block that has four pins on the bottom and two on top and therefore a ramp is used as a face for the elephant. Again, Yu Yan adds blocks on top that stick out. It can be observed that for this construction, she spends less time constructing and more time playing. She moves the “snake” and the “elephant” toward the cabinet. Words are not spoken aloud, but Yu Yan makes some mumbling noises. She is using LEGO to recapitulate a former seen story. on TV, she has seen a cartoon of an elephant and a snake she tries to rebuild these figures from her mind and replays the story. This is in accordance with the earlier described phenomena of fantasy and play. While the story was shown to her, she is using her fantasy to rebuild the characters and retell the story.

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In this playing session, Yu Yun is playing along the other children. She has short interactions with them, but constructs and plays on her own. She generally seems focused on her construction, not getting distracted by the other children’s conversation. While the other children talk a lot during the sessions, she continuously tries different spots for a block, adjusts her construction and adds more blocks. Yu Yan seems acquainted to using LEGO, which is in line with her parents’ statement of her using construction toys daily. She is swift and fluent in her movements adding blocks and precise when placing them. As mentioned before, Zhang Wei’s score on the math test was particular low compared to the other children. His attitudes are generally high which includes counting. The only activity he gave a sad face for was drawing pictures. His parents report that he can count until 20. Zhang Wei is also exposed to LEGO almost daily and the parents strongly agree that he should be exposed to mathematical concepts every day and that play is important for the development of a child. They believe that toys that are related to spatial representation are important for the development of a child. Zhang Wei has access to LEGO at home and plays with it three times per week or more. His parents do not believe that it is important for caregivers to focus on math skills in young children as their cognitive development is not mature enough. Activities they would believe are generally important for developing mathematical knowledge are mathematics, addition, and arranging in order. When comparing Yu Yan’s and Zhang Wei’s case, performance on the math test appears to go along with construction complexity. There seems to be a generally slightly lower frequency of activities happening at home connected to numeracy and literacy for Zhang Wei. It needs to be mentioned that Yu Yan is one year and six months older than Zhang Wei. During LEGO play, Yu Yan is rather focused on her own construction without interacting much with the other boys while Zhang Wei is talking to the other boys to a greater extent even though he does not always receive a reaction from them. The Chinese researcher has stated, that Zhang Wei is saying a lot of words and short phrases that are not understandable during LEGO play and during the math test.

Discussion and Future Directions In this study, there were two participants whom we observed by videos, tested in mathematics, and asked their parents to fill in a questionnaire on frequencies of home numeracy activities as well as the parent’s attitude toward literacy and numeracy. The context of the study was a Chinese kindergarten in Shanghai affiliated to the University. The procedure was observing two children in particular during LEGO play. We selected these two children because they appeared to be on two different ends of a spectrum between high and low performance looking at the math test and performance in LEGO construction. We then compared them in terms of LEGO construction complexity, construction idea, and interaction or play. They had differences in

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activity duration, LEGO construction complexity and size as well as ideas of what can be done with their construction. This might be due to a difference in spatial ability and ability to use imagination and creativity. We triangulated the video observation findings with their math test and parent questionnaires and found that high performance in the mathematics test went along with higher complexity of LEGO construction and vice versa. Moreover, a difference in frequency of home numeracy activities might play a role. Not many studies have looked at the connection between LEGO and numeracy development, instead mathematical development is more commonly used as a concept than the wider spectrum of numeracy. The studies that have looked at this found a correlation between constructional ability and spatial ability (Brosnan, 1998) and that advanced LEGO play is a predictor for later achievement in mathematics (Wolfgang et al., 2003). With this study, we contribute to the identification of factors and tools that support the development of numeracy and mathematics which can potentially be implemented in the education of children at school and at home. Looking at Yu Yan’s and Zhang Wei’s case and taking the other children’s constructions into account, different stages when playing LEGO built up intuitively might be, that a young child starts out playing with one block and continuously adds more blocks of the same size exactly on top of the other one. Progressively, more blocks will be added with experience and practice. Subsequently, children start to build gestalts out of their imagination. Again, these will be rather simple in their complexity, but can possibly be identified by an outsider as a certain gestalt. A next stage, like the one that Yu Yan is in, can be complex constructions of gestalts. These can have all kinds of different block sizes built up not exactly on top of each other, but blocks might be sticking out, a bigger one might be placed on top of a smaller one in order to construct a mental image of a jumping board into the water as Yu Yan did. With growing age, these constructions get more advanced and complex with no limits in size or imagination as can be seen in professional LEGO constructions nowadays. This study does not attempt to compare two children in terms of how elevated their skill is, but investigates how LEGO and building a construction is handled in relation to numeracy. The difference that is found here should not be taken as a difference due to age, but a difference in the use of blocks itself and how it connects.

Limitations This study has only taken two children for a limited time for closer research into account. Moreover, the summer time at ECNU kindergarten is an unusual time for the children as the teacher changes every day, the children are mixed from different classes and age groups and the daily schedule is less structured and more relaxed. For that reason, neither the teacher’s impression of the children could be considered as the teachers did not know the children for a longer period of time, nor the regular daily schedule and incorporation of activities connected to numeracy could be taken into account.

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Future Research and Practical Implications Future research should lead to connecting the curriculum and daily activities during the regular school year to construction ability and performance in numeracy activities. Moreover, the teacher’s impression on the child is an important source of information and should be taken into account. That would provide a fuller picture of the children. In particular, practical implications for these two children and the kindergarten can be to encourage activities that the children are not advanced in and guide them to more complex play. Teachers can be more aware of children’s cognitive development and encourage each child for more advanced LEGO play as well as numeracy activities in accordance with their abilities. Moreover, it is important to collaborate with parents and to emphasize the importance of incorporation of numeracy activities into the daily schedule as it supports the learning-by-doing process. This can prevent possible academic difficulties or direct children in their academic path especially connected to mathematical achievement in the later school years.

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Krajewski, K., & Ennemoser, M. (2013). Entwicklung und Diagnostik der Zahl-GrößenVerknüpfung zwischen 3 und 8 Jahren. In M. Hasselhorn, A. Heinze, W. Schneider, & U. Trautwein (Eds.), Diagnostik mathematischer Kompetenzen (Vol. 11, pp. 41–65). Göttingen: Hogrefe Verlag. LeFevre, J.-A., Skwarchuk, S.-L., Smith-Chant, B. L., Fast, L., Kamawar, D., & Bisanz, J. (2009). Home numeracy experiences and children’s math performance in the early school years. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, 41(2), 55–66. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014532 Lego | Meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary. (2013). Cambridge advanced learner’s dictionary (4th ed.). Retrieved from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/lego Mähler, C. (2007). Kindergarten-und Vorschulalter. In M. Hasselhorn & W. Schneider (Eds.), Handbuch der Entwicklungspsychologie (Vol. 7, pp. 164–174). Göttingen: Hogrefe Verlag. Ministry of Education, P. R. of China. (2012). Guide to learning and development for 3–6 year-old children (3–6岁儿童学习与发展指南). Beijing: Capital Normal University Press. Nath, S., & Szücs, D. (2014). Construction play and cognitive skills associated with the development of mathematical abilities in 7-year-old children. Learning and Instruction, 32, 73–80. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2014.01.006 Parsons, S., & Bynner, J. (1997). Numeracy and employment. Education + Training, 39(2), 43–51. https://doi.org/10.1108/00400919710164125 Robert, M., & Héroux, G. (2004). Visuo-spatial play experience: Forerunner of visuo-spatial achievement in preadolescent and adolescent boys and girls? Infant and Child Development: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 13(1), 49–78. Sandgaard, M. (2016, February). The LEGO® Brand. Retrieved March 21, 2019, from https://www. lego.com/en-us/aboutus/lego-group/the_lego_brand Siegler, R. S., & Mu, Y. (2008). Chinese children excel on novel mathematics problems even before elementary school. Psychological Science, 19(8), 759–763. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280. 2008.02153.x Stannard, L., Wolfgang, C. H., Jones, I., & Phelps, P. (2001). A longitudinal study of the predictive relations among construction play and mathematical achievement. Early Child Development and Care, 167(1), 115–125. Tymms, P. (1999). Baseline assessment and monitoring in primary schools: Achievements, attitudes, and value-added indicators. London, England: David Fulton Publishers. Wolfgang, C., Stannard, L., & Jones, I. (2003). Advanced constructional play with LEGOs among preschoolers as a predictor of later school achievement in mathematics. Early Child Development and Care, 173(5), 467–475. https://doi.org/10.1080/0300443032000088212

Chapter 9

Children’s Construction of the Natural Numbers: Some Examples from a Cultural Background Mariela Orozco

This comment aims to present new conceptions about the development and learning of children’s natural numbers from birth to entering into primary school. First of all, I report/inform about the research carried out in several countries that account for babies’ mathematical thinking; and secondly, I reflect on the demands that children have in order to construct an understanding of the natural numbers, and the base ten system that supports them; and finally, I give examples of the way children learn the natural numbers and the incredible knowledge of children living in slums of the city where I live.1

Baby’s Representation of Numerical Magnitudes Since the last century, many authors have shown evidence about children’s mathematical knowledge since they are babies. They have found “that two distinct core systems of numerical representations are present in human infants”; “one system for representing numerical magnitudes, and another system that enables precise representation of small numbers of individual objects.” These systems “do not emerge through individual learning or cultural transmission.” “These systems account for our basic numerical intuitions and serve as the foundation for the more sophisticated numerical concepts.” (Feigenson, Dehaene, & Spelke, 2004, p. 307). According to Karmiloff-Smith (1992, p. 125), recent research allows us to point out “innate predispositions” in the babies to distinguish small collections of objects, initially, no more than three. Dehaene (2017) points out that the meaning of the 1 Cali,

Colombia, South America.

M. Orozco (B) Corporación Niñez y Conocimiento, Cali, Colombia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_9

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number is very early, as it sometimes occurs in babies within a few hours of being born. Baby’s sensitivity to the effects of addition and subtractions of items in sets sizes up to three has been shown at various ages and with different types of objects. During infancy, children exhibit numerical knowledge. Using the habituation paradigm, Xu and Spelke (2000) tested six-month-old infants’ discrimination of numerosities. Careful controls for non-numerical dimensions ensured that infants only responded to numerosity. In the experiment 1, infants were first exposed to see repeated presentations of 8 or 16 dots, and the experiment 2 tested infants’ discrimination of 8 versus 12 elements. When they were tested with other arrays than 8 and 16 dots, infants looked longer at the newer numerical set regardless of whether they had been habituated to 8 and 16, showing that they successfully responded to number. Implementing the thesis on violation of expectations, another pioneer who has worked with babies’ early numerical knowledge is Wynn (1992, 1998). She found that at five months, babies were able to compute simple addition and subtraction operations by working with small sets of objects. Initially, she presented babies with only one doll, which she hid behind a small screen, and then, a second doll that she also hid. Later, she showed the babies a doll, where she had put the two; or two dolls, where she had put only one. Babies looked for a longer time to the situation, which did not correspond to the action of adding and removing previously carried out by the researcher, than to those situations in which she showed them the same number of dolls she had put behind the screen. In other words, the babies’ look lasted concentratedly for a longer period on the activity of 1 plus 1 doll, when the researcher only showed them one, as a final result; that is, as if they were missing because 1 plus 1 cannot be equal to 1. When she initially showed them two dolls and removed one, the babies also looked longer when she showed them the two dolls, as if they were surprised because two minus one, she took cannot be equal to two. This primitive ability to make approximate numerical judgments, shared by human beings and nonhuman animals, relies on a common nonverbal system to represent quantities called the approximate number system (ANS). The results of these and other investigations postulate that the construction of knowledge about the number and quantity is available to babies very early and that through the practices and everyday language of the elderly, they progressively access the numbers. There are also a lot of researches pointing out the difference in knowledge related to age levels. Nevertheless, several examples of parent’s practices, in many societies, exemplify the way children start to construct the numbers. When children turn two years old, a common behavior may be found. Parents teach them to lift two fingers when they ask them: “How old are you?” They learn to lift “two” fingers and not only one or all their fingers. Another example of children’s knowledge is when they count up to three and more, stepping up the stairs with their dads.

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Requirements for Counting Development When children are learning to count up to one hundred, they have to cope with several requirements. In order to count correctly, children have to coordinate the relationship of each numerical expression with the counted item. In order to do so, children have to: • know the numerical expressions, • neatly indicate the elements assigned to each expression, • recognize that the last expression corresponds to the total number of counted items. However, still something is missing: Besides counting, children have to learn how to write the numerals. What are the demands to the children in order to learn how to write the numerals? How do they develop the ability that enables “the mapping between numeral symbols” and their corresponding magnitude that has been called “mapping precision?” (Siegler & Booth, 2004, in Gimbert, Camos, Gentaz, & Mazens, 2019, p. 105) In order to learn to write the numerals children must: • know the sign that represents each numeral from one to zero, • recognize that in the written numerals; the position of each sign is related to the expression they represent: The two (2) in twenty has to be written in the second place from left to right; but in twelve and thirty two, and so on, it has to go on the right (12, 32, … 92).2 • Understand that the different units in the system are product of multiplication: 2 in order one, that is the tenths, is a product of 2 × 10 = 20; in order two is a product (10 × 10 = 100) and (2 × 100 = 200), and so on … In Spanish, the numerical expressions that are the words to design numbers are not regular. In order to learn how to count, children have to learn the different words that designate numbers up to fifteen and relate them to each item they count, and understand that the last number pronounced designate the total amount of items in the collection. The first ten numerical expressions in Spanish are different: (1) uno, (2) dos, (3) tres, (4) cuatro, (5) cinco, (6) seis, (7) siete, (8) ocho (9) nueve, (10) diez.3 After ten, numbers as 11, 12 … 15 have special words: (11) once, (12) doce, (13) trece, (14) catorce, (15) quince.4 After these numbers, the following ones present certain regularities: Diez5 y seis (16), diez y siete (17), diez y ocho (18), diez y nueve (19). 2 It

is necessary to remember that the base ten notation system has its origin in Arabia, and that the Arabs write from right to left. This is why the numerals that represent the minor numbers go to the right of the major. 3 One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. 4 Like in English: eleven, twelve, thirteen. Nonetheless, in English, the sounds of the words for the following numbers—fourteen, fifteen … have some resemblance with the original numbers that they have learned. 5 Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

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After twenty, the counting becomes regular—veinti(uno), veinti(dós), veinti(tres) … veinti(nueve),6 but not in the expressions that designate the multiples of ten. Veinte (20), treinta (30), cuarenta (40), cincuenta (50), sesenta (60), setenta (70), ochenta (80), noventa (90).7 The ending “enta” supports the tenth multiples after “forty,” as in English “ty” defines the multiples of ten. In order to learn to count up to one hundred, we propose the children to make necklaces, and in each necklace, they thread ten elements.8 This is the strategy which we use so that they are able to construct units of ten: one necklace, ten elements. A girl, who has made 2 two collars,9 counted correctly up to twenty buttons. When she finished counting the button in the third necklace she said: “twenty-ten.” She already knew she was counting tens. The teacher understood her and said to her: “treinta (thirty).” Then, she continued: thirty one, thirty two, thirty three … thirty nine, and when she reached the tenth button, before saying thirty-ten, she stopped counting, looked at her teacher questioning her. The girl already knew that the expression changed its name but she didn’t know it. Then, the teacher said: “cuarenta (forty)”. (Orozco, 2020). Using this method, making necklaces with ten buttons each and giving the girl the name of the base ten numbers, she learned to count up to one hundred. She was constructing what Dowker calls (2005) the regular number system and a clear and consistent representation of the base ten system. Jordan, Kaplan, Ramineni, and Locuniak (2009) have shown the importance of early numeracy competence for children’s learning trajectories in elementary school’s mathematics. However, there is still something missing that this girl has to learn: how to write the numerals that is to manage the “mapping precision” proposed by Siegler and Booth 2004 in Gimbert et al. (2019, p. 105). In a study that we developed in order to establish the way in which children transcode numerals from verbal expression to written numerals, we dictated them numerals, whose writing requires the use of “intermediate zeros.” A typical error was that they omitted or increased the zeros in the numeral and in some cases placed the point of the thousand units in the wrong place or interpreted the zero as the absence of units in a given order. For example, by dictating “five thousand thirty,” they wrote: 530 or 503 or 50.30; and if asked: How many hundreds are there in “five thousand thirty,” their answer was wrong. We found that fifth grade students in private schools have not obtained this “knowledge,” because when we dictated numerals the segmentation of the dictated numeral was not correct. When reading numerals, two segmentation strategies were found: implicit segmentation with a partial production and explicit segmentation with total production; and both types of strategies affect the syntax of the verbal numeral. When reading a numeral, children tend to segment the Arabic input into meaningful units for them, for instance, tens. Instead of reading the numeral “3.524,” they read it: 6 Twenty

one, twenty two, twenty three … twenty nine. forty, fifty, but no sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. 8 We use any type of material that can be skewered. 9 The girl makes necklaces by inserting 10 buttons in each thread. 7 Thirty,

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“thirty five and twenty four.” The transcoding process evolution is independent of the type of numeral children read. The development of basic numerical skills does not happen in coordinated steps for all children, not even for the same children. Another basic knowledge when children are learning to write and read numerals is learning to operate, at least the direct operations: sum and multiplication. These operations enable them to understand logic of the base ten systems. But, as in previous studies, when they are learning to multiply, we found a process that is no continuous. For instance, one day, a girl working with me was able to understand the relation between the sum and the multiplication. That day she counted: “two, four, six, eight, ten.” Then, I asked her: How many times have you counted two? The girl responded: “Five times.” Then, I asked: how much are five times two? And the girl answered: “ten.” That day the girl was able to answer the question related to the two direct operations: addition and multiplication. Nevertheless, the following day I wanted to confirm that the girl was advancing to multiply and started working with her, using the same task. The only thing the girl was able to do correctly was to count by two, but she was not able to answer the following questions. The children’s response to the same problem or the same type of problems change from one day to the other, and there is not a continuous advance for every child. The development of mathematical thinking or any other type of development do not present a permanent rise. In most children, mathematical thinking development has many fluctuations between understanding and errors. The study I am introducing “investigates the connection between LEGO play, home numeracy, and math abilities of two individual cases that represent extremes on two ends of the spectrum by triangulating the information that has been collected about them.” In the article, the authors compare the production of 4 years and 5 months old boy with a 5 years and 11 months old girl, in the math test and the construction task. The girl “explained that she has built an elephant and a snake. The snake is coming up from the leg of the table and wants to steal candy from the elephant, but the elephant wants to keep his candy and put slimy material on the table leg in order to prevent the snake from coming up.” That is the girl who is able to construct a history about the Lego constructions which she has built. “As a contrast, Zhang Wei of 4 years and 5 months spends approximately one minute building his structure of four blocks. He proudly moves the construction in his hands for the rest of the playtime (about 30 min). When asked about what he has built, he explains that it is an antenna because the other one broke in a fire.” The authors recognize that Yu Yan is one year and six months older than Zhang Wei. But almost at the end of the article, they propose that “The difference that is found here should not be taken as a difference due to age, but a difference in the use of blocks itself and how it connects.” Nevertheless, they do not inform the way the boy solves the Lego construction, and the math test is adequate to his age. Were his performances lower than those of other children of the same age? What were other children’s results the same age as the girl? Which were the differences found in the Lego construction and the math test between children the same age as the girl?

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I suggest that the comparison has to be established with a child the same age as the girl, but not with a boy that is one and a half years younger than her. Obviously, the boy’s capabilities to solve either the math test or the Lego construction are lower than the capabilities of a girl one and a half years older than him. From the previous points of view, the comparison of the girl’s results has to be established between the performance of the girl with another child more less her same age, having lower results in the construction and the math test.

References Dehaene, S. (2017). Comment apprend-on? (N°6, pp. 30–33). Paris: Sciences Humaines. Dowker, A. (2005). Early identification and intervention for students with mathematics difficulties. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 38(4), 324–332. Feigenson, L., Dehaene, S., & Spelke, E. (2004). Core systems of number. Language. Conceptual development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(7), 307–314. Gimbert, F., Camos, V., Gentaz, E., & Mazens, K. (2019). What predicts mathematics achievement? Developmental change in 5- and 7-year-old children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 178, 104–120. Jordan, N., Kaplan, D., Ramineni, C., & Locuniak, M. N. (2009). Early math matters: Kindergarten number competence and later mathematics outcomes. Developmental Psychology, 45(3), 850– 867. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Más allá de la modularidad: La ciencia cognitiva desde la perspectiva del desarrollo (p. 125). Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Orozco, M. (2020). Uno, dos, tres … hasta mil. La aritmética de los niños, la aritmética para los niños (p. 248). Corporación Niñez y Conocimiento: Editorial San Buenaventura. Wynn, K. (1992). Addition and subtraction by human infants. Nature, 358, 749–750. Wynn, K. (1998). Psychological foundations of number: Numerical competence in human infants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2(8), 296–303. Xu, F., & Spelke, E. S. (2000). Large number discrimination in 6-month-old infants. Cognition, 74, B1–B11.

Chapter 10

The School as Semiotic Intercultural Arena Luca Tateo

Introduction: Polyphonic Epistemology Psychology urgently needs a polyphonic gaze on human activity. We are living a time in which monological perspectives contend the epistemological primacy over the world with a renovated stamina. As a supposed reaction to weak late-modernity epistemology (only apparently polyphonic, rather actually hegemonic), we witness the comeback of strong claims about who is entitled to understand the reality. Identity politics, for instance, is but a big attempt to annihilate “other” ways of knowing and acting politically. It is the tyranny of some groups, legitimated by religion, blood, market, to rule against minorities. Neo-positivistic epistemologies in social sciences claim the primacy of evidence (built in a monological and reductionist way) over the multiplicity of human experience. The global ecological debate seems polarized between two positions that admit no dialogue. In other words, it seems that we are able to deal with each other only in terms of black and white, forgetting the amazing polychromies of life. In this sense, the colonizing attitude is still there (Bhatia, 2018), to the extent that our epistemic categories are built in terms of oppositions, binary couples and monological perspectives. The enormous amount of suffering that such an epistemological attitude (which is always also political and ethical) produces in our contemporary everyday life is adamant. Monological epistemologies do not answer a need for knowledge; they fulfil a need for power. They signal a need for a safe space, where our relation with the alterity of the world is oversimplified and made manageable. Yet, we ultimately are but a part of a global living system. We are not in power of the world’s functioning, to the extent that our fate is linked to the fate of the entire planet and its inhabitants, including other humans. We are not just human L. Tateo (B) University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_10

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beings, all looking to the same world, yet we are a web of gazes looking to each other, and through this mutual gaze, we contribute to build our shared environment. Thus, psychology, as science of human beings, needs to become aware of the systemic interconnectedness of humans and to develop adequate epistemological perspectives, rather than imposing a monological view; no matter if the hegemonic perspective originates from the USA, Europe or China, respectively, (Bhatia, 2018). Psychology must develop a polyphonic epistemology, implying that “multiple gazes also multiply the qualities and the features of the field of meaning we come to build as our object of investigation” (Tateo, Español, Kullasepp, Marsico, & Palang, 2018, p. 131). The present volume is a first attempt to concretely build such a polyphonic epistemology, involving students from the very beginning of the academic training. Instead of adopting a cross-cultural perspective, in which the monological gaze looks at supposedly different realities, the approach proposed here (e.g. the research tandem) is meant to build an actual polyphonic epistemology (Fig. 10.1). We do not start from a single perspective to observe multiple contexts. We rather assume the polyphony of gazes as constitutive of the process of knowing and understanding. Human geography tells us that there are materialities, lands, plants and roads “out there”. To these objects are attached practices, meanings, memories and expectations, as both products and producers of the territory. Yet, their meaning is not a given, and it is not the same for all the persons involved. There is no meaning “out there”, yet potentially meaningful objects of semiotic reference. Each researcher is moving through a field of experience from

Fig. 10.1 Polyphonic perspectives produce the object of study out of a field of experience (Tateo et al., 2018, p. 131)

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her ethnocentric, embodied and egocentric perspective, while meeting other observers with eyes, bodies, meanings who will provide different gazes. (Tateo et al., 2018, p. 131)

The field of experience itself does not make sense without the experiencing person, as the Umwelt is co-constitutive of the organism’s experience. The experiencing person is not alone in her egocentric and ethnocentric perspective, rather part of a web of relationships. So, the field of experience (Fig. 10.1) is the result of a collective mutually coordinated action that we have tried to turn into a systemic epistemological approach through the research tandem method. The two studies by Eimer (2020) and Périard and Liu (2020) illuminate the possibility to overturn the cross-cultural gaze into a polyphonic one. They focus on the school environment of the Shanghainese kindergarten, trying to look at the complex whole of material and immaterial elements that contribute to build a moral atmosphere orienting children development as members of the future society. The collaboration between Luxembourgish and Chinese young researchers constitutes a specific field of experience and shows a different understanding of cultural context. Culture is but a local set of solutions that human collectives produce to answer general existential problems (e.g. how do we give birth and reproduce, how to coordinate and manage conflicts, how do we die, what is healthy, what is a happy life, etc.). The local solutions, built through different sets of messages, practices, organization of places and artefacts, constitute local ecosystems. A cross-cultural approach would provide a monological gaze (a common theoretical construct and standardized method) by which comparing them, so that one will probably just find some similarities and some differences (Fig. 10.2). The monological approach would consist of collecting inductive evidences about personal variations of the construct between cultural (meaning national) groups. Both variability and similarity would be grouped in a limited number of binary dimensions (e.g. dependence/independence, collectivistic/individualistic, secure/insecure attachment, etc.) and explained by the belonging to a given culture. The universality of the theoretical construct is assumed in virtue of an ethnocentric epistemology, whose validity is cross-cultural. Bhatia (2018) has nicely showed how this assumption is proved to be false by scholars from different parts of the world; it has nevertheless not yet modified the general monological epistemology of psychology. Universal theoretical constructs

Solution 1

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Fig. 10.2 Current cross-cultural approach

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Universal existential problems

Solution 1

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Person 2

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Person N… This is a unique local ecosystem that works with general processes

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Fig. 10.3 Ecosystemic approach to cultural differences

Ecosystems are instead unique instances of local complex configurations of interacting elements that nevertheless follow generalizable laws. Constructs are thus the product of indigenous, historically situated scientific traditions. Some specific traditions, namely the Western positivistic social science, have been particularly functional to the colonialist process, which has legitimated this perspective as the only scientifically valid in return (Bhatia, 2018). What can be assumed as universal is the set of problems that emerge from the ecosystemic set of relationships (Fig. 10.3): One can generalize the existential problems, not compare the local solutions. The two chapters Cultural objects at ECNU Kindergarten and Moral education in a Shanghai kindergarten—how do children perceive social values and norms? have an enormous heuristic potential not because they use some universal construct of psychology, such as moral development, but because they focus on universal problems that is possible to observe in any human collective: How to build an environment for children that is functional to their moral development fitting both with the society’s requirements and the person’s psychological processes. Adopting a polyphonic and ecosystemic approach, one shall look at every subpart (both human and non-human elements) of the kindergarten as a unique local configuration: The peculiar solution to existential problems that one can call “culture”, such as “how do we organize family relationships” or “how do I differentiate myself from the other, but at the same time I do not appear an alien”.

Semiotics and Materiality: Ordinary Things The school environment is filled with signs (Tateo, 2018), often carrying ambivalent messages, that the students, the parents and the teacher have to make sense of.

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However, in this continuous interpretive effort, there is a clear asymmetry of power. Any educational intervention assumes that the child must change, not the school. The school environment is also made of things, and the materiality studies have showed how every artefact and space in the school is conveying moral and political messages, beside the educational ones (Grosvenor & Rasmussen, 2018; Marsico, Dazzani, Ristum, & Bastos, 2015). Eimer (2020) and Périard and Liu (2020) observe how the materiality plays a role in Chinese kindergarten educational practices, and they suggest a very relevant advancement in this sense: We must consider the semiotic and the material nature of signs in the school environment altogether. Signs and materiality are the two faces of the same coin (Tateo & Marsico, 2019): Objects and practices have semiotic value, and signs always have a material quality. The sign/materiality complexes are used in human activities to guide people’s conduct towards some goals. They fill human environments of potential humus to nourish meaning-making. They suggest some interpretive directions, but at the same time they need not to be too directive; otherwise, they can generate strong resistance. Meaningful signs/materialities better work when they are peripheral, when they fill lateral spaces (such as corridors and classroom walls), but are always ready to become central again under specific conditions (Tateo & Marsico, 2019). Peripheral condition is essential to the functioning of moral guidance: A wall just in front of the person cannot but represent an obstacle, triggering resistance and suggesting overcoming or withdrawing, while a corridor, where walls are still a barrier but peripheral, orients the path by accompanying and canalizing the movement. Signs/materialities are often constituted by ordinary “things” that can potentially assume extraordinary meanings, under some temporary conditions (e.g. the different corners of the classroom filled with ordinary objects, such as toys or kitchen stuff, that under some conditions become tools for moral education). On the other hand, extraordinary meanings (e.g. the ubiquitous red flag in any Chinese school, the American flag in United States’ classrooms or the cross on the wall of many classrooms in Christian majority countries) need to become ordinary objects to gain their place in everyday life (Fig. 10.4). The works of Eimer (2020) and Périard and Liu (2020) provide a number of examples in the context of Shanghainese kindergarten. For instance, Eimer (2020) describes the presence of the Zh¯ongguó jié (the Chinese traditional decorative red yarn knot) as ornamental element in the school environment. It can be considered the equivalent of the cross on the wall of many Western classrooms. It is related to a relevant cultural tradition; it is an artefact charged with several extraordinary meanings, and its presence can be easily accepted, in the form of a peripheral and ordinary wall ornament. However, in relation to its discrete presence, it can become central again under specific conditions, revealing all its extraordinary moral value. Very often, we are nowadays observing the use of these cultural artefacts for political purposes, as they become controversial objects of struggle for those who want to “preserve” the traditional values against any “invasion” of barbarians “others.” Politicians can suddenly hold the cross (or any other religious or nationalistic symbols) as

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Fig. 10.4 The dynamics of meaning-making between ordinary and extraordinary (Tateo & Marsico, 2019, p. xx)

a weapon against minorities exactly because those symbols are usually available in the periphery of perception, in the form of ornaments. Moreover, it is fundamental that the same mechanism applies in the opposite direction; in such a way that any object charged with extraordinary meanings can deescalate and become again part of the ordinary landscape. To understand the relevance of this bidirectional process, for instance, just imagine a school in which the presence of the flag is experienced every day as an extraordinary a call to duty, even in times of peace! Every culture provides some kinds of semiotic operators to turn ordinary things into extraordinary meaningful signs. Tateo and Marsico (2019) have tried to begin a typology of the semiotic operators that make possible the mutual feeding of ordinary into extraordinary. One operator is scaling (Tateo & Marsico, 2019, p. xxii): Eimer (2020) describes the presence of big decorations on the corridors’ walls and tries to imagine the effect of the pictures of the large big ordinary figures involved in traditional activities on the gaze of 4–6 years children. A further semiotic operator to produce extraordinary meanings is the regulation of access (Tateo & Marsico, 2019, p. xxiv). Périard and Liu (2020) illustrate different classrooms everyday routines, in which the practices of regulation of access (to the drinking water, to the toys, to the toilet) convey some specific moral values. Finally, one can mention the building of narratives (Tateo & Marsico, 2019, p. xxv) as an operator that feeds ordinary into extraordinary. Périard and Liu (2020), in the second part of their field study, analyse how the material artefacts in the school environment (some story books) are used to build moral meanings through relating extraordinary fictional characters with ordinary moral acceptable or unacceptable conducts.

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To understand the complex of signs/materialities in a school environment, we need a polyphonic epistemology. The first reason is that the monological gaze cannot grasp the dialectics between ordinary and extraordinary meanings. Too many taken for granted are present in the universalistic gaze of the monological researcher. A multiple gaze is necessary to build an epistemic object that reveals its multiple meanings. So, the researcher (generally educated to Western epistemology) who enters the field can be simply blind to meanings. As she is incapable of recognizing materialities as signs: She may need a local interpreter. On the other hand, we tend to think culture as internally homogeneous. So, for instance, both Eimer (2020) and Périard and Liu (2020) look for what is typically Chinese in the Shanghainese kindergartens. They run the risk to overlook what is actually a space filled with intercultural signs. The cultural project of the school as builder of coordinated culturally homogenous messages is possible only to the extent that also “alien” signs are present. Any collective identity is built in relation to its constructed counterpart. The classroom is filled both with Chinese traditional signs and with non-Chinese traditional signs, no matter how clear-cut the distinction may be. At any moment, one of these elements can become salient in function of the identity project, because the purpose is to build at the same time an obedient citizen and an eager consumer. So, Mickey Mouse toys or Coca-Cola exist together with traditional Chinese instruments, contributing to an intercultural complex of signs. In the case of Périard and Liu (2020), an American story book becomes the mediational tool for the internalization of what are supposed to be typical Chinese moral values. Yet, in order to become sensitive to these complex semiotic dynamics, we need a polyphonic gaze, like that of the research tandem. Only a polyphonic gaze can, for instance, overcome the superficial opposition between collectivistic and individualistic cultures by revealing that how, in school moral education, the messages are both collectivistic and individualistic, when, for instance, the teacher praises the single child in front of the classmates for having been the best one in following the collective activity and doing exactly the same task of the others (Périard & Liu, 2020). One can easily understand that the theoretical issue is not to asses whether a given culture is similar or different on the binary category of individualism/collectivism, but how that specific human ecosystem has developed a local solution to the existential problem of coordinating the individual and the group on the practical moral conduct and what are the psychosocial processes involved.

Socially Coordinated Human Development The studies of Eimer (2020) and Périard and Liu (2020) stress the role of values in educational contexts. In a certain sense, it is easier to observe the presence of value-laden educational practices in the school of the “others”. While we are more reluctant to admit that also our schools, as any form of education, are not independent or universal with respect to a given system of values. Education is both a practice to make children internalize the appropriate values in the course of development

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and a product of a given historical system of values (Branco & Lopes-de-Oliveira, 2017). Any educational intervention is a project of transformation of the actual child in function of an imagined one (Tateo, 2018, 2019), with respect to a given set of values. So, any human collective at a given time sets some acceptable forms of human development (Fig. 10.5), and immediately evokes the complementary non-acceptable forms. If the person’s development is taking place within the frame of the acceptable window of possibilities or acceptability (Tateo, 2019), then the school does not take any specific corrective action. The entire complex of signs/materialities in the school environment are exactly aimed at making visible, but peripheral, the limits of the window of possibilities. In the case of the Shanghainese kindergarten, for instance, the corridors are filled with suggestion about acceptable developmental trajectories in the form of examples of “proper” jobs, and how they must be valued (Eimer, 2020). What is really interesting is the complementary nature of any educational message: Any trajectory which is included into the windows of acceptability (A), immediately evokes a complementary set (non-A), which is a range of non-acceptable conducts. Moreover, the acceptable form of development A can be defined only in relation to non-A. The border between acceptable and non-acceptable forms of development is historically produced by the interpretation of the system of values.

Fig. 10.5 Windows of possibilities and forms of acceptable development (Tateo, 2019, p. 7)

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Some forms of development (e.g. some moral conducts) are acceptable at a certain age and in a certain historical period, while become non-acceptable at a different age. The dialectic relationship between A and non-A generates a border zone of quasi-acceptable forms of development that can be candidate, from time to time, to become object of negotiation as either acceptable or non-acceptable. This is a generalizable feature of the local school ecosystem, as it can be observed any where anytime, although with unique configurations. Let’s take, for instance, the issue of children sexuality (Egan & Hawkes, 2008). In general, many cultures consider sexuality as a legitimate feature of development only at a certain age, although the age limit has varied across times and places. Common sense still struggles to accept the concept of libido and infantile sexuality as it touches some deep resistance: This is why Nabokov’s Lolita exerts such an ambivalent lure. So, the value of children’s sexual purity sets some forms of development as acceptable, immediately relating to the non-acceptable forms. This results in a number of different local practices to make sense of this opposition (e.g. physical segregation of boys and girls, adult supervision and controlled access to sexual content, etc.). At the same time, we cannot help finding tender when two children kiss or hug each other, or when they say they want to marry, because we attribute to that gesture a non-sexualized, spontaneous nature and at best an imitation of adult behaviour. After a certain age, these behaviours stop becoming tender and begin to become suspicious. Gradually, in the course of human development, acceptable conducts become quasi-acceptable. In order to become acceptable again, they have to fit the socially guided developmental trajectories at the right age. The developing person will be required to understand and internalize the progressive movement of the conduct “kissing” from acceptable to non-acceptable to quasi-acceptable under specific conditions/limitations. This movement is also accompanied by an emotional guidance that suggests what kind of feelings are associated to the moral conduct, as it can be easily observed in any developing child, who would answer with a loud “bleach” if asked to kiss a child of the opposite gender, in between the age of 7 and of 13. Another example of how the window of possibilities regulates the educational intervention is presented by Périard and Liu (2020) in their study on the use of the book David Gets in Trouble (Shannon, 2002). The book is a collection of short illustrated stories about the misconducts of the child named David. It is used by adults to convey some understanding about what is appropriate or inappropriate in the children’s conduct. It is a tool that should help children between 4 and 6 to internalize some moral values such as obedience to parents, telling the truth, etc. by presenting it in visual form, rather than abstract moral rules. Like, in the case of children sexuality, adults tend to set a range of acceptable (thus, also non-acceptable and quasi-acceptable) conducts at a given age. Any educational intervention will be aimed at changing the actual child in function of an imagined future state (Fig. 10.6). The intervention is focused on what the child should be (promoting some features) but at the same time defines what the child should not be (inhibiting other developmental features). (Tateo, 2019, p. 13)

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Fig. 10.6 Educational intervention in function of an imagined child (Tateo, 2019, p. 14)

Figure 10.6 describes the mutual feeding of values and educational intervention within the window of possibilities. In their discussion, Périard and Liu (2020) show that children understanding of David’s stories have more variability than expected if one considers only age as a relevant element. One tends to overlook children’s subjectivities. Each child interviewed by Périard and Liu (2020) provides a slightly different interpretation of the moral storyes, sometimes siding with David misconducts, sometime with the adults’ moral perspective. If the children’s answers fall within the window of acceptability, then one will consider their conduct acceptable. If not, the adult would initiate an educational intervention that, by definition, is aimed at changing the child in function of a desired (by the collective system of value) future developmental state. In any case, one tends to naturalize and make transparent the value-grounded nature of the educational intervention. There is nothing intrinsically bad or good in the value-laden nature of education. The window of possibilities is a theoretical tool to make visible the general functioning of each local educational ecosystem. Indeed, the system of values can be only understood as part of the ecosystem, historically situated and in movement. The problem is that we are again confronted with a monological view that tends to asses all the local ecosystems against the standards of a supposedly universal window of possibilities. So, dominant educational practices in the neo-liberist world seem to value creativity, entrepreneurship, individualism, competitivity, identity and fill the environment with signs/materialities that try to orient individual development towards that imagined future. When we look closer, we find instead that the messages circulating within the educational context are more complex and ambivalent (Tateo, 2018), as in the example of daily school routines described by Périard

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and Liu (2020). Children must learn to navigate between these ambivalences that tell them “be creative” but “obey the teacher”, “be part of the collective” but “be a brave entrepreneur”, etc.

Conclusion: Polyphonic Psychology Starting from the works of Eimer (2020) and Périard and Liu (2020), I have tried to present some complexities of studying the educational contexts. The first complexity is the overcoming of the monological gaze in favour of a polyphonic understanding of reality. The second complexity concerns the nature of the person/environment relationships and the analysis of different ecosystems. The third complexity is represented by the kind of objects we consider. While psychological research is still largely logocentric (based on linguistic data), I showed that we need to consider the signs/materiality complexes that fill the environment and provide meanings to be interpreted. Then, I have reminded the concept of window of possibilities, to deconstruct the taken for granted when it comes to the relationship between development, education and values. The lesson we learn from the experiences of research tandem presented in this volume is that the complexities of human activity cannot be understood through a monological epistemology. We need multiple gazes, which at the same time constitute the field of experience as both familiar and unfamiliar. The object of polyphonic epistemology is the local ecosystem: A peculiar complex configuration that functions in a unique way according to general processes. The last question I would like to ask is: Who should study such a complexity? The monological epistemology in psychology has been embodied also through the academic distinctions. Do the phenomena observed by Eimer (2020) and Périard and Liu (2020) belong to the field of developmental psychology, educational psychology, school psychology, social psychology or semiotics? By asking the question, one immediately realizes that the question itself does not make sense and that the distinctions are just academic. It would be the same to ask whether Wundt, Lewin or Bruner have been more social, educational or developmental psychologists. Psychology must become polyphonic also in this sense. This volume presents some fundamental orientations for the future of psychology of development and education. It proves that we need to train our students to become polyphonic psychologists, grounding their future ways of knowing into a polyphonic epistemology, collaborating to construct multiple gazes on complex phenomena and be able to overcome the ethnocentric view of Western psychology. This goal can be achieved by promoting psychological science as human and collective enterprise from the very first days of young scholars training, as in the example of research tandems.

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References Bhatia, S. (2018). Decolonizing psychology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Branco, A. U., & Lopes-de-Oliveira, M. C. (Eds.). (2017). Alterity, values, and socialization: Human development within educational contexts. Cham: Springer. Egan, R. D., & Hawkes, G. L. (2008). Imperiled and perilous: Exploring the history of childhood sexuality. Journal of Historical Sociology, 21(4), 355–367. Eimer, T. (2020). Cultural objects at ECNU kindergarten. In S. Xu & G. Marsico (Eds.), Where culture grows: Social ecology of a Chinese kindergarten. Switzerland: Springer. Grosvenor, I., & Rasmussen, L. R. (Eds.). (2018). Making education: Material school design and educational governance. Cham: Springer. Marsico, G., Dazzani, V., Ristum, M., & Bastos, A. C. (Eds.). (2015). Educational contexts and borders through a cultural lens—Looking inside. Viewing outside. Cultural Psychology of Education (Vol. 1). Geneva, Switzerland: Springer. Périard, I., & Liu, J. J. (2020). Moral education in a Shanghai kindergarten—How do children perceive social values? In S. Xu & G. Marsico (Eds.), Where culture grows: Social ecology of a Chinese kindergarten. Switzerland: Springer. Shannon, D. (2002). David gets in trouble. New York, NY: The Blue Sky Press. Tateo, L. (2018). Ideology of success and the dilemma of education today. In A. Joerchel & G. Benetka (Eds.), Memories of Gustav Ichheiser (pp. 157–164). Cham: Springer. Tateo, L. (2019). Introduction: The inherent ambivalence of educational trajectories and the zone of proximal development with reduced potential. In L. Tateo (Ed.), Educational dilemmas: A cultural psychological perspective (pp. 1–21). Abingdon: Routledge. Tateo, L., & Marsico, G. (2019). Introduction: Framing a theory of ordinary and extraordinary in cultural psychology. In G. Marsico & L. Tateo (Eds.), Ordinary things and their extraordinary meanings (pp. xi–xxix). Charlotte, NC: Info Age Publications. Tateo, L., Español, A., Kullasepp, K., Marsico, G., & Palang, H. (2018). Five gazes on the border: A collective auto-ethnographic writing. Human Arenas, 1(2), 113–133.

Chapter 11

Revisiting Peer Conflict from Sociocultural Perspective Aruna Wu

Chapter 6 “Chinese preschoolers’ conflict negotiation in resource limited situations” (Sonntag & Xu, 2020) mainly describes the different responses of preschool children toward four types of common conflict situations. Conflict is a common phenomenon in children’s social interaction and an important issue in child developmental research (Genishi & Di Paolo, 1982; Killen & Cords, 1998; Shantz, 1987; Verbeek, Hartup, & Collins, 2000). Although researchers agree that peer conflict is inevitable, it is often seen as a negative behavior and a disruption to peer relationships, instead of an opportunity through which children learn to grow up. This commentary attempts to elaborate the relationship between conflict and development from a sociocultural perspective. It starts with constructing children’s conflict from the framework of systematic interdependence of CHILD ENVIRONMENT, which logically leads to a conceptualization of conflicting situation as a dynamic borderland. Then, the idea of catalytic scaffolding is introduced to analyze how to transform conflict situation into opportunities empowering innovative development. Last, importance and implication of peer conflict research are discussed upon the background of Chinese modern society.

Systematic Interdependence: Children in Conflicting Situation as Inclusive Partitioning Traditionally, conflict is defined in terms of compatible behaviors or goals: as one person overtly expresses his/her opposition to another person’s statements or goals (Laursen & Hafen, 2010; Shantz, 1987). Conflict is also used interchangeably with terms of aggressive, disruptive, coercive, and aversive behaviors (Ross & Conant, A. Wu (B) Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_11

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1992; Shantz, 1987). Conflicts as well as its’ management skills indicate children’s developmental level in the field of emotion, cognition, morality, and personality, etc. Although conflicts appear within relationship instead of single person, individual characteristics are observed and measured to detect development or describe relatedness of different characteristics (Rose & Asher, 1999; Vespo & Caplan, 1993). Conflict is described as overt behavioral opposition (Laursen & Pursell, 2009). “Overt” means that behaviors signifying disagreement are directed toward the individual with whom one is disagreeing, in a manner that is understood by both participants to signify disagreement. “Behavioral” implies verbal or physical actions that convey disagreement so as to be observable. Privately held opinions may contain the basic elements of disagreement, but they do not rise to the level of conflict unless they are expressed. “Opposition” connotes a contrary position or action. During a conflict, one party resists or contests the behaviors or views advanced by another party. Based on these understandings, researchers customarily categorize different types, frequencies of conflicts as well as the resolution skills which are compared between different ages and cultures (e.g., Caplan, Vespo, Pedersen, & Hay, 1991; French et al., 2011). In this way, it is believed that we can see children’s development and perceived impact of culture. Analysis of children’s conflict from this perspective is often carried out in intra/inter-individual (intra-/inter-systemic) reference frame (Valsiner, 2000). The correlations between different qualities of individuals are analyzed, such as the positive relatedness between social abilities and conflict resolution, and conflict is also viewed as a construct containing different components, for example, conflict as a “timedistributed social episode” that contains several distinct features, including initiation and opposition (behaviors that start the conflict), tactics and strategies (behaviors that perpetuate the conflict), resolution (behaviors that conclude the conflict), and outcome (consequences of the conflict). After decomposed into different parts, the conflict is separated from the agentic person, and events and reactions become the research objects. Additionally, the subject becomes only combination of the solution, the result, and so on. Some studies describe the process of development by means of comparing types of conflicts and resolutions of children from different ages and also explain the impact of culture on individuals by comparing the differences between children from different nationalities and countries. However, it is difficult to describe the nature of development and the impact of culture. These studies consider the two opposing and complementary sides of the conflict as mutually incompatible parts separated from the environment. The systematic interdependence of CHILD ENVIRONMENT is replaced by independent measurement of the CHILD separated from the ENVIRONMENT (Valsiner & Cairns, 1992). The shared premise of these studies is that the population of the same age group, or the same country is regarded as homogeneous people, so it can be averaged by quantitative statistics to describe the characteristics of different populations. In this way, the inherent heterogeneity of each person as well as dynamic interaction between participants and the environment is neglected. Valsiner and Cairns (1992) distinguish two views on conflict which are based on the idea of partitioning. Partitioning refers to the process of person differentiating the

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knowledge about the world in terms of similarity or other categorizations from the perceptual level to higher level of cognition and affective function. Two ways of partitioning—exclusive and inclusive—represent different viewpoints and approaches to study human development. Conflicts in the case of the exclusive partitioning are the oppositions between the homogeneously perceived classes, which led to reduction of heterogeneous means to resolve conflicts. In contrast, inclusive partitioning of the world for the issue of conflict can be defined in terms of the nature of linkages between the differentiated parts of a whole. The opposition, as one kind of linkages between the parts, makes it possible for the parts to coexist or temporarily transform into one another. Adopting the view of inclusive partitioning toward conflicts will provide more fertile land to developmental researches. It is in accordance with the individual socioecological frame in which the dynamic interaction between agentic children and environment with the guiding role of social others can be researched (Valsiner, 2001). This dynamic process as well as personal psychological world is achieved by semiotic mediation. Signs are the crucial for sociocultural psychology—leading to the creation of meaning and pragmatic logic of daily life.

Peer Conflict as Dynamic Borderland From the perspective of sociocultural psychology, peer conflict is the arena for negotiation of different voices in interpersonal and intrapersonal level. I want to adopt the idea borderland proposed by Marsico (2011, 2016, 2017) to elaborate the developmental significance of peer conflicts. Peer conflict creates a borderland between friends through which the individual and collective development can possibly emerge. Border is the developmental conceptual place of tension and pacification between possible clashes (Marsico, 2016). A border demarcates what is possible to know, to do, or to say, and what is not allowed. A border defines what is crossable, and what is not even approachable. It locates the order on one side and the chaos on the other. Border evokes the idea of differences and possible difficulties in interaction. Even if border implies the idea of separation, it is also “the point of contact” of different settings. Borders divide and connect two sides simultaneously, and this ambivalent nature allows to cope with intrinsic continuity/discontinuity dynamics among social places (Marsico, 2016). The tension between continuity and discontinuity in border of conflict is manifested in two ways: 1. Negotiation of tension from the developmental trajectory of a child Children’s feeling of ownership is disrupted in the conflict. The external conflict between two children A and B triggers the inner dialog of the child (both A and B) in that scenario. The habitual linkage of the child’s understanding toward the object “If I want X” and “I can get X” is cut off, then the tension emerges. Selfawareness is aroused in this process. It means that on one hand, others are transformed from physical presence to psychological presence for the child, and on the other

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hand, the power of his/herself is limited and not everything he/she wants which belongs to him/her. Alongside with the arising of self-awareness, a borderland is also established between I and others. When the border separates self and others, it is also promoting the growth of self through continuous dialog between I and others. As Vygotsky said, every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level (interpsychological) and later on the individual level (intrapsychological) (1994). The same is true of interpersonal conflicts. The process of external conflicts brings about intensification of internal psychological activities and further development of individual’s self-awareness. At the same time, external dialog also feeds back to internal dialog, which leads to the growth of psychological complexity of the child. Then, the internal dialog enriches as well the communication between conflicting children, which is manifested in second way below. 2. Negotiation of tension from communicative space of two children The boundary between A and B is constantly swinging in conflicts. Interpersonal boundary moving back and forth indicates intensive negotiation in conflicts. The negotiation involves the two part of conflicts with the guidance of self and others. It can be seen from the participant’s answers in Chap. 6. For example: In free play time, Tiantian and Lele both want to sit on that cute blue chair. Tiantian takes the chair first, and he pushes Lele down to the ground. What would happen next? Child Teacher Child Teacher Child Teacher Child Teacher Child Teacher Child

crying? (Line 1) who is crying? Is Lele pushed to the ground? (Line 2) Yes (Line 3) then, Lele is crying; Tiantian still sit on the chair (Line 4) he will soon understand. (Line 5) Who (Line 6) sitting on a chair. (Line 7) understand what? (Line 8) can not push others. (Line 9) what will happen next? (Line 10) said I’m sorry. (Line 11)

From the standpoint of the child answering questions, Tiantian possesses the space through which his interpersonal boundary moves forward after pushing down Lele and sitting on the chair. Then, on seeing the crying of Lele, Tiantian “understands that he can not push others.” The process of “understanding” indicates that his previous knowledge learned from parents or teachers occurs and regulates his immediate behaviors. The action of apologizing pulls Tiantian’s boundary back to appropriate and polite position. To Lele, crying after being pushed is the way to resist the violation, and also through his resistance the contracted space rebounds. This kind of negotiating experience is important for children to establish and clarify personal boundaries. It is exact in this borderland that formation of ownership and even identity takes place.

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Peer conflicts create an opportunity both for interpsychological and intrapsyhcological negotiation, all of which emerges at the borderland. The latter involves border separating/combining habitual thinking and new thinking as well as personal space and other’s space. Swinging between habitual new and person other, the movement of boundary is able to give birth to innovation. But importantly, the emergence of innovation will benefit from scaffolding in the conflict.

Catalytic Scaffolding in Peer Conflict Peer conflict, as borderland featured with tension, is a good opportunity to intervene and promote actualize development. This kind of intervention does not aim to just resolve or pacify conflicts. Instead, development will occur after the intervention. That is the idea of SYNTHESIS and CATALYSIS in dialog which refers to the process of overcoming tension created by opposing parts with catalysis (Valsiner & Cabell, 2012). Catalysis, regarding peer conflict with the idea of inclusive partitioning, plays crucial role, especially when innovation takes place through dialectical process of conflicts. The catalytic conditions enable—rather than cause—the self-regulatory functioning of the organism in its relations with the surrounding world. It is the catalytic functions that dominate the organization of the meaning-making process (Valsiner, 2014, p. 90). The tension in conflict holds the system to highly unstable situation with much dynamics. Different interventional approaches provide different conditions for the system to release the tension. Catalytic condition may lead toward innovation, or just block or transform the dynamics in the system, such as aggressive behaviors. Shunshi, in Chinese philosophy, represents the interventional efforts of acting upon the trends or propensity of the process of being toward the future (Wu, Li, & Zhang, 2017). The crucial principle of Shunshi is the timing which implies if the moment of intervention is appropriate, then the effect will be enlarged. That is to say, if catalytic condition is embedded into conflict situation, then the child might gain more than non-conflict situation. The intervention in the conflict aiming at development can be alternated with the conception of scaffolding advocated firstly by Lev Vygotsky. The scaffolding we adopt here is a version of catalysis catalyzing child development through setting up supporting conditions at relevant moments of relating with environment (Kull, 2014). According to the origins of providing scaffolding to children in peer conflicts, we can distinguish four different types of scaffolding. 1. Scaffolding from adults. It is the most common phenomenon in peer conflicts that teachers, parents, or other elder ones are involved in conflicts as the third party. Adults may offer some suggestions, such as turn-taking strategy, rules for competition, or rules of morality. These suggestions function as new tools for children to resolve the conflicts and would be internalized by children as signs to deal with further conflicts they meet in future.

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2. Scaffolding from peers. Children involved in conflicts are in intensive interaction involving negotiation and proposal. The one with more social skill can act as a scaffolder to the other one whose related skills will improve. 3. Scaffolding from self. When the child is in conflict, his/her past experience and knowledge will come out to help him/herself to resolve conflicts. In the example above, the child’s answer—“he understands that he can not push others” while sitting on the chair—indicates the process of self-scaffolding. 4. Scaffolding from tasks. The tasks can also function as the scaffold, for example, the projective test in Chap. 6. Completion of the task is a way for children to practice the knowledge that they have learned from parents or teachers. The process of practice entails two processes including generalization and contextualization. The strategy to resolve the conflict, which the child heard before from adults, is externalized and contextualized in this projective test; or the strategies they adopted before can be generalized and stabilized through the rational semiotic regulation during the process of answering questions. Here, four types of scaffolding regarding its origins are summarized roughly. The microgenetic process of scaffolding in the conflict deserves further exploration and analysis to promote children’s development more efficiently and economically.

Implications for Peer Conflicts in Chinese Context Different types of conflicts produce different dialogical process, which affects children’s development differently. In the early stage of childhood, peer conflicts and parent-child conflicts are the most common ones. Especially, in China, most families has only one child and lack conflicts between siblings in the family context. Conflicts between siblings and peers share many similarities. The two opposing sides of peer/sibling conflict are more equal and balanced in all aspects, which become the borderland with more stretching tensions. However, in the parent-child conflict, two sides are in more unequal relationship with greater differences in both psychological and physical development. From the dialogical perspective, there may be more diverse and equal voices in peer conflicts; in parent-child conflicts on the contrary, parents always take on more powerful role with guidance and control, and there are likely to occur more hierarchical and top-down dialogs. In many typical Chinese families, there is a structure of inverted pyramid as 4-2-1. 4 refers to grandparents of both mother and father’s sides; 2 refers to parents, and 1 is the child. The only child is surrounded by 6 adults and cared for thoughtfully on substance. Children face very few conflicts, including those with parents and siblings of course. Also paradoxically, maintenance of harmony is emphasized in Chinese families. In this way, the positive significance of peer conflicts in early childhood needs to be informed to adults more clearly and publically. Most importantly, the strategies for scaffolding are the crucial idea to be learned.

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References Caplan, M., Vespo, J., Pedersen, J., & Hay, D. F. (1991). Conflict and its resolution in small groups of one-and two-year-olds. Child Development, 62(6), 1513–1524. French, D. C., Chen, X., Chung, J., Li, M., Chen, H., & Li, D. (2011). Four children and one toy: Chinese and Canadian children faced with potential conflict over a limited resource. Child Development, 82(3), 830–841. Genishi, C., & Di Paolo, M. (1982). Learning through argument in a preschool. In L. C. Wilkinson (Ed.), Communicating in the classroom (pp. 49–68). New York, NY: Academic Press. Killen, M., & Cords, M. (1998). Conflict resolution in human and non-human primates. In J. Langer & M. Killen (Eds.), Piaget, evolution, and development (pp. 193–220). Mahwah, NJ: LEA. Kull, K. (2014). Catalysis and scaffolding in semiosis. In The catalyzing mind (pp. 111–121). New York, NY: Springer. Laursen, B., & Hafen, C. A. (2010). Future directions in the study of close relationships: Conflict is bad (except when it’s not). Social Development, 19(4), 858–872. Laursen, B., & Pursell, G. (2009). Conflict in peer relationships. In K. H. Rubin, W. M. Bukowski, & B. Laursen (Eds.), Social, emotional, and personality development in context. Handbook of peer interactions, relationships, and groups (pp. 267–286). The Guilford Press. Marsico, G. (2011). The “noncuttable” space in between: Context, boundaries and their natural fluidity. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 45(2), 185–193. Marsico, G. (2016). The borderland. Culture & Psychology, 22(2), 206–215. Marsico, G. (2017). Development and education as crossing sociocultural boundaries. In A. Rosa & J. Valsiner (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, A. J., & Asher, S. R. (1999). Children’s goals and strategies in response to conflicts within a friendship. Developmental Psychology, 35, 69–79. Ross, H. S., & Conant, C. L. (1992). The social structure of early conflict: Interaction, relationships, and alliances. In C. U. Shantz & W. H. Hartup (Eds.), Conflict in child and adolescent development (pp. 153–185). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shantz, C. U. (1987). Conflicts between children. Child Development, 58, 283–305. Sonntag, M., & Xu, S. (2020). Chinese preschoolers’ conflict negotiation in resource limited situations. In S. Xu & G. Marsico (Eds.), Where culture grows: Social ecology of a Chinese kindergarten. Switzerland: Springer. Valsiner, J. (2000). Culture and human development. London, UK: SAGE. Valsiner, J. (2001). Process structure of semiotic mediation in human development. Human Development, 44(2–3), 84–97. Valsiner, J.(2014). An invitation to cultural psychology. London, UK: SAGE. Valsiner, J., & Cabell, K. R. (2012). Self-making through synthesis: Extending dialogical self theory. In Handbook of dialogical self theory (pp. 82–97). Information Age Publishing. Valsiner, J., & Cairns, R. (1992). Theoretical perspectives on conflict and development. In C. V. Shantz & W. W. Hartup (Eds.), Conflict in child and adolescent development (pp. 15–35). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Verbeek, P., Hartup, W. W., & Collins, A. (2000). Conflict management in children and adolescents. In F. Aureli & F. B. M. de Waal (Eds.), Natural conflict resolution (pp. 34–53). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Vespo, J. E., & Caplan, M. (1993). Preschoolers’ differential conflict behavior with friends and with acquaintances. Early Education and Development, 4(1), 45–53. Vygotsky, L. (1994). The problem of the cultural development of the child. In R. Van der Veer & J. Valsiner (Eds.), The Vygotsky reader (pp. 57–72). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Wu, A., Li, X. W., & Zhang, Q. (2017). Releasing effect of individual potential: Formation of productive collective and children’s self-transcendence in a Chinese school. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 51(3), 432–455.

Chapter 12

General Conclusions: United Research Efforts of the Young: Realizing Potentials Jaan Valsiner

Where, and by who, is new knowledge in the social sciences generated in our twentyfirst century? Our social folklore about science suggests an institutional answer—in large research collectives, organized as knowledge production corporations, where many narrowly specialized highly skilled technicians operate sophisticated equipment in the search for new knowledge. According to this scenario, knowledge is a result of a collective enterprise, institutionally organized and evaluated, and following of the leads of the current social fashions of what is “in” in the epistemic markets (Valsiner, 2010, 2018c). “Big data” are the way to go—say some: “evidence-based medicine”—say others—all reflect a current (and eventually passing) fashion in the sciences. Psychology as a science is the bastard1 of the social wars about natural sciences in the nineteenth century (Valsiner, 2012), resulting in waves of self-denial of relevant evidence in the efforts to look “scientific” (Toomela & Valsiner, 2010). The “empire of chance” has descended upon the field and covered it with a huge cloud of uncertainty (Gigerenzer et al., 1989) within which the social representation of science as an institutionally guided enterprise has been thriving over the past half century. Psychology may become fully institutionalized in the twenty-first century—yet the efforts by ever new young generations of psychology students to make sense of human living and playing minds remains fresh in the supposed naivite of the young souls.

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the original meaning of the word—illegitimate child.

J. Valsiner (B) Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, 9000 Aalborg, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Xu and G. Marsico (eds.), Social Ecology of a Chinese Kindergarten, Cultural Psychology of Education 12, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59735-1_12

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Young Researchers Who Changed Our Basic Knowledge—The Trimates There exist important examples in the history of science of the reliance on the very young—but strongly motivated—beginning researchers whose (at first) naïve and unprepared starting point turned—as a result of direct and massive experience in the field—into the major source of basic scientific knowledge. In the 1960s, it was the Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey who recruited three aspiring young women to go into the natural habitats of surviving higher primates to establish an observational base knowledge of their ways of living. The three young women became the leading experts in science as a result of these efforts—Jane Goodall for the study of chimpanzees, Birute Galdikas for orangutans and Dian Fossey for gorillas, as well as fierce advocates for preserving the lives of the species in their natural habitats. The “Trimates” (as Leakey called the three) shared an important feature (aside from no specific scientific training at the outset)—deep dedication to the study of non-human primates and stamina in encountering hard working conditions in the wild, it might not be a coincidence that their boyfriends or husbands who initially accompanied them to their fieldwork escaped from there soon. Why would Leakey prefer to promote the academically less prepared but highly motivated young women over academically established (with PhDs) male researchers? One of the major differences between the lives of psychologists and paleoanthropologists and archaeologists in their understanding in the digging—literally or metaphorically—for the data within the phenomena. Archaeologists have to sieve through tons of unearthed material before finding the fractures of the objects they hope for—often relying on good luck and approximate decision intuitions where to dig. Furthermore, their digging is a very slow process, requiring goals-oriented stamina in putting up with all the frustrations of the fieldwork—bad weather, isolation, suspicions by the local population and frustrations of finding nothing, most of the time. In contrast, psychologists have naively rosy ideas of their “data collection” practices—they expect their desired persons to agree to participate, to “tell them the truth” rather than deceive them, and basic knowledge result in data accumulation followed by statistical analyses. The two worlds of meaning making are diametrically opposite—at least in the recent times.2 There is also another aspect why younger and less experienced researcher has an advantage over their better-trained advanced peers—the openness to novelty in the phenomena. Looking at our higher education in the twenty-first century we need to accept the reality that the corporations’ takeover (sometimes called the “neoliberal influence”—Valsiner, Lutsenko and Antoniouk, 2018) has resulted in increasingly fixed curriculae (the “Bologna system”) and increasingly standardized textbooks that are the basis for academic knowledge delivery (rather than reconstruction) in our 2 It

would be adequate to view psychologists of about 100 years ago still living up to the credo of archaeologists—Sigmund Freud’s treatment of phenomena to derive data is the most celebrated example here.

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universities. This tendency overlooks the relevance of doubt in a field of slow movement towards new knowledge, replacing it with summaries of finalized—fossilized— knowledge that constates an end state of knowledge. This is exactly the opposite of what is needed for scholarly progress towards new knowledge (Valsiner, 2018e). As Michael Polanyi has concisely stated how the nature of science is that of discovery of not-yet-known domains. Scientific idea …reveals new knowledge, but the new vision that accompanies it is not knowledge. It is less than knowledge, for it is a guess; but it is more than knowledge, for it is a foreknowledge of things yet unknown and at present perhaps inconceivable. Our vision of the general nature of things is our guide for the interpretation of all future experience. Such guidance is indispensable. Theories of the scientific method which try to explain the establishment of scientific truth by any purely objective formal procedure are doomed to failure. Any process of enquiry unguided by intellectual passions would inevitably spread out into a desert of trivialities. (Polanyi, 1962, p. 135, added emphasis)

It is here where young researchers have an advantage. The young have the eye for innovation—the more trained they become in the formal textbook knowledge the less ready they would be to discover novel moments in the phenomena—to get the valuable but rare gems of data out of the large piles of phenomena (Valsiner, 2000). Leakey understood this well—the selection of the pioneers to study the difficult to approach primates in far-away inhospitable locations demanded stamina first. Knowledge would come—and it did. Still we need not forget that academic environments in the 1960s were different from those in 2010s, and observing primates in the wilderness is by far complex an endeavour than watching children in a kindergarten.

Needed—New Forms of Knowledge Construction There is much to learn from Leakey’s reliance on young people’s initiative an desires to explore new ways of seeing. The academic system half a century later has taken a new form that sets knowledge construction up in a straightjacket of neoliberal imperatives of “efficiency” (Valsiner et al., 2018) where the freshness of look is replaced by criteria-based academic “training” (Valsiner, 2018b, 2018c). Universities have become knowledge transfer supermarkets where advertising and evaluating have begun to dominate over contemplation of new knowledge (Valsiner, 2018a). In this societal context, the question—who is in a social power position to build new knowledge—becomes crucial. The usual—carried over to us by centuries long academic traditions—answer to this question is clear—the wise old men and women who are long experienced in research and teaching have tenured professorships, and all the resources—intellectual and financial—to do research that is on the frontiers of the current knowledge. Yet this answer might not be so simple in the twenty-first century where the working conditions to these recognized academic elders are very different from those of the explorers of the wilderness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The wellesteemed top-level academics in the twenty-first century are societally set up as

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overwhelmed in the work of various university committees and busy writing grants to feed their doctoral and postdoctoral students under conditions of 90% of such applications being not funded. While in the 1960s–1970s a researcher wrote a grant application there was a fair chance of getting funded3 and research could be done. If in the 2020s a researcher succeeds she or he will spend most time writing reports on how the promised “grant management plan” has been fulfilled. The active research is left to postdocs and predocs—who are trained to perform specific fragments of the research project, rather than educated in the wider issues of knowledge the given project might create. If this—less than positive—picture is correct, then the question arises—who could create new knowledge? Who are intellectually oriented investigators who are (not yet) involved in the race for funding and maintaining of their academic positions by “demonstrated research productivity” in publishing many articles in “Scopus journals” to appease their university administrators? The answer is seemingly paradoxical—the youngest participants in the chain of knowledge acquisition and production. It is the youngest—beginning undergraduate students—whose desires and initiatives to get to learn and discover new knowledge go largely unnoticed and downplayed in their universities that implement “Bologna system” curriculae to masses of students in the hope of homogenization of the knowledge acquisition across universities and countries. Knowledge becomes a consumer product to be advertised, popularized and sold in many disguises. Changes in that product are led by “market forces” (Valsiner, 2010, 2018b) that build on changing fashions of one or another paradigm at the time. The making of knowledge becomes an industry—and no longer an art that it had been for centuries. However, it is well known already from the studies of non-human primates that it is precisely the young who bring in innovations in ways of acting (technologies) and may have the freshness of look to discover new knowledge. The results of this book are precisely accounts of how empowering young students coming from two academic backgrounds—Luxembourg and Shanghai—can take a new look in intensive observational encounters in a Chinese kindergarten.

A “Beagle” for the Young: The Positive Role of Internships When Charles Darwin started his five-year Worldwide trip on the Beagle in 1831, he was undertaking a similar adventure as our four students from Luxembourg did for two months—encountering novelty where one may have expectations, but where all the details needed to be filled in by careful observations. Furthermore—for the Chinese students who joined them in the research tandems the experience was similar—not only did they work together with foreigners, but for the first time took a systematic look at an ordinary object in their lives—as kindergarten is.

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the context of the US academic environment of mid-twentieth century.

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The work reported in this book is a concrete demonstration of the realized value of the short term but highly concentrated research experiences that all students had in these projects. Within the general task—multisided view on the processes of socialization that was visible during the study—the students could negotiate their own research subgoals. This unity of direction of the general project and flexibility of subprojects was the basis for success. But what was that success?

What Is There to Learn from a Kindergarten? There is much to learn. Kindergarten is an institution the structure of which is set up to “speak” to people in it—children and adults alike—without any of them responding. It is an advertisement of the institutional belonging of young children. Jean Piaget back in the 1920s described children’s speaking developing through a stage of collective monologue—when children speak for themselves among other children who do the same—not expecting any particular addressee to respond. An example of such speech comes from Piaget’s recording of 50 consecutive statements by a boy Lev, of Georgian origin, in the Institut Rousseau in Geneva. The boy is involved in a series of activities and speaks without expecting (or getting) any reply from the teacher or other children around him: 22. Lev: “I have done one half properly, teacher.” Mlle L (teacher) does not hear, another child asks “How is it a half?” Lev does not listen but goes on repeating: 23. “One half properly”. A silence. Teacher: “Now you must write” 24. Lev: “Write what?” “What there is on that hat.” A moment later Lev takes his hat and looks. 25. Lev: “It is something in English. I can’t. It’s “big””. Drawing attention to what he is doing; 26. Lev: “Please teacher, one half is right, yes, look”. Addresses himself to no one and returns to his former topic. 27. Lev: “I don’t like that name in English”. Other children are building near the table where Lev is drawing. They are making a hut out of leaves. Lev looks on: 28. Lev: “I can make houses of leaves”. Ro is working with figures. Lev gets up and announces 29. Lev: “I want to see”. He approves of what Ro is doing. Ro asks him nothing. 30. Lev: “Yes it is 5” Ro makes a mistake, 31. Lev: “You ought to count, down there”. Lev goes back to his place. He talks without being listened to by anyone. (Piaget, 1959, p. 284)

Thus we may need to proceed beyond the labelling of a child’s communicative style in a kindergarten by the easy label collective monologue and look more carefully what kind of a communicative setting a kindergarten is. Our adult models of communication presume that an addressee is involved and that the addressee responds, in one way or another, to the message received. What we see in kindergarten is that this assumption is wrong—there may be (for the child) to gain attention

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of an addressees (Line 22 and 23 in the Lev example—the teacher does not hear the message, another child does and responds, but Lev ignores it). This kind of diffuse communication—where messages are generated without checking upon their arrival and responses—comes to dominate human interactions a hundred years later through the invention of Twitter and Instagram. Moral socialization usually happens in such implicit ways (Périard & Jie, 2020). Many of the examples of children’s actions in the kindergarten presented in this volume are examples of collective monologue—albeit in the domain of actions rather than talk. A child acts with an object in a context shared with other children. By taking over a communal object, the child communicates to others—without a clear addressee—one’s position in the peer group. He or she is not waiting for a response— rather, the social setting leads to renegotiation of the individual assertion within the collective framework. This is the process of creating no conflict in the social order—collective emulation of individual actions beyond the collective (Sonntag & Xu, 2020). Careful observational studies of children’s non-actions that de-escalate possible emergence of conflicts is something child psychology needs to learn to conceptualize. Non-action in a crucially relevant moment is as important as action— or even more.

Redundancy as a Tool to Break Through the Barriers of Non-response How can a setting like that of a kindergarten work? On the one hand, it is a setting of NON-HOME in the duality of HOME non-HOME and thus involves regular border crossing between these two settings. Children are taken by some caregiver— adult—from home to kindergarten and back. They are temporary—daily—migrants. The ritual of such transition—getting ready to leave, actual leaving, and arrival in the other place—is repeated every day. Such repetitiveness is a central feature for marking the guidance experience for “going elsewhere”—to a known place, with its expected routines that are different from home. As Koji Komatsu has emphasized, …institutional settings like school education work as the standardized and stable setting in which such resources are presented to children through their repetitive encounter with similar environments, both materially and conceptually. Thus, in the ontogenetic process of human development, these places become the indispensable foundation for us to become the actors in meaning construction. Repeated encounter with socially shared meaning is usually considered the foundation of firm understanding or internalization of these meaning. However, the dynamics of our meaning construction go further over it and work for the introduction of a new meaning or re-creation of meaning, as the experimental procedures that employ our repeated encounter with one simple stimulus suggest. In this point, redundancy plays important role to introduce the dialectic nature of meaning construction, and this leads to the idea that the productive nature of redundancy works in the emergence of our self as the result of everlasting meaning construction in life. (Komatsu, 2019, p. 1)

Creating redundancy in communicative efforts is natural adaptation to conditions where the presence or attention by the audience is not guaranteed. Human beings

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Fig. 12.1 Two architectural decorations of columns: Corinthian and Ionian

organize places—any architecturally set up place—in ways similar to the general notion of collective monologue. The ways in which regular features of buildings— for example columns—are decorated communicate some “messages in stone” to the passers-by over centuries. The floweresque implications of the Corinthian column (Fig. 12.1 left side) have had their catalytic role in European societies for centuries. The Ionian column (right side) brings to the environment the mutuality of linear and spiral forms that play relevant role in human psyche. Columns stand for centuries—with ever new generations of people passing them by, mostly even not noticing them. They are silent “inputs” of affective relating with the environment that passers-by create by episodic attention given to them. They function by way of high redundancy of accessibility to the passers-by. Most of human exposure to affectively oriented materials in the environment is peripheral in its nature—by either filling the whole perceptual field (visual, acoustic, gustatory) with high redundancy of inputs, or—knowing the regular movement routines of people—saturating the surroundings of their trajectories of movement—work for constant intermittent social suggestion efforts. Children in kindergarten are “captive audience” for such saturated input. In the interior space in a kindergarten, we can observe decoration efforts that are similar in their affect-directing function. Kindergartens are rich in peripherally located objects that are central for the socializing missions of the institution and that operate by their forceful peripheral presence—similar to columns in classical architecture. The decorations of seemingly peripheral places—corridors (see Eimer, 2020, Fig. 17) are similar in their function to columns in external architectural construction. Redundancy of the encounters—children (and adults) passing these objects by in the corridor on a regular basis—acts as subtle social guidance in the desired goals direction. It is present in the classrooms making it possible for children to practice their numeracy skills without ever actually becoming involved in direct counting (Eimer, Zhang, & Aleksic, 2020).

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How Can One Generalize from This One Single Kindergarten? The kind of ideology of generalization that has dominated psychology in the second half of the twentieth century (Toomela & Valsiner, 2010) has clear imperative answer to this question—there is no wayto generalize from one single instance! Yet that claim is blatantly wrong (Valsiner, 2015)—it is precisely on the basis of single structured specimens that generalization is in principle possible. How could psychology go wrong for a century? The answer is very simple—with the focus on empirical data and their accumulation within the framework of inductive generalization the parameters of the aggregate (averages, prototypes) became axiomatically set to represent the generalized knowledge. Such axiomatic set-up builds on the social representation of the democratic governance that European societies became actively practicing in the twentieth century—where the majority vote (e.g. 52–48% voting result) leads to generalized political action (the ones who “won” at the level of 52% get the 100% of the power to act in the given society. Democracy indeed is the tyranny of the majority over the minority—it is here where the inductive framework of input becomes deductive in the output. A right-wing political party—democratically voted in to form a government which then eliminates the social sciences in the country and loses out in the next election—shows this dynamics of transitions between inductively and deductively framed actions in the political sphere. The damage done in the deductive phase is not repairable of course. Generalizing from single instances is possible when we have theoretical images of the system that operates in the given case, but lack evidence for its actual ways of being. The rhythm of activities in any kindergarten over the world would follow the basic necessity of guiding children’s activity in play and imagination in the direction of accomplishing “educational” tasks. In this sense, kindergarten is a version of all gardens where some specimens are goal-directed cultivated. It is the place for domestication of the “wild beasts” of ever curious children—who nevertheless preserve their curiosity.

General Conclusión: Universal Freedom in Disguise This book is a testimony to the intellectual power and productivity of young researchers—students working in international tandems. It also provides a new look at the very ordinary place for preschool children—a kindergarten. Kindergartens, schools, universities and other institutional settings are where growing young persons are subjected to systematic socialization inputs. Redundancy is the general rule. In any child socialization institution with aims of guiding children, adolescents and adults in some socially desired direction with the notion that they comply to act so “by their free will” the general principle is the same—(1) control the outer borders of the setting, limiting who is allowed inside

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and under what conditions, and (2) saturate the environment with redundant communicative messages leading the “free actors” confined to the limits to assemble their own personal ways of accommodating to the social direction. This general way of social control effort is predicated upon the non-controllability of human psychological development as it is an open-systemic phenomenon. Children’s experiencing of a kindergarten makes them develop skills of establishing personal freedom under whatever particular context. The inner infinity of the psyche is not a problem, but a solution—to the problem of the freedom of the mind under any circumstances.

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