ABSTRACT
There is a widespread consensus that the first five or six years of life are particularly important for children’s learning. There is evidence of rapid growth and learning from a range of disciplines, charting changes in physical, social, emotional and cognitive capacities. From neuroscience we learn about changes in the brain that speed up the passage of signals and increase the number of synaptic connections. Psychologists have identified changes in children’s cognitive capacities in the early years of life, for example, becoming able to sort, classify, sequence and use symbols, the development of meta-cognition and theory of mind. From a sociological perspective, learning in the early years is often seen as a process of enculturation, as children learn the ways of their families and society. But they do not just learn how to ‘fit in’, they appropriate, reinvent and contribute to cultural reproduction (Corsaro, 1997). The focus in this chapter is on the learning of 3-5-year-olds, often referred to as the preschool years.
This is not to suggest that children younger than 3 years old do not learn – they clearly do. There is a wealth of literature that demonstrates that babies learn from birth and that some kinds of learning occur in the womb (e.g. Goswami, 2008). Infants learn through tracking associations between co-occuring events, imitation, constructing causal connections and making analogies. The focus on 3-5-year-olds is a response to pragmatic considerations about space in this brief chapter, but it is also in recognition of the distinctive nature of the ways in which young children learn as they begin to engage more independently with the world outside their homes and with settings designed to foster their development. As Nelson (1996: 325) points out:
