ABSTRACT
In Kellyan psychology, the teachers are defined by the understandings they have constructed, the world of meanings were deal in, and inhabit. A few years ago, Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes studied thirty 4-year-old girls, comparing the mornings they spent at nursery school with their afternoons at home. Since the focus of the study was talk, these little girls’ conversations were all tape-recorded, through small microphones sewn into their clothes. Tizard and Hughes were therefore able to make detailed comparisons of the children’s talk with their nursery school teachers, and the conversations they had at home with their mothers. The learning curriculum of school is, of course, connected in a number of ways with children’s out-of-school experience. But paradoxically, the same material which, in the classroom, so often passes children by, may become rooted in their real personal understanding through their own life engagements.
