Children's Learning

This chapter provides an introduction to theories of learning, which is defined as how children make sense of reality and make meaning in a social world. The chapter briefly considers well-known models of learning that focus on individual construction of knowledge (Skinner and Piaget) and then discusses more fully the view of the child as an active co-constructor of knowledge (Bruner. Donaldson, Rogoff. Vygotsky. etc.). The chapter also discusses recent literature on learning relationships, dispositions and play. Learning is considered generally, not in terms of school curricula (see Dowling. 2005; Siraj-Blatchford, 2004). However, the ideas about learning introduced in this chapter do have implications for learning and teaching in schools and readers are encouraged to reflect on this afterwards. Also, there is not scope within the chapter to give a detailed consideration of how children learn language, but it should be remembered that most children in the world are bilingual or multilingual (over 70 per cent). The ability to understand and speak more than one language can be a considerable benefit to learning in general (see Brooker, 2005; Brown, 1998; Gregory et al., 2004).