nodos sin Aristas de Entrada / Salida

Despite the fact that play is a difficult concept to describe, it is generally acknowl- edged as having an essential role in how children learn and mentally develop, even if its exact role is contested. Furthermore, the concept of collaboration, whether in play or in work, is also recognized as playing a key role in children’s social and mental development.

Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development

In Piaget’s theory of early childhood development, children tend to progress through specific forms of play and cognitive development at certain stages of their lives, with each form of play and level of development building cumulatively on top of the concepts that are learned in previous developmental stages. From birth until the age of two, in which children are in their sensorimotor stages, children tend to engage in sensorimotor play by learning to control their movements, experimenting with different ways of sensing the world, and understanding how their actions can change what they sense. Between the ages of two and six, children are in their preoperational phase and tend to engage in symbolic or representational play, in which they use one object to represent or symbolize another object. In this form of play, a child can pretend that a block is a plane or use a broom to represent a guitar. Children in this age range can also engage in sociodramatic play, in which they pretend to be other individuals in different circumstances. Finally, from the age of seven onwards,

children tend to play games with rules, e.g. sports and board games, after learning about cooperation and competition [Piaget, 1962].

Piaget’s theory also states that in every stage of development children are practicing assimilation and accomodation whenever they learn. According to Piaget, assimilation is the taking of information from one’s surroundings and changing it to match one’s cognitive schema of how the world works. Assimilation is performed whenever someone encounters new information, or finds themselves in an unfamil- iar situation and attempts to understand the new phenomenon by refering back to previously learned concepts. In contrast, accomodation is performed when someone modifies their own cognitive schema in order to make room for new information from their environment. While both processes are necessary requirements for cog- nitive development, Piaget claims that whenever a child engages in play, they are mainly assimilating information from their environment into their existing schemas. However, whenever a child imitates a behaviour that they have seen before, they are trying to accomodate information from the novel behaviour into their own mental schema [Piaget, 1962].

Vygotsky’s social development theory

In contrast, Vygotsky’s theory of social development views the concepts of play and collaboration from a different perspective. Unlike Piaget’s claim of individual cogni- tive development preceding certain kinds of learning, Vygotsky believes that social interaction plays a pivotal role in children’s development and that any changes in a child’s thought processes will first come to them in their interactions with others. According to Vygotsky, children learn a great deal by engaging in collaborative or cooperative dialogues with other individuals (teachers, adults, peers, or computer systems) who are more skillful in certain tasks or more knowledgeable about cer- tain subjects. These individuals are known as more knowledgeable others and in their social dialogues with children, they transmit information by modeling certain

tasks or giving verbal instructions on how something should be done; alternatively, individuals can also provide scaffolding, an externally-enforced educational struc- ture/arrangement, to give children hints and allow them to accomplish a skill or learn a fact. These individuals and helpful interactions are necessary for a child to learn certain concepts that they cannot learn on their own, and the theory of so- cial development states that skills which can be learned with careful guidance from another are said to reside in a child’s zone of proximal development. Children can internalize more knowledge and develop their cognitive abilities further than they could on their own by using these forms of social learning [Vygotsky, 1978].

Additionally, Vygotsky also believed that play helped children to learn and develop cognitive abilities. He felt that Piaget’s concept of symbolic play was pivotal for a child’s development of abstract thought - by first using one object to symbolize another one, e.g. a broom for a guitar, a child has learned to use the object (in this case, the broom) as a pivot which helps to separate the concept of an object from the object itself. As a child grows, Vygotsky claims that they will learn to internalize pivots as imagination and abstract concepts which will help them to better comprehend the world. Furthermore, when a child participates in imaginary play with other children or by themselves, they begin to understand the idea of social roles and comprehend the rules that govern their relationships as children assume roles which are not their own and imitate others’ actions. Because imaginary play involves an understanding of social rules, it also prepares children for participating in more complex social games with clearly defined rules and allows them to understand the social concept of intentionality [Vygotsky, 1978].

Other constructivist theories

Bruner has similar thoughts as Vygotsky on the nature of play and how it factors into a child’s development. Bruner describes play as a means of gathering infor- mation about one’s surroundings and a way of developing experiences in particular

settings. In play, children can experiment with novel combinations of behaviours which allows them to be more creative, more mentally flexible, and develop a founda- tion of experiences for later learning, particularly to learning by imitation. Bruner sees social play as an activity that allows for even more creativity since the con- sequences of ones’s actions are greatly reduced than they would otherwise be in non-social play, thus enabling one to engage in riskier behaviour. Bruner also sees play as a means for learning about social communication since children use “switch signals” and “play faces” during play in order to show that their actions should be interpreted in a more playful context. This helps children to learn about multiple levels of social communication and to use context to interpret someone’s behaviours [Bruner, 1974].

Lave and Wenger also have similar thoughts as Vygotsky, but their theories focus on how social learning and collaboration can contribute to a child’s develop- ment. Lave and Wenger’s theory of situated learning states that learning is not merely what occurs in a classroom setting, i.e. transmission of abstract knowledge from one individual to another without any sense of context. Instead, learning is usually an unintentional process that occurs within activities, context, and culture; it begins with people trying to solve real-life problems and requires individuals to imitate others’ actions, to socialize with others, and to collaboratively visualize prob- lems with others. Situated learning takes place in communities of practice, which are communities that have a common interest or profession and learn from each other by sharing experiences and information with each other. These communities are created by a process known as legitimate peripheral participation, in which new- comers to a community begin participating by taking part in simple, low-level tasks that are necessary and productive for the community’s goals. By taking part in such peripheral activities, new members can learn a community’s particular jargon and become accustomed to the way a community is organized. When members have physical and social access to the knowledge of a community’s group of experts, they

can understand how each and every member’s contributions fit into a more general context [Lave and Wenger, 1991].