Experience Lost in Words - ?

On Friday the 3-rd of April, I had a day-long meeting with my colleague Ann-Hege Lorvik Waterhouse from Oslo University College, Faculty of Education. In our projects we both deal with young children (0-5 years old) and argue for the importance of children’s experience with the three dimensional world around them: I focus on children’s play with materials, and Ann-Hege on their experience with sculptures. Beside discussing different challenges in choice of research methods, genres of writing etc., our conversation touched on something I kept thinking about: What characterizes a child’s pre-linguistic experience? Are there significant differences in human experience before we are able to verbalize the experience, and after?

Kieran Egan speaks of humans as “creatures whose understanding of the world is profoundly shaped by our particular kind of bodies and senses” (Egan 2001). In the same article “The Cognitive Tools of Children’s Imagination” he writes that: ”…literacy has psychological costs as well as the more obvious benefits” (Egan 2001). I suggest that one such cost is that we, during the process of naming objects and qualities around us, somehow stop giving attention to our senses. Can our “mature” ability to name objects and categorize them in taxonomies hinder us in exploring details and qualities the way small children do when they experience an object for the first time? (See for example “Sharing a nacho”, published 14.02 on this blog page.)

Egan explains that young children first learn words that are opposites, and later fill the gap between the opposites. “Once they have formed an opposition, they can learn other terms along the continuum between such opposites.” I believe that learning the other terms is possible only if the environment offers a spectre of qualities, and if the people (pedagogues) in the child’s environment acknowledge the importance of such learning. As Elliot Eisner wrote ”… the ability to experience qualities requires more than their presence. Experience is a form of human achievement, and as such it depends upon an act of mind; qualitative experience depends on qualitative forms of inquiry” (Eisner, 1991)

Ann-Hege and I watched a video from the pedagogical context where two children explored different types of clay to value the best for their sculpturing. They had never played with any type of clay before. The materials in front of them had different (and surprising) visual and tactical qualities (some of the clay had been dried, some put in water, some shaped in geometric forms etc.) To begin with, the girl and the boy had problems with explaining their experiences, but they commonly used metaphors, songs and imaginative stories to describe the clays’ qualities. After the hour of exploring, the simple word “clay” they knew before the activity, would never again be enough to capture the diversity of qualities they had experienced.

Unfortunately, there are probably people who would turn up their nose at a lump of clay, call it “dirty clay” and leave it untouched…. if they one day found it on their office table…

References:
Egan, Kieran (2001): The Cognitive Tools of Children’s Imagination, paper presented at the Annual European Conference on Quality in Early Childhood Education, Netherlands
Eisner, Elliot (1991): The Enlightened Eye, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company