Introduction

Concept development is a big topic with a big focus: how children acquire and use concepts.

So, what is a concept to begin with? In the simplest terms, a concept is an idea that can organize or make sense of other ideas or the world. So, it is pretty much impossible to list all the concepts that exist, but we can begin our discussion by looking at the kinds of ideas that young children, particularly infants and toddlers, are learning.

Think about the experiences and objects infants and toddlers interact with and how such things might be organized. For example, concepts such as shape and colour can help a child sort blocks into different piles.

Sorting activities are wonderful places to start when we are talking about concepts. Have you ever seen a young child sort things in their play? Or have you led a sorting activity to teach young children about shape or size? Think of the many ways we see young children sorting.

I would like to turn now to an example of a toddler playing with objects and then complete the following reflection.

Video: Sorting (duration: 00:50)

Think about concepts you know as an adult. Your mind might be drawn to scientific principles such as gravity or time. Now, think about how we work with young children. They must also learn about such big ideas, and some even emerge in early childhood.

Have you ever used a water table with young children? Think about the concept you were trying to teach them as they experimented with objects in water. Consider the concept of time. What tools do you rely on to help children navigate the day, and how do they understand time passing?

What about other concepts we tend to not focus on as much in the Western world, such as those of space and navigation? Such concepts would be much more important if young children needed to know why the sun rose in a particular place and set in another. In our society, those concepts tend to be taught formally in the school years as part of science, but in many societies, having a sense of the daily rhythms of nature and orienting oneself spatially in nature are essential ideas that emerge in daily life.

So, each culture emphasizes the most important concepts for young children, and we teach the most highly valued concepts in our societies. We do this either because of the concept’s relationship to formal learning and schooling or its value in day-to-day functioning. In this way, concepts and their development, as with all aspects of thinking and learning, are not universal.

Which Concepts Do Children Learn?

Siegler and Alibali (2019) focus their discussion of conceptual development on four central concepts in their textbook: time, space, number, and biology. They also outline theoretical ideas about how we form “conceptual representations,” but I will not go into these details here.

What I will focus on, inspired by their approach, is the notion of “representations.” That is because this term refers to something that exists in the mind, not the world. It is a sort of mental object that we can use, and it helps us understand just how abstract concepts are. While colour and shape are visible to the eye, concepts such as living or not living are less immediately observable. Concepts such as causality seem quite abstract, while other abstract concepts like democracy are so complex that they tend to be taught formally in school.

What is important to keep in mind as we discuss concepts and how children develop them is that children are capable of abstraction much more than we tend to realize. The human mind is very much structured around ideas that help us sort the world. Some scientists have even argued that some very core concepts, such as living versus not living, are innate.But those of us who observe the powerful interactions of children learning in their environment, such as Gelman and colleagues (Gelman, Durgin and Kaufman, 1995), refer instead to the innate capacity of humans to learn.

Of course, there are many concepts across cultures taught to young children beyond those that Siegler and Alibali (2019) chose for their focus. Cultures differ from one another partially due to the choice of particular concepts of focus, but it is also through different kinds of interactions in which they are learned.

Returning to the notion of intersubjectivity, we can think of children learning concepts through shared reading with adults, different kinds of play, working alongside adults in an apprenticeship model, or being engaged with others in the outdoors (particularly in navigating). This last context for conceptual development is one that Gardner (1983) identified as part of geospatial awareness; it was not the focus of much Western theory or research because of the high degree of industrialization that created worlds in which finding one’s way was not important. But consider cultures in which looking to the natural world (e.g., landmarks, the directionality of water flow, the sun, the stars, the earth’s incline, the direction of the wind, the presence or absence of certain kinds of flora in an ever-changing landscape, etc.) would inform conceptual knowledge. How do concepts develop in young children?

How Do Concepts Develop in Young Children?

Barbara Rogoff long ago identified the mechanism of guided participation (1990) as central to children’s thinking and learning. In conceptual development, Rogoff discusses the routinized ways in which adults (particularly parents) interact with their infants and toddlers such that the infants understand the adult as a source for interpreting the world and explaining new phenomena or otherwise guiding them in all respects.

This social mechanism will be more deeply explored in Chapter 7, but the concept is integral to Vygotsky’s conception of sociocultural theory; therefore, observing interactions will provide us with important insights into the specific ways children’s thinking, and in this case concepts, develops.

Rogoff discusses the “social” aspect of sociocultural theory through her coverage of conceptual development in her foundational book Apprenticeship in Thinking (1990). Here, Rogoff explains how children’s understanding of hierarchical organization in concepts, also known as taxonomies, can be formed in interaction with their parents during picture-book reading (see Adams, 1987, as cited in Rogoff, 1990).

So, if we think about these fundamental day-to-day interactions between adults and children, we find that adults organize children’s experiences with the world in systematic ways that help children learn and actually think about the world in different ways. In the study that Rogoff summarizes, the children of the parents who did not organize concepts in this way while sharing a picture book did not learn the concepts.

If we go back to the fundamental concepts of our world — for example, the natural world — we should be able to find some interesting examples of how children develop thinking in these areas in interaction with adults in their environment. Let’s look to the skies, a universal part of the human experience. A Greek study conducted by Fragkiadaki, Fleer, and Ravanis (2019) looked at kindergarteners’ understanding of clouds. These authors used an approach to analysis based on Barbara Rogoff’s work as they examined the conversations that young children have with adults relating to the sky, clouds, and weather, as well as children’s experiences with nature.

The researchers interacted with the children in conversation on many aspects of clouds, eliciting their perspectives and associations with them. Then, the researchers had the children work together in pairs, addressing the very same questions together, without an adult.

The study found that the children generated a variety of explanations for clouds that included fantastical or imaginary elements as well as religious ones that are clearly rooted in their culture and world experience. They also identified the children’s use of gesture (i.e., arm and hand movements) to clarify aspects of their conceptual understanding. When the children interacted with one another, they engaged in a kind of negotiation of meaning that pushed their understandings forward. Lastly, the children referred to culturally available sources of information on clouds, such as elders or the newspaper.

The authors point out that the very process of acquiring such concepts — not what concepts they have and have not acquired — is the most illuminating about children’s thinking. We can see their process and the complex factors that support their cognitive development, which are rooted in social interaction and cultural artifacts and meaning.

Dramatic Play

As we think about cultural perspectives in engaging with concepts and representations, I would like to direct your thoughts to dramatic or pretend play. As we know, young children often enact what they see in the adult world in pretend play and centres in Toronto typically have areas designated for this type of play. We will revisit the role of play in the classroom again in Chapter 8, but it is important for our purposes here to think about what is involved in pretense. When a child uses an object to do an imaginary act, it represents something they have seen in the real world. The recreation of scenarios in play or activities carried out by adults is very much central to children’s concepts and representations.

Complete the simulation exercise below to explore how one preschooler enacted what they had observed at home in the dramatic play centre.