Young children grow cognitively competent through joint processes of guided participation and appropriation wherein children use past interpretations of experiences in their lives to make sense of new events (Rogoff, 1990). While young children are deemed competent meaning-makers when supported by their everyday social contexts (Fivush and Hudson, 1991, Rogoff, 1990) in the early years of schooling, traditional classroom discourse styles do not facilitate the child's ability to access their personal meaning. Based on findings from three pilot studies, it was hypothesized that four features of the social context--the teacher's valuing of their personal meaning, encouraging children to personalize their narrative, use of informal conversational discourse, and encouraging peer contribution--would enhance children's meaning-making. In order to examine the relationship of these social context features on the process of meaning making, memories were collected from children in a four step memory book activity. Thirty-six teachers from five different socioeconomic settings conducted the memory book activity with 199 children wherein the children verbally reported on and made pictures of a self chosen event from their past. Transcripts, developed from the videotapes of the memory book activity, were rated for coherence and completeness of the memories, and the degree to which the four context features were in evidence. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to determine whether there was a relationship between the children's ability to access and communicate their memory and the four independent variables. The results indicate that the teachers valuing and commitment to children's personal knowledge is a significant predictor of coherent and complete memories. In this study, meaning-making and guided participation can be described as social and collaborative in nature, and proceeds in a four stage process.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8947 |
| Date | 01 January 1994 |
| Creators | Perry, Gail Powell |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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