Children’s Ways of Knowing

A key characteristic of play is that it is self-initiated and internally and

intrinsically motivated. The purpose of this paper is to explore theories and

practices that support opportunities for children to engage in self-initiated,

autonomous, and intrinsically motivated play both at school and at home.

I examine these ideas through the lens of what has been referred to as

“children’s ways of knowing” (Ramsey, 2011). These ways of knowing are

unique to children and often go unnoticed, unheard, and unobserved by adults. It

is not enough to simply state that children’s play is self-initiated and internally

and intrinsically motivated; it is necessary to push further and think about both

what play behavior illuminates about children’s ways of knowing the world and

also how in the context of play these children’s epistemologies can be

understood and interrogated.

The idea of children’s ways of knowing goes beyond the idea of

developmental stages as described by Piaget (1962). This concept also is not a

mere consideration of differences in children’s ways of learning. The framework

of children’s ways of knowing encompasses the idea that children know the

world, encounter the world, experience the world, and make sense of the world

differently from adults. This moves further than simply thinking about how

children learn, or how children interact with each other and with adults. Children

have ways of being and existing in the universe that are fundamentally different

from adult ways of being in the world.

 Christopher Day (2007) distinguished ways in which children encounter

and utilize places and space from how adults experience space:

Adult experience centers on how we use places; we know what they are

for. For children, it’s more about what places ‘say’, how they meet and

experience them. To them, the world is still fresh- one big sensory

exploratorium. Hence railings and walls aren’t for excluding trespassers,

but for rattling sticks or bouncing balls...adults live (mostly) in a world of

material facts- ‘known’ and unchanging. For children, the ‘real’ world is

often servant to an imaginary world. Even single rooms, gardens, or

behind-the-shed forgotten places can be whole palettes of mood, whole

geographies of mountains and jungles, harbours and shops- places to live

out fantasy through action. (pp. 3-4)

Milne (1952) recognized these children’s ways of experiencing the world

when he wrote the poem “Nursery Chairs”, which describes a young child’s

imagination taking flight from the mundane reality of being in a room with several

chairs and nothing else to entertain him:

One of the chairs is South America,

One of the chairs is a ship at sea,

One is a cage for a great big lion,

And one is a chair for me...

 Shall I go off to South America?

Shall I put out in my ship to sea?

Or get in my cage and be lions and tigers?

Or- shall I be only me? (p. 18)

Harry Heft (1988) conducted a study where he looked closely at children’s

outdoor environments and analyzed the affordances that they presented for

children to use and play with. Heft was attempting to look at outdoor

environments for children not from a descriptive perspective but from a

perspective that looked at the use to which children might put the environment.

What Heft found was that almost any object in an outdoor environment had a

potential functional affordance for children, and that these potential affordances

generally differed quite markedly from the uses that adults might ascribe to them.

Some of the affordance categories Heft found included ‘climb-on-able

features’, which might be objects such as a bench, a crate, a tree or a fence;

‘hide-in-able features’, such as bushes, an upside-down bench, or a cardboard

box; ‘walk-on-able ledges’, which could be a retaining wall, a bandstand railing,

or the ridge of a garage roof; ‘dig-with-able objects’ such as shingles or sticks;

and ‘sound-produceable features’ such as hitting a flagpole with a bat.

Heft described research by Martha Muchow (1935) that detailed the

“different affordance properties” (Heft, p. 34) a canal loading dock had for adults

versus children. This was a popular children’s play place, and consisted of “a
wooden fence separating the street from the dock area, a steep slope down to

the canal, and the dock itself” (Heft, p. 35).

For the adult the principal features of this place would be the street, the

path down, and the landing place. The child, particularly at an earlier

school age, pays little attention to these elements. For him the main

features are the wooden fence and the slopes. The fence which, for the

adult, has the negative character of stopping movement, is for the child,

exactly to the contrary, the very signal of movement. It invites the child to

climb or jump on it or over it. Similarly, the slopes, which would have an

indifferent or negative value for the adult, represent a provocative field of

action for the child. (p. 35)

Aspects of children’s ways of knowing can be seen in situations such as

children’s play, where adults might offer analyses and interpretations of the play

being observed, but the importance of the play to the children involved is almost

impossible for the children to articulate in any way that adequately or completely

makes sense to an adult observer.

If one takes the time to watch how children use space and objects when

unhindered by adult cautions and proscriptions, one can begin to glimpse how

very differently from adults children view not just the world itself, but the

possibilities present in the world. In many ways the world for a child is full of

possibilities that an adult has great difficulty seeing and understanding. It is not
so much that an adult can’t understand, but that the ways of knowing that the

world demands of an adult are far removed from the ways of knowing that the

world requests of children.

What causes an airplane to fly in the sky? Clearly an adult’s answer to

this question will be different from a child’s answer. Adults are often tempted to

label the child’s answer as wrong, incorrect, uninformed, or incomplete, and the

adult’s answer as correct. From a scientific perspective the adult answer might

be more aligned with established principles and theories regarding aerodynamics

and physics. However, from the perspective of making sense of the world and

trying to understand how the world works, the child’s answer is every bit as

legitimate and perhaps even more useful to the child in that it provides a way of

encountering the world on a level that the child can relate to, understand, and

accept.

The child makes meaning of the world in ways that help him or her

become better able to navigate the complexities of everyday life. The needs of

the child, in this context, are very different from the needs of the adult, and

therefore the requirements for making meaning and understanding the world are

likewise different.

Traditional methods of instruction in school tend to follow a ‘transmission‘

or ‘banking‘ (Freire, 2005) model of teaching and learning, where the teacher

holds knowledge and deposits it into the empty vessels of the students‘ minds.

There are pedagogies, however, that eschew this view of children as individuals

with no intrinsic capability to make meaning of the world on their own. These
pedagogies emphasize the idea that children have unique ways of making sense

of experiences in the world, and they emphasize student-initiated and teacher-

supported engagement in the school.

Constructivist pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning based on

the idea that learning is an active process in which students create their

understanding of the world through encounters with ideas, concepts, physical

sensations, and experiences. In this view meaning does not lie outside of the

individual; meaning is constructed by the individual.

George Hein (2002) drew a particularly fascinating distinction between the

similar pedagogies of constructivism and discovery education. Discovery

education aligns with constructivism in the belief that people learn actively, but it

maintains that constructed knowledge can still be viewed as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’;

there is a correct reality that actually exists and that can be discovered through

active investigation. Constructivism, according to Hein, posits that:

...understanding comes from the active creation by the learner of the

knowledge itself. Not only do students have to be given the opportunity to

experience, to measure, observe, interview, draw and perform; their

products also need to be honored and validated on criteria other than their

fidelity to an accepted canon.

(p. 4)
 It is this very last phrase regarding fidelity to an accepted canon that

connects constructivism to historical and feminist perspectives (Harding, 2006;

Minnich, 2005; Phillips and Burbules, 2000) that claim that there are multiple

ways of knowing, and that there is not one true, absolute knowledge or

explanation for reality. Constructivist pedagogy embraces the idea that there are

many ways of knowing, and that knowing is largely subjective, based on an

individual’s encounters with experience and the ways in which the individual

accommodates or assimilates that experience; how the individual interprets and

makes sense of that experience.

A compelling contructivist pedagogy can be found in the preschools of

Reggio Emilia, in Italy (Edwards, Gandini, and Forman, 1998). A central tenet of

these schools is the belief that children and teachers can and should be co-

creators of knowledge and understanding; there is not one ultimate knowledge

that teachers are duty-bound to transmit to children. Carolyn Edwards (1998)

described the view of the child held by teachers in Reggio Emilia this way:

...young children are powerful, active, competent protagonists of their own

growth: actors in their shared history, participants in society and culture,

with the right (and obligation) to speak from their own perspective, and to

act with others on the basis of their own particular experience and level of

consciousness...this intrinsically social view of children- as protagonists

with unique personal, historical, and cultural identities- involves parallel

expectations and possibilities for adults. (p. 180)

 In considering how a teacher should best encourage a child's intellectual

development and attempt to understand the child’s perspectives on the world,

Tiziana Fillippini (1998) claimed that ‘listening’ is the key practice of the

educator. As Edwards (1998) stated, “’listening’ means seeking to follow and

enter into the active learning that is taking place” for children (p. 181).

One of the key ways of listening to and making visible children’s ways of

knowing in Reggio Emilia is documentation. The most important aspect of

documentation is that it is not simply a display of children’s work. Forman (1998)

provided an example of the difference between display and documentation in

looking at a single drawing by a child versus a videotape of the child creating the

drawing, or a videotape showing how the child engaged in editing and revising

his drawing to arrive at the final piece. The use of videotape to look more deeply

at the process involved in the child’s work is part of what moves this example

beyond the realm of mere display into the arena of documentation.

As Forman said:

...documentation is not a form of assessment of individual progress, but

rather a form of explaining, to the constituents of the school, the depth of

the child’s learning and the educational rationale of activities.

Documentation is central to negotiated learning...this term negotiated

captures the centrality of the social, co-constructivist principles...the

teachers seek to uncover the children’s beliefs about the topics to be

 investigated...the curriculum is not child centered or teacher directed. The

curriculum is child originated and teacher framed. The children discuss

many interests, for example, what amusement rides would small birds

enjoy. These interests are reframed into slightly more general concepts

considered important by professional teachers...then specific follow-up

activities are proposed and negotiated with the children, and at the more

general level, with the parents. (p. 240-241)

The idea of both actively seeking out children’s views and being willing to

negotiate with children to collaboratively decide upon next steps in the process of

creating understanding and meaning is central to attempts to engage in research

and consultation with children. There is an extensive literature (Ergler, 2011;

Kellet, 2005; Cunningham, 2004; Malone, 1999) that explores methodologies and

considerations in collaborating with and making visible the perspectives of

children in areas as diverse as classroom and school design, toy design, uses for

public space, children’s experiences in hospitals and in receiving medical care,

and creating media.

The common belief that runs through these practices is the idea that

children have ways of experiencing and knowing the world that are different from

those of adults. Allowing for children’s participation in research, planning,

design, and consultation enables adults to gain a fuller perspective on the project

at hand by hearing the insights of a significant constituent group or consumer

group that might be directly or indirectly impacted by the project. In the practices
that I will describe now, there is a common theme that children are viewed by

adults as worthy of respect, and as individuals who deserve to have their voices

heard. While many conscientious adults might profess that they wish to hear the

voices of children, this ‘listening‘ often occurs in a tokenistic way. Children might

be given the opportunity to speak or participate in decision-making processes,

but it is often adults who ultimately decide the outcomes of these processes.

Listening to and validating children’s voices aligns closely with considerations of

children as citizens as put forward in the United Nations Convention on the

Rights of the Child, and it relates as well to the pedagogy of Reggio Emilia where

educators view children as powerful co-constructors of knowledge and

understanding.

Alison Clark (2007) described in detail how she involved 3 and 4 year-old

children in a research and design project focused on creating a plan for

remodeling the children’s school. In the first phase of her study she was

determined to find out what the young children thought about their current school.

Methodologically, this posed some challenges. Initially Clark and her co-

researchers observed how the children used the space in their classroom and in

the school; she was interested not just in creating an observational account of

the ways in which the children used the space, but in actually obtaining the

children’s perspectives about the school space. Clark taught the preschoolers

how to use disposable cameras to take photographs, and then she asked them

to take pictures of what they felt were ‘important things’ in the school.
 Another way in which Clark elicited children’s thoughts about their school

environment was by having children lead tours of the school and create a map

utilizing drawings and digital photographs created and taken by the children

themselves. One-on-one and small group interviews with the children were also

conducted, and children were given the opportunity to build a model of a new

school using various sorts of blocks and construction materials.

What is particularly interesting about Clark’s approach is that she utilized

multiple methods of obtaining the views and perspectives of the preschool

children, and the different responses and data yielded a complex and informative

picture of what the children felt about both their current school and their ideas for

a remodeled and renovated school.

Mark Francis (1988) led a research and design project in California that

attempted to access both child and adult perspectives on open space usage,

centered around creating a new neighborhood playground in one project and

creating a new school play space in another. Utilizing a number of methods,

Francis found that children preferred open spaces that were challenging, that had

water for playing, that allowed for change and discovery, that had loose parts that

the children could use to construct games and toys and to engage in fantasy

play, and that looked somewhat rough and unfinished. Adults, he found,

preferred open spaces that were physically safe, that had fixed parts that could

not be taken apart and reassembled in different ways, that had no water, that

were static and familiar, and that looked neat and clean.
 These differences between adult and child preferences regarding open

space qualities and features offer a vivid example of the very real differences in

how children and adults view and see the world. While it may seem obvious that

children and adults will have different opinions and perspectives on issues and

ideas, it is still quite rare that adults take the time to listen, hear, and take the

most significant step of actually acting on what children have to say (Camilleri,

1997; Leroy & Bressoux, 2007).

Roger Hart (1992) developed a model that describes eight levels of

children’s potential participation in various interactions, activities, and projects in

relation to sharing power and control with adult participants. In his “Ladder of

Children’s Participation” Hart made the case that as children’s ways of knowing

are validated and deemed to be of importance by adults, both parties move

towards the higher rungs of the ladder of participation.

As movement is made towards the top of the ladder children’s views and

ideas are accorded more weight, and there is more desire on the part of adults to

take the time not only to hear children’s perspectives but to help enact these

perspectives by allowing for child-initiated decisions about situations. Hart

referred to the lowest rung of the ladder as ‘manipulation’, and at this level

children’s views are rarely solicited, and if they are allowed to be heard there is

no real effort by adults to act on what children have to say. The highest rung of

Hart’s ladder is ‘child-initiated, shared decisions with adults’, and it is here that

we come back to the idea of children having their own unique and valid ways of
knowing, with adults providing opportunities for children to make meaning of and

in the world.

It is important here to spend some time connecting ideas about children’s

ways of knowing with broader historical contexts of ways of knowing.

The parallel ideas of knowledge and inquiry are fundamental to the work

and practice of the researcher, regardless of discipline or field of study. These

two concepts have been theorized, contested, explored, defined, argued, and

developed over millennia. One of the most fascinating aspects of these concepts

is that they are still debated, re-defined, and re-imagined today. This continued

conversation over the meaning, use, and significance of these two ideas speaks

to the power they hold over our ancient and ongoing struggle to confront deep

and intrinsic questions: what is knowledge, and where does knowledge come

from?

A fundamental question arises as to whether there is a knowledge that is

most true, absolute, and beyond all other knowledge, or whether the ‘truth factor’

of knowledge is much more contextual, dependent on the time, place, and culture

in which it is being pursued- always defined to the best abilities of the

researchers and thinkers of the day, but with the caveat that in the future this

knowledge might need to be reconsidered in light of new data, new discoveries,

and new contexts for creating meaning.

Foundationalist thinkers such as Rene Descartes (1637) and John Locke

(1690) were in the former camp, though Descartes was a rationalist and Locke

was an empiricist. They both believed that it was possible to find a ‘secure
foundation’ for knowledge, with Descartes attempting to find this foundation by

“using his rational faculties” (Phillips & Burbules, 2000), and Locke believing that

the foundation of knowledge lies in experience and could be found using the

human senses (Phillips & Burbules, 2000).

Karl Popper (1972) was in the latter camp, and he quite clearly stated that

there is no ultimate, absolute source of knowledge. The idea of there being an

“absolutely secure foundation” for knowledge is false, because knowledge is

“conjectural”- it is supported by the best, but potentially imperfect, evidence

available at the time. The pursuit of ‘truth’ is not what is important, according to

Dewey (1933). What is significant is the “longer term process of exploration and

experimentation” and the attempt to determine a well-warranted belief that

follows from competent inquiry (Phillips & Burbules, 2000).

The idea that knowledge is a product of the best data available at a given

time, but always subject to improvement or change, relates to ideas of

knowledge as culturally constructed, and ideas of conscious and unconscious

bias in inquiry; knowledge as a product of a particular time and place, and as a

product of an individual’s own values and biases and the perspectives and

structural norms of the larger society and culture within which an inquiry takes

place.

The conflict, or discussion, between epistemologies that hold, on the one

hand, that the goal of science is to create a “mirror-like reflection of a reality that

is already out there,” according to Richard Rorty (cited in Harding, 1998 ) and, on

the other hand, that there is no one, central, universal, objective truth or
knowledge to discover, is seen in Harding’s description of postcolonial science

and technology studies.

In postcolonial studies the view of science is opened up and expanded, no

longer limited to a traditional western European perspective, but instead

examines the creation of technological knowledge from the perspectives of non-

western European cultures, which encompass the majority of the world’s most

vulnerable people (Harding, 1998). This idea that there are ways of knowing and

understanding the world outside of the dominant western European view was

given support by the work of Johann Herder, who attempted to demonstrate the

inappropriateness of viewing one culture through the lens or value-system of

another culture.

As Berlin (1995) put it, Herder “held that every society had what he called

its own centre of gravity, which differed from that of others” (p. 51). Drawing as

well on the earlier work of Vico, Berlin made a case for what he called pluralism-

“the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be

fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing

and deriving light from each other...” (p. 52). Berlin acknowledged that we all

have our own values, but that this does not give us an excuse, when considering

other cultures, to “pretend not to understand them at all, or to regard them simply

as subjective, the products of creatures in different circumstances with different

tastes from our own, which do not speak to us at all” (p. 52). There is some sort

of larger common value that is inherent in all civilizations, because, “if we did not

have any values in common with these distant figures, each civilisation would be
enclosed in its own impenetrable bubble, and we could not understand them at

all” (Berlin, 1995, p. 52).

The idea of dominant epistemologies and the structures that serve to

maintain them is a major focus of Harding’s (2006) later work, which relates in

several key ways to Minnich’s (2005) concern that knowledge has traditionally

been defined from a white, male perspective at the expense of the perspectives

of women and minorities. In order for there to be a dominant epistemology or

structure there needs to be at least one, and probably more, subjugated way of

knowing. While taking a slightly different path to organize their theoretical ideas,

Minnich (2005) and Harding (2006) both explored the idea of multiple ways of

knowing the world. They offered the key point that these multiple ways of

knowing the world are not all afforded equal standing and equal power.

Standpoint theory and other similar perspectives seek to reorient the

conversation so that the almost invisible structures of power and domination

embedded in and nurtured by white, male epistemologies are countered more

fully by ways of knowing that are sidelined and ignored.

This brief historical overview of ways of knowing has a thread running

through it that is on one level obvious and on another incredibly exciting and

opening to a world of fascinating possibilities. This thread is the idea that there

are multiple ways of knowing the world, whether from cultural perspectives,

gender perspectives, class or economic perspectives, or other perspectives less

often discussed by postcolonial theorists.

 It is often the case that adult ways of knowing are given precedence and

priority over children’s ways of knowing. According to the United Nations

Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), children should be afforded the

opportunity to participate in decisions that affect them, and they should be

allowed to express themselves in all matters that concern them. In reality, adults

frequently have difficulty with the idea of sharing power and control with children,

and adults are often not even aware of the possibility that children have deep and

meaningful ways of understanding the world. It is still the case that most adults,

whether teachers, parents, or others who frequently encounter children, view

their ways of knowing as being the correct or best ways of knowing, and

children’s perspectives as lacking or deficient (Andreychuk & Fraser, 2007;

Ehrensal, date unknown; Johnny, 2006).

Vivian Gussin Paley (1986) described how challenging it can be for an

adult to be receptive to children’s ways of knowing. In order to engage with

children’s ways of knowing adults must set aside many preconceptions that they

hold onto and struggle with letting go. Paley described her attempts to emulate a

colleague who seemed to have a very strong rapport and ability to communicate

with the children in classroom on their ‘level’:

I began to copy Bill’s style whenever the children and I had formal

discussions. I practiced his open-ended questions, the kind that seek no

specific answers but rather build a chain of ideas without the need for

closure. It was not easy. I felt myself always waiting for the right answer-
 my answer. The children knew I was waiting and watched my face for

clues. Clearly, it was not enough simply to copy someone else’s teaching

manner; real change comes about only through the painful recognition of

one’s own vulnerability. (p. 123)

In thinking about children’s ways of knowing it is vitally important to also

consider adults’ ways of listening. While there might be an infinite number of

ways of knowing the world, if one is not willing to take the time to listen and hear

the unique perspectives of these different ways of understanding and making

meaning, then a richness of diversity within the human race is neglected and

ignored. A way of knowing the world is only as powerful as the willingness of

others to listen and try to understand. Carlina Rinaldi (2006) described what she

called a “Pedagogy of Listening”:

Listening should be sensitive to the patterns that connect us to others.

Our understanding and own being are a small part of a broader, integrated

knowledge that holds the universe together.

Listening should be open and sensitive to the need to listen and be

listened to, and the need to listen not just with our ears but with all our

senses.

Listening should recognize the many languages, symbols, and codes that

people use to express themselves and communicate.

 Listening is generated by curiosity, desire, doubt and uncertainty. This is

not insecurity but the reassurance that every “truth” is so only if we are

aware of its limits and its possible “falsification”.

Listening produces questions, not answers.

Listening is an active verb, which involves giving an interpretation, giving

meaning to the message and value to those who are being listened to.

Listening is not easy. It requires a deep awareness and a suspension of

our judgements and prejudices. It requires openness to change.

It demands that we value the unknown and overcome the feelings of

emptiness that we experience when our certainties are questioned....

(p. 65)

Paley (1986) described the importance of listening to children in a

preschool classroom in order to understand more fully their views and

perspectives on the world. She described how her colleague Bill seemed to have

a remarkable way of listening to the young children in her classroom:

But something else was going on that was essential to Bill’s success. He

was truly curious. He had few expectations of what five-year-olds might

say or think, and he listened to their responses with the anticipation one

brings to the theater when a mystery is being revealed. Bill was interested

not in what he knew to be an answer, but only in how the children

intuitively approached a problem... (p. 123)

 The conversation between historical epistemologies and twenty-first

century ways of knowing is complex and challenging. Equally intricate and

fascinating is the conversation between adult ways of making meaning and

children’s ways of understanding the world. Berlin’s (1995) idea of people

“deriving light from each other” (p. 52) is a provocative way of thinking about a

world in which many ways of knowing are publicly recognized. A multiplicity of

ways of knowing is a source of richness, of depth, as we consider what it means

to be human. There is a strength that can only be found in a willingness to listen

to and attempt to understand different ways of creating meaning in and of the

world. As a teacher I have seen firsthand the power that children’s ways of

knowing can have at the level of the individual, at the level of the classroom, and

at the level of the school. It is my hope that as I and others continue to research

children’s ways of knowing we will be able to increase opportunities for children’s

voices and children’s participation particularly in the context of children’s play in

urban environments, because the possibilities for new levels of meaning-making

by children as they engage in play are still only beginning to be uncovered.

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