Abstract
The final chapter of this book brings together the central ideas discussed in previous chapters and presents a model of early childhood science education. This chapter theorises early childhood science education as a dialectical process between everyday and scientific concepts. The central concepts of the social situation of development, the relations between the ideal and the real form, imagination and creativity, and perezhivanie are reviewed in this chapter. Similarly the concepts of shared sustained thinking, rising to the concrete, intersubjectivity, mediation, metaphorical speech, anthropomorphic speech, the gap between the familiar and unfamiliar, simile, and metaphor are also revisited. The nature of institutional practices, the relations between ‘telling’ and ‘explaining’, the aesthetics of perception, and how phenomenon are culturally and socially constructed, and what this means for the role of the early childhood teacher are discussed. Further, the nature of children’s drawings in science and how this contributes to children’s scientific thinking and conceptual development of science concepts are considered. Together, these concepts give a different view of research in early childhood science education to previous reviews. An example of a cultural-historical model of early childhood science education in action completes the book.
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Fleer, M. (2015). A Cultural-Historical Model of Early Childhood Science Education. In: A Cultural-Historical Study of Children Learning Science. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9370-4_13
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