Knowledge and Understanding

04/17/2014

To every man alive, one must hope it has in some way happened that he has talked with his more fascinating friends around a table on some night when all the numerous personalities unfolded themselves like great tropical flowers.
G. K. Chesterton

"For children growing up to become responsible participants in a democracy, the disposition to seek understanding of the complex issues and decisions for which we all share responsibility should be a major goal of education at every level," argues Lilian Katz in her article, "Knowledge, Understanding, and the Disposition to Seek Both," which is included in the Beginnings Workshop curriculum unit, Dispositions. Katz elaborates...

"At the preschool level this goal means supporting young children’s natural nosiness about things and events around them worth understanding. The disposition to seek understanding is one of several important inborn dispositions that early childhood educators should strive to support and strengthen, by providing a wide range of opportunities for young children to explore and investigate important aspects of their environments and experiences....

To build the disposition to seek knowledge and understanding implies that our curriculum strategies and teaching methods must ensure that young children have frequent opportunities:

to explore their environment.
to observe significant activities, objects, and events and to investigate them in depth.
to look for evidence with which to answer their own questions about these real phenomena.
to challenge as well as appreciate each other’s explanations of daily events.
to ask the adults and older children in their daily environments to help deepen their understanding of what goes on around them and within them.

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