A Learning Zone of One's Own: Sharing Representations and Flow in Collaborative Learning Enviroments

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A LEARNING ZONE OF ONE'S OWN

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A Learning Zone of One's Own Sharing Representations and Flow in Collaborative Learning Environments

Edited by Mario Tokoro Sony Computer Science Labs Inc., Tokyo, Japan and

Luc Steels Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris, France and VUB AI Laboratory, Brussels, Belgium

/OS

Press Amsterdam • Berlin • Oxford • Tokyo • Washington, DC

© 2004, The authors mentioned in the table of contents All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission from the publisher. ISBN 1 58603 4103 Library of Congress Control Number: 2004101285

Publisher IOS Press Nieuwe Hemweg 6B 1013 BG Amsterdam The Netherlands fax:+3120 620 3419 e-mail: [email protected]

Distributor in the UK and Ireland IOS Press/Lavis Marketing 73 Lime Walk Headington Oxford OX3 7AD England fax: +44 1865 75 0079

Distributor in the USA and Canada IOS Press, Inc. 5795-G Burke Centre Parkway Burke, VA 22015 USA fax: +1 703 323 3668 e-mail: [email protected]

LEGAL NOTICE The publisher is not responsible for the use which might be made of the following information. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

Preface This book is part of a long-term effort, initiated by Mario Tokoro, to 'weave a web' of researchers and practitioners that are dedicated to advance the quality of education in the 21st century. It involves workshops, books, large-scale experiments, international projects and web resources. The initiative intends to stimulate multidisciplinary discussions which contribute to improving education and learning for children and adults of all ages everywhere in the world, based on an improved understanding, methodology and policy for education and human learning. In our view, information and communication technology can contribute to the creation of powerful support tools, but should not be seen as an end in itself. The present book follows up on a first introductory volume: 'The Future of Learning - Issues and Prospects' (also published by IOS Press and edited by M. Tokoro and L. Steels), which has set the scene for the discussion. Both books are to a large extent based on workshops that have involved participants from the various sciences investigating learning (educational psychology, AI, brain science), technology developers, especially in computing and networking, as well as practitioners involved in education at different age levels. The material is as much as possible presented in a way that might be accessible to a broad audience. The discussions reported in this book do not claim to be the final answer to the enormously complex and extremely important question of the future of learning, far from it. Many issues remain to be explored and educational practice keeps evolving. This book covers free and open discussions, and we hope that they will be enjoyable as well as inspiring to everybody who takes an interest in education or learning either for the short or the longer term. Mario Tokoro and Luc Steels Editors

A Learning Zone of One's Own Sharing Representations and Flow in Collaborative Learning Environments Editors: Mario Tokoro and Luc Steels Copy Editor: Marleen Wynants

Acknowledgements The present book is to a large extent based on two workshops, with additional authors included. The first workshop was organised by Luc Steels in April 2002 in Calheiros, near Ponte di Lima (Portugal). It was financed by Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Tokyo and Paris) and co-funded by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, thanks to Peter Gardenfors, Olle Edqvist and Maria Larsson. Workshop participants included Edith Ackermann, Walter Aprile, Olivier Coenen, Olle Edqvist, Peter Gardenfors, Celia Hoyles, Bunya Kasai, Maria Larsson, Sarat Maharaj, Yvonne Rogers, Takahiro Sasaki, John Sivell, Luc Steels, Mario Tokoro, Marleen Wynants and Jan-Christope Zoels. We thank the Count and Countess of the Pa9o de Calheiros and their staff for the warm welcome and their hospitality, and Nicole Bastien for her help in the practical organisation of the workshop. The second workshop was organised by Luc Steels in April 2003 and took place in the Casa di Carmona, in Carmona near Sevilla (Spain). It was funded by Sony Computer Science Laboratories. The participants included Antonella Delle Fave, Patrick De Muynck, Mark Eisenstadt, Ulrich Hoppe, Michinori Kawachi, Ken Mogi, Francois Pachet, Takahiro Sasaki, Daniel Schneider, Chris Sinha, Luc Steels, Mario Tokoro, Colwyn Trevarthen, and Marleen Wynants. We thank the staff of the Casa de Carmona for the great care they took in supporting the workshop activities, and Nicole Bastien for her help in the practical organisation. The present book would not have come into existence without the enormous, much appreciated efforts of each author. Special thanks go to Marleen Wynants who acted as copy editor. She convinced busy authors to work on their texts and cooperated with each of them to shape and reshape the texts and illustrations. Pictures of authors have also been contributed by her. Mario Tokoro also thanks Takahiro Sasaki and Michinori Kawachi for their help in editing this volume, and gives special thanks to Joseph Goguen for his insightful comments. Finally we thank the staff of IOS Press, particularly Einar Fredriksson, Anne Marie de Rover and other members of the IOS Press team for their efficient production of the book.

Introduction The articles in this volume have been divided into three parts. The first part, entitled "Play and Grounding", looks at play as a context likely to reveal the essence of grounding. Grounding is the embodiment of understanding things/actions in relation to and/or integrated with their environments. The second part, entitled "Optimal Experience and Emotion", shows the close association between grounding and emotion. The third part, entitled "Pedagogy and Technology", elaborates new technologies, such as the computer and internet, and concepts and pedagogical methodologies supported by such technologies. Part I. Play and Grounding In Grounding, Emotion and Learning, Mario Tokoro, a leader in the field of computer and internet technologies, who is currently much interested in learning and brain science, and Takahiro Sasaki, a researcher on computer science and learning science, focus on the significance of emotion for grounding, arguing that emotion plays an essential role in learning and human development. Grounding is the embodiment of understanding things/actions through our own real experience, and emotion facilitates embodiment and leads to the development of "self. The authors try to interpret observations in developmental psychology from the viewpoint of brain science, especially the emotion system. In Constructing Knowledge and Transforming the World, Edith K. Ackermann, a developmental psychologist, reviews Piaget, Papert and Vygotsky, noting similarities and differences among the three. While Piaget described the developmental process of cognition from the viewpoint of an individual, Vygotsky regarded social context as primary. Papert complemented Piaget by stressing the importance of communication, and noting the significance of externalizing inner feelings and ideas through media. The author considers each view important, and tries to give a unified interpretation. She then refers to the variety of representations made by individuals, one of the forms of which is "play", especially for children. Simulacre and simulation as activities are contrasted in that light. Grounding takes place in play, and it is significant that the child can reconfirm through his/her own performance what has been learned. In How Infants Learn How to Mean, Colwyn Trevathen, a child psychologist, describes precise developmental stages from newborn to infant. He cites observations showing that newborn babies have all the essentials of a whole "self. He also states that the power of a child's brain to find motivation and confidence in sensitive communication with others makes possible lifelong compassion and sympathy. By constructing narratives, mother and infant come to share history and invoke community, which gives the basis for shared meaning. He states that the principles of the productive communication are reciprocity, mutuality, attunement, regular timing, and turn-taking behavior. In Pretend Play as Learning: Case Studies from the Home, Marleen Wynants, an independent journalist and mother of two daughters, highlights the significance of children's pretend play, seeing it as simulation of self and communication. She describes

her experience, arguing the importance for individuals to fully engage in play at home, where safety is assured. She also raises some important open questions.

Part II. Optimal Experience and Emotion In A Feeling of Well-Being in Learning and Teaching, Antonella Delle Fave, a psychologist, explains the essence of the notion of "optimal experience", also called "flow". Optimal experience is a complex and highly structured state of consciousness, preferentially associated with highly structured tasks and with activities supporting autonomy and creativity. For personal development, it fosters the growth of complexity in individual behavior, and at the cultural level, it promotes survival and eventually the diffusion of information. She also stresses the importance of optimal experience not only for learning, but also for teaching. In On the Design of a Musical Flow Machine, Fra^ois Pachet, a researcher on computer science and music, with co-author Anna Rita Addessi, presents the happy results of experiments using an automatic piano-like instrument named "Continuator". It responds to what you played, in a similar style with similar duration. Both professional musicians and children were excited by it. The reflective property of the system, in which users can play with virtual copies of themselves, may have been a cause for entraining them into a "flow"-like state. Another result is that children engage in turn-taking behaviors in a spontaneous way, while playing with Continuator. In The Architecture of Flow, Luc Steels, a researcher on artificial intelligence and complex dynamic system, discusses the need to integrate notions of flow in thinking about education in general and learning environments in particular. He firstly explained the theory of "flow" devised by Csikszentmihalyi in his own words as well as referring to what Csikszentmihalyi described, focusing on how a person can be self-motivated. He then discusses the importance of the collaboration of pupils and teachers/parents in learning environments at school or at home. Lastly, from the cognitive scientist view, he proposes an operational model of agents that simulate aspects of autotelic behavior.

Part III. Pedagogy and Technology In Tools for Embodied Teaching: Celestin Freinet and the Learner-Centered Classroom, John Sivell, an educational practitioner, introduces the Freinet approach, in which real tools that have only been size-adjusted are given to children, so that they are encouraged to create. Freinet teachers select and use tools such as PC's and the web, in the light of this pedagogical philosophy. Through such genuine experiences, a learner should undergo the stage of grounding, and grow to be an individual who can handle new experiences on his own. In Playing and Learning in Digitally-Augmented Physical Worlds, Yvonne Rogers, a leader in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Collaborative Work, and Sara Price, a researcher on information science, propose digitally augmented physical space to support reflection and interpretation in children. They illustrate this proposal with three examples. The first, "Chromarium", is a mixed reality environment for young children to explore different ways of mixing color, using various physical and digital actions, and combinations of the two. The second, "The Hunting of the Snark", is a digitally-augmented adventure game whose goal is to look for an elusive virtual creature hidden in virtual space, and appearing digitally in physical space. The last one, "Ambient Wood", is a learning experience in the form of real field trip, utilizing wireless networking with mobile and

handheld technologies. In these activities, children experience physical feeling and motion through a digital extension. In Learning Together Through Collaborative Portal Sites, Daniel K. Schneider, an educational practitioner and promoter of innovative pedagogical and technological projects, demonstrates use of the internet in education, noting that positive results are attained only for pedagogically well designed projects. The importance of the teacher's roles in learnercentered learning is also stressed; these roles are facilitator, manager and orchestrator. To support these roles effectively, the author proposes a framework and modules for building an ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) educational environment as a portal, where teachers and students can carry out their activities. In Collaborative Mind Tools, H. Ulrich Hoppe, a researcher on intelligent support in educational systems and distributed collaborative environments, first reviews various tools in the light of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, and examines their effectiveness. Then he introduces his own collaborative tool named "Cool Modes" (for Collaborative Open Learning, Modelling and DEsigning System). It has been shown to be a good instrument for supporting collaborative modeling activities in science and mathematics. He also finds it important for learners to use visual representations. In Playgrounds for a New Mathematics, Celia Hoyles, an educational practitioner in mathematics, points out the importance of representational infrastructure for reasoning, with two examples. One of them, the Playground project, uses Ken Kahn's ToonTalk to explore new ways for children to develop a sense of mechanism. The other example uses geometric modeling to illustrate the interaction of knowledge and representation. In ToonTalk - Powerful Building Blocks for Computer-Based Learning Environments, Ken Kahn, a specialist in computer programming, introduces an enjoyable educational software environment named ToonTalk, through which kids can program pieces of algorithms, logics, or even entire game-like programs. Logo and Smalltalk were previously proposed for educational purposes, but mastering these languages is not necessarily easy for kids. On the other hand, in ToonTalk, they can create programs easily by manipulating characters and objects in an animated world. The tool lets kids structure and externalize their concepts logically in a formal way, although it feels like playing a game. Further Vision The contributions in this volume demonstrate the great potential for the further development of the vision that inspired the meetings in which they were presented. First, we are now more confident that emotion is indispensable for human learning, and that learning requires grounding. Emotion accompanies play activities and play activities accompany emotion. This relation provides a rich context for grounding. The communication and play between an infant and its parent(s) can be interpreted as the earliest context for "emotional grounding". Play activities in which learners can become deeply involved require a safe environment. The notion of optimal experience, or flow, seems an important factor for grounding, and it is suggested that optimal experience occurs when the emotion and neuro systems come into harmony. To further examine the possible association of flow with grounding, we might analyze emotion in the light of neurophysiology; this could be a future focus for our discussions. Moreover, the reports and proposals made here on pedagogy and tools assure us of the feasibility of learning environments that are safe, effective and innovative. Technologies, if appropriately applied, should greatly benefit learning in both classroom

and home. We should remain fully aware of the potential of environments where learners and teachers are supported by easy-to-handle, pedagogically sophisticated tools of the future. We hope that the contributions in this volume will be enjoyable and inspiring to a broad audience interested in education and learning, either in the short or the longer term. Although work in the classroom context (group teaching) seems to prevail in many contributions, our attention is directed equally to settings of individual learning, and of group learning. Since this book is intended to promote open discussion of the future of learning, any comments or inquiries on the articles are most welcome.

Mario Tokoro

Contents Preface Mario Tokoro and Luc Steels

v

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction Mario Tokoro

vii

Part I. Play and Grounding Chapter 1. Grounding, Emotion and Learning Mario Tokoro and Takahiro Sasaki

3

Chapter 2. Constructing Knowledge and Transforming the World Edith K. Ackermann

15

Chapter 3. How Infants Learn How to Mean Colwyn Trevarthen

37

Chapter 4. Pretend Play as Learning: Case Studies from the Home Marleen Wynants

71

Part II. Optimal Experience and Emotion Chapter 5. A Feeling of Well-Being in Learning and Teaching Antonella Delle Fave

97

Chapter 6. On the Design of a Musical Flow Machine Francois Packet

111

Chapter 7. The Architecture of Flow Luc Steels

13 5

Part HI. Pedagogy and Technology Chapter 8. Tools for Embodied Teaching: Celestin Freinet and the Learner-Centered Classroom John Sivell Chapter 9. Playing and Learning in Digitally-Augmented Physical Worlds Yvonne Rogers and Sara Price

153

171

Chapter 10. Learning Together Through Collaborative Portal Sites Daniel K. Schneider

193

Chapter 11. Collaborative Mind Tools H. Ulrich Hoppe

221

Chapter 12. Playgrounds for a New Mathematics Celia Hoyles

237

Chapter 13. ToonTalk - Powerful Building Blocks for Computer-Based Learning Environments KenKahn

253

List of Authors

271

Subject Index

273

Parti. Play and Grounding


1

"Education is very difficult but fortunately humans are very flexible. Even if they receive a bad education, they try to come up with the best in themselves. That doesn't mean we should resign to bad education! We have to provide a good atmosphere, a good environment during the time that individuals grow and we should try not to kill their motivation for doing things, for trying things out." Mario Tokoro

A Learning Zone of One's Own M. Tokoro and L. Steels (Eds.) IOS Press, 2004

1.

Grounding, Emotion, and Learning Mario Tokoro and Takahiro Sasaki As knowledge is what should be finally constructed inside each individual, education must be carried out from the point of view of facilitation for "learnercentered learning." In this article, we review some issues of "grounding," which we believe are important for the process of learning. These are discussed particularly in connection with "emotion." Through the insights, we would like to envisage what human learning and the way of its support should be.

It is said that we human beings, or higher primates, possess instinctive motivations such as: "sensuous motivation" or "inquisitive motivation", which are desires for seeking stimuli in the environment, "cognitive motivation" which is a desire for understanding our relationship to the environment, and "motivation to act" which is a desire for being active in the world. Thus, human beings leam instinctively, which is a manifestation of our innate desire. It is a starting point for all kind of learning activities to consider how we can satisfy our desire, and how we can "enhance" this motivation, which is naturally autonomous, and move it toward "the right direction." "Grounding" is one of the important processes through which the desire for learning or for knowing is satisfied. In our previous article [8], we gave a definition of "grounding" as the process in which mere information is transformed into knowledge by having a connection with the "place" of contexts or situations; those being the ground. More precisely, grounding is the embodiment of understanding things/actions in relation to and/or integrated with their environments. In the following pages, we would like to further discuss grounding in which we consider the essence of human learning, and review it particularly from the point of view of its connection to emotions. The discussion will include a few arguments which may be a bit premature, but we present them in the hope that they invite exciting discussions about reconsidering what learning and the way of its support are and what they should be. Grounding in the Physical World Not only human beings, but dogs, cats, and almost every living thing can easily move around with a certain degree of rationality in the real world. Why is it possible? The key idea is "grounding." Since the stage of infancy, or as unborn children, we keep moving our hands and legs, and by acquiring associations with the perception of sights and sounds, we become able to control our body without thinking. Moreover, we physically acquire the basic concept of causality by operating with objects in the real world and repeat experiences of basic physical phenomena such as "an object to be falling", "a ball to be rolling", "water to be flowing", and so on. Knowledge for living in the real world cannot be

1. Grounding, Emotion and Learning

represented symbolically or logically, let alone separated from the real world, but somehow should be embedded inside the interactive loop established between the body and environment. One aspect of "grounding" is the process of embodiment which integrates the sense of "body" and "physical world", and establishes the relationship between the two by repeating physical interactions. M. Montessori discovered what may be exactly related to this process. The fact that many infants and preschoolers concentrating on tenaciously repeating simple actions such as opening and closing doors, piling up and breaking down blocks, and so on [4]. The primary knowledge structure formed during this stage will be a ground for surviving thereafter. Meanwhile, as we grow up, we come to understand things which have neither a direct connection with the physical ground nor real experience. We develop a structure of knowledge that is seemingly ungrounded from the real world and extend it further. For example, we can imagine and understand historical issues or the theory of a huge universe that we cannot directly see; we can formalize the theory of abstract mathematics; we can conduct logical thinking which is purely symbolic. These form the knowledge structure of a more abstract level which could be placed upon the primary ground mentioned above. These higher knowledge structures can also be a part of the ground if they are acquired with consistency. Thus, we regard the process of cognitive development as hierarchical grounding, which may correspond to the theory of J. Piaget [5]. According to his theory, the development of human cognition passes through the following four phases (Figure 1): 1.

Sensory-motor period (postnatal to 2 years old). Movement is directly connected with sensation, and children capture the outside world sensuously through actions, such as "pulling," "clapping," "catching," and so on. 2. Preoperational period (2 to 7 years old). The period when symbolic functions appear clearly and develop. The thinking style of children during this period is marked by "centralization," "egocentrism" and "animism." They hardly see things from another's situation or viewpoint. Many make-believe plays are observed during this period. 3. Concrete-operational period (7 to 11 years old). Various logical operations are made possible during this period, but their objects are limited to concrete targets and realityrelated matters. It is this period when they acquire the concept of conservation (even if a substance changes in its appearance, there is no change in its essential number, length, weight, and quantity.). 4. Formal-operational period (11 to 15 years old). They can perform logical operation and abstract reasoning for not only realistic and concrete events on the site but also imaginary matters and abstract events. They can understand the concepts of "combination" and "proportionality", and can conduct systematic analysis. Each knowledge structure of a certain level is founded on a lower structure, and the most primitive structure of knowledge should be attached to the physical ground. That is, all knowledge must finally, somehow, connect with the sense of the physical world.

/. Grounding, Emotion and Learning

concept

deduction image word index signal

intuitive thinking

symbolic thinking

word 4 o.

ill

I scheme birth

= real

8 mo D 9 mo

preconcep (im age)

1yrSmo D 2yis

sensory-motor period

concept = nonreal (proposition)

concept = real

word f

thinking word

1v rv

_ ll motor

logical thinking

proposition hypothesis abstraction

!,

= real

4yrs

preoperational period

7yrs D 8yrs

11 yis D 12yis

concrete - operational period

age

formal -operational period

Figure 1. The process of cognitive development.

Emotions, Feelings, and Grounding So far, we have discussed especially the importance of physical aspect of "grounding" for knowledge construction. Now we will discuss the issue of "emotions" and "feelings". We consider that "emotions" and "feelings" play important roles in the process of grounding. Both "emotions" and "feelings" are very similar words, and there is much confusion in their common use. Therefore, we should sort out their relationship in accordance with the ideas of A. R. Damasio [1]. When we encounter some danger, we are startled and run away. When we fill our stomachs, we relax in a mood of happiness. These reactions come from the following mechanisms (Figure 2). 1. First, a sensory stimulus enters the limbic system, where the amygdala and frontal cyngulate gyrus play an important role. Here the type of the stimulus is judged to be either comfortable or uncomfortable. 2. These stimuli activate several autonomic nuclei in the hypothalamus, and then the internal organs are induced in a certain type of condition which activates the internal secretion system and peptide system. Thus the chemical reaction accelerates, for example, to expand and contract the intestines, changing the heart rate, and increasing the blood flow volume which causes sweating, and so on. 3. Simultaneously, through the motor system, some expressions in the face, posture or behavior are found that are caused by skeletal muscle movements. As described thus far, in response to stimuli from external situations or from internal images, a rather structured innate reaction of body occurs, which is defined as an "emotion." The next step continues further.

8


4. The "emotional somatic condition", which arises due to the above steps, returns signals via nervous system and chemical messengers via blood vessels to the brain, and creates an image of the "somatic landscape", mainly through the network in the somatosensory region. At this point, a "feeling" is defined as an experience of "emotion." It is experienced by continuously monitoring images of the somatic landscape, i.e., the condition of the "body," represented in the brain.

Emotional Somatic States

Figure 2. How "feelings" arise from "emotions."

Although emotions and feelings have an important relationship, it does not mean that emotion is a feeling in itself. In a famous psychological experiment by S. Shachter and J. E. Singer, a particular somatic condition artificially stimulated by adrenalin produced quite different feelings among test subjects, such as a feeling of happiness or anger, according to their surrounding environment [7]. After experiencing an emotional somatic condition, the relationship between the emotion and external or internal condition which was considered to cause the emotion is then labeled as a feeling. That is to say, feelings involve higher cognitive functions than emotions. At an early stage of development, such as in the case of infants, their emotions and feelings are brought about by direct stimuli. However, by repeating the above-mentioned loop and enforcing the systematic association among feelings and characteristic conditions at those times, it becomes possible to express happiness or anger even in some more complex social contexts. Furthermore, it also becomes possible to be emotive by only imagining certain stories without having direct experiences of them. Cooperative work


9

between the prefrontal region and somatosensory region develops a complex and rich emotion and feeling system. This can be envisaged as the grounding of feeling on emotion. The proof of the relationship between the prefrontal region (especially the ventromedial prefrontal region) and somatosensory region, in connection to the functions of emotions and feelings, has been demonstrated in many cases of patients who have suffered from brain damage. Figure 3 depicts those regions. It is widely known that their feelings become extraordinarily flat, especially in expressing happiness, sadness, and anger. For patients who suffered from damage in the ventromedial prefrontal region, it seems to be difficult to appropriately label the emotional somatic conditions. For patients who suffered damage in the somatosensory region, it seems to be impossible to update the somatic landscape and/or to monitor it.

somatosensory area

ventromedial prefrontal area

Figure 3. Cortical regions which play an important role for emotions and feelings.

Regarding the relationship between emotional and cognitive structures, some patients described above are known to show normal intelligence or rationality, when they are tested within a laboratory. Nevertheless, in actual life, their reasoning and decision making severely lack appropriateness in personal and social matters, and therefore they could not make the proper decision about how to act. A. R. Damasio has argued that whether we can reason suitably in most cases in our daily life, which is made up of a series of decisions at every moment, depends on our possessing of emotions and feelings [1] (Figure 4, left). That is, even if a person possesses normal social knowledge, he/she cannot produce appropriate behaviors from that knowledge when his/her feeling system has not functioned properly. If so, why can't we imagine, vice versa, that how the emotion and feeling system functions is also important for the process of constructing and expanding his/her knowledge structure by acquiring various information and experience through grounding (Figure 4, right)? Although we do not have any scientific and concrete evidence for our conjecture at

10


this moment, it seems feasible to consider emotions and feelings also as important factors for learning.

Figure 4. Emotions and feelings as a bridge between physical world and knowledge structure.

Learner Support in Learner-Centered Learning Based on the discussion so far, it is of primary importance in learning to provide appropriate support according to the developmental stages, not only exposing abundant knowledge, but also nourishing a sound and rich physical and emotional system in the first place. It is important for infants to form a rich ground by playing enthusiastically under circumstances with an abundant variation of physical stimulation because any high-level knowledge is grounded on the primary ground which is acquired in infancy. Basically, children have a great chance of experiencing various kinds of physical stimulation and acquiring a physical ground because they are curious about everything. At the same time, they need stimulations which nourish their rich emotion and feeling system. Of course, the stimulation involves tactile contact with their parents. Learning is ultimately mediated by synaptic change in the neocortex. However, the neocortex cannot function by itself. It requires the functionality of the subcortical regions, most notably the limbic system, which mediates information processing related to emotions and feelings. In this sense, learning should be grounded on the emotion-related subcortical systems in the brain, as well as on the physical world. In other words, learning should be emotionally as well as physically grounded. This is particularly true in the case of infants and small children.


11

Figure 5. Environmental support for learning.

It is important to support forming an appropriate connection between emotions and feelings, which then makes communication with others and makes adaptation to society as well as cultural learning possible. This corresponds to the process of mind construction or personality building, so to speak, which will form one's way of thinking, way of living, motivation and self-confidence. For a sound construction of mind, it is indispensable for children to be encouraged, praised and sometimes scolded by parents (or other people) with sincerity. If the mind is constructed well, the learning motivation will naturally flow out. Upon this, if we can provide opportunities for children to come in touch with rich sources of knowledge, they could steadily expand their worlds from the viewpoint of each child's interest (Figure 5). Learning in a group is also very important and indispensable. Children learn a lot with each other by mimicking each other and/or stimulating each other. Moreover, children are always observing grownups. It is also important that we grownups show them our lifestyles as we enjoy ourselves enthusiastically concentrating on something of interest. After all, "conveying" emotion and feeling, rather than "telling" knowledge, will also open the entrance for children to expand their worlds. It is also important to bring out their intrinsic motivation. Many observations indicate that motivation brought about extrinsically, by compelling force or external rewards cannot last and that deteriorates children's activities [2, 3]. The manner of support should be natural and in learner-centered way. Nevertheless, except for a few examples such as Freinet or Montessori's school, education today is too institutional or systematic, and lacks the point of view of the individual. In addition, the manner of learning tends to be one of cramming knowledge without grounding it. If such is true, it is hard to say that the education of today sufficiently satisfies the learning desire which we naturally have. This results in a decline of the learning motivation. Following the nature of human beings, we believe in the necessity of establishing a methodology for learner-centered learning and of preparing a comprehensive environment; curricula, teaching materials and tools as they ought to be. For its achievement, we could exploit new technologies such as computers and the Internet. They make it possible for us to have a more complex and larger amount of experience in the virtual environment beyond economic or spatial limitation, and thus, they

12

I. Grounding, Emotion and Learning

will support the learning process. These technologies would be a great use for extending the knowledge and conceptions which have already been grounded. On the other hand, however, they are of no use or even harmful for knowledge and concepts that have not been sufficiently grounded. How could we truly understand the meaning of "broken", if we have never been shocked by dropping a toy and breaking it? As is often pointed out nowadays, people who thoroughly enjoy looking at violent scenes on TV or playing virtual fighting games, while not having had any experience of being hurt by someone or hurting someone, may have difficulty in forming sound sociability. We must pay close attention to the direction of using learning support and tools which appropriately meet the developmental stages of human beings. Conclusion: Hope for the Future Having touched upon how learning and the way of its support should be, we must admit that the discussion of such a nature ought to be based on what might be termed the grand vision for knowledge acquisition in general. That is, how should we perceive the process of human learning in its entirety? Or even, what should such learning mean to an individual as well as to human society as a whole in a new era? A vast amount of studies and experiments must be carried out before we are confident of an epoch-making methodology. But in the meantime many people will remain uncertain of their future. It is our sincere wish that a step forward be taken by those related in any sense to education so that a new method of learning can be proposed and shared worldwide before long. We have a hope that if such a new learning method is designed with a comprehensive understanding of human development and behavior, it should bring about learner-centered learning as we have envisaged. It would make everyone feel that he/she can find his/her way of self-enhancement, thus getting relieved from despair. The individual with hope for his/her future would live positively, which would generate positive waves to his/her neighbors and might eventually contribute to human society around the world. References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

A.R.Damasio, 1994, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain., William Morris. E.L.Deci & R.Flaste, 1996, Why We Do and What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, Penguin Books. M.R.Lepper et al., 1973, Undermining Children's Interest with Extrinsic Rewards: A Test of the "Over Justification" Hypothesis, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 129-137. P. P. Lillard, 1996, Montessori Today: A Comprehensive Approach to Education from Birth to Adulthood, Shocken Books. J. Piaget, 1936, La naissance de 1'enfant., Delachaux et Niestle. J. J. Ratey, 2001, A User's Guide to the Brain, Pantheon Books. S. Schacter & J. E. Singer, 1962, Cognitive, social and physiological determinants of emotional state, Psychological Review, 69, 379-399. M. Tokoro, 2003, The Knowledge Revolution. In: M. Tokoro and L. Steels (eds.) The Future of Learning. Issues and Prospects. IOS Press, 15-27


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MARIO TOKORO is a Corporate Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Information Technology at Sony Corporation, and the President and the founding Director of Research of the Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo (1988) and Paris (1996). Until 1997 he was a professor of computer science at Keio University, His research interests range over a wide spectrum of Computer Science, from Computational Models, Programming Languages, Operating Systems to Artificial Intelligence. He was particularly interested in Object-Oriented Computing, Concurrent Programming, Distributed and Open Systems, and Cooperative Problem Solving. He developed object-oriented concurrent programming languages: Orient84/K is designed for describing problems which are solved by multiple knowledge agents and ConcurrentSmalltalk is based on Smalltalk-80 and being widely used for various applications and for teaching concurrent programming; Paradise is based on Lisp and has been used for describing behavioral simulation arid cooperative problem solving. His largest interest is the development of computational models/paradigms for open distributed environments. He is a leader in the field of Computer and Internet Technologies and known as a loving educator. Some books: "Concepts and Characteristics of Knowledge-based Systems," (Tokoro, M., Anzai, Y., and Yonezawa, A., eds, 1989, North Holland), "Object Oriented Concurrent Programming," (Yonezawa, A., and Tokoro, M., eds, 1987, MIT Press) TAKAHIRO SASAKI received a Ph.D. in computer science from Keio University, Japan. He is an associate researcher of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. His fundamental interests have been how the spread of personal computer, Internet, and its surrounding technologies promotes empowering individual and change the lifestyle of people. Recently he is seeking a new concept of education, as well as a framework of methodology for realising it. His research interests are Multiple Agents System (Distributed Artificial Intelligence) The Search Algorithms for Moving Target. Relationship between Learning and Evolution and Complex Adaptive Systems.

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I. Grounding, Emotion and Learning

"We did some experiments in the use of a virtual environment with 20 kids from 6 to 12 years old. They really enjoyed the virtual environment we had built although these were kids that were not at all familiar with using computers. They quickly found out who was good at what and they spontaneously exchanged their skills. What struck us even more, and I don't know whether this is relevant or not, is that children do like to communicate very much. So after a while they tended to spend most of the time chatting to each other and would rather not go to any of the virtual pavilions to find out what was going on there..." Takahiro Sasaki

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"Call it powers of pretence, seductions of sim, virtues of virtual... In all cases we have to rethink the relationship between virtual and real. Irony has it that a so called "escape" in a virtual environment can be a rich way to gain deeper understanding about the world in which we live. The difference between micro-worlds and simulation is that a micro-world is a simulation that doesn't mimic the real world but creates a new world, a displaced reality in which the dynamic properties AT play are different. What counts in the idea of simulation is an "instead of and not an "equal as"... So if you meddle around with the properties of the displaced reality, you might understand some aspects oj reality "better". We should also rethink the role of the mediator, the leader, the facilitator and allow this balance between self-determination, self-directed learning, and the ability to actually work together with others." Edith Ackermann

A Learning Zone of One's Own M. Tokoro andL. Steels (Eds.) IOS Press, 2004

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2.

Constructing Knowledge and Transforming the World Edith K. Ackermann

The first part of this chapter examines the differences between Piaget's constructivism, what Papert refers to as "constructionism," and the socio-constructivist approach as portrayed by Vygotsky. All these views are developmental, and they share the notion that people actively contribute to the construction of their knowledge, by transforming their world. Yet the views also differ, each highlighting on some aspects of how children learn, while leaving other questions unanswered. Attempts at integrating these views [learning through experience, through media, and through others] helps shed light on how people of different ages and venues come to make sense of their experience, and find their place in the world. Tools, media, and cultural artefacts are the tangible forms, through which we make sense of our world and negotiate meaning with others. In the second part of this chapter, I speak to the articulations between make-believe activities and creative symboluse as a guiding connection to rethink the aims of representations. Simulacrum and simulation, I show, play a key role besides language in helping children ground and mediate their experience in new ways. From computer-based micro-worlds for constructive learning (Papert's turtle geometry, TERC's body-syntonic graphing), to social virtual environments (MUDing). In each case, I discuss the roles of symbolic recreation, and imaginary projection (people's abilities to build and dwell in their creations) as two powerful heuristic to keep in touch with situations, to bring what's unknown to mind's reach, and to explore risky ideas on safe grounds. I draw implications for education.

1. Constructivism, one or many? The beliefs we held about children's learning are deeply grounded in our own convictions on what it means to be knowledgeable, intelligent, experienced, and what it takes to become so. Whether implicit or explicitly stated, these convictions drive our attitudes and practices as educators, parents, teachers, and researchers.

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2. Constructing Knowledge and Transforming the World

If we think, for example, that intelligence is innate and that talents are given, we are likely to gear our interventions at helping others unfold their existing potentials. We may do so at the cost of not giving a chance to those we think of as being "ungifted". If we believe, on the other hand, that knowledge or intelligence are a reflection of a child's surrounds, then we are more likely to "pass on" our own solutions and values. And we sometimes do so at the cost of ignoring a person's own ways of doing, of thinking, and of relating to the world. And if we believe, as constructivists do, that knowledge is actively constructed through relating to others and acting in the world, then we are tempted to step aside and just set the stage for kids to engage in hands-on explorations that fuel the constructive process. We may do so at the cost of letting them "rediscover the wheel" or drift away endlessly when shortcuts may be welcome. Obviously, there is nothing wrong in showing youngsters the right ways of doing things, in helping them unravel their natural gifts, or in creating opportunities to let them discover things by themselves. Yet, the believe in either extreme "fixity" or extreme malleability of mind can become a formula for disaster especially when worldviews are at odds, when value systems clash, or when some "unpopular views" stubbornly persist within a community. My own life-long interest in constructivism and socio-constructivism grows out of a personal belief that wherever diversity reigns, the mere transmission of traditional values just won't do. That is when people(s), young and old, need to become their own path-finders, speak their own voices, bring their own personal and collective experience to the world, and negotiate their differences with others. Constructivism, in a nutshell, states that children are the builders of their own cognitive tools, as well as of their external realities. In other words, knowledge and the world are both construed and interpreted through action, and mediated through symbol use. Each gains existence and form through the construction of the other. Knowledge, to a constructivist, is not a commodity to be transmitted—delivered at one end, encoded, retained, and re-applied at the other— but an experience to be actively built, both individually and collectively. Similarly, the world is not just sitting out there waiting to be to be uncovered, but gets progressively shaped and formed through people's interactions / transactions. Psychologists and pedagogues like Piaget, Bruner, Papert, Vygotsky, Bakt'in, but also Dewey, Freynet, Freire, Malaguzzi and many others', remind us that indeed, learning is less about acquiring information or transmitting existing ideas or values, than it is about collectively designing a world in which it is worth living. What's more, this process of negotiating views with others requires the co-construction of [taken as] "shared" forms (Reddy, 1993). In what follows, I present some aspects of Piaget's constructivist theory, and I contrast them with Papert's constructionism, and Vygotsky's socio-constructivism. I flesh out what each captures and leaves out, thus setting the stage for my own attempt at integrating the two.

1 An extended verion of this paper appears in French in Ackermann, E. (2001) Constructivism et Constructionism: Quelle difference?. Constructivismes: usages et perspectives en education. (Volumes 1 et 2). Actes du Colloque "Constructivismes". Geneva: Service de la recherche en edication / Cahier 8 / September 01. pp. 85-94.


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Eloge a 1'abstraction - Piaget, the rationalist Piaget is best known for his stages, which offer a window into what children are interested in and capable o/at different levels of their cognitive development. While this is an important contribution, there is more to Piaget than his stage. Piaget has forcefully shown that children have their own views of the world, which differ from those of adults, and that these views are extremely coherent and robust. They are stubborn, if you wish, i.e., not very easy to shake. Children, to Piaget are not incomplete adults. Instead, their ways of thinking have a reason to be, mostly well suited to their current needs and possibilities. This is not to say that children's views of the world, as well as of themselves, do not change through contact with others and with things. The views are continually evolving. Yet, to Piaget, knowledge grows according to complex laws of self-organisation, which operate in the background according to some "logic" of their own. Thus, for a child—or an adult—to abandon a current theory, or believe system, requires more than just being exposed to a better theory. Conceptual changes in children, like theory changes in scientists (Kuhn, 1970), emerge as a result of people's action-in-the-world (their living experience) in conjunction with many "hidden" regulatory processes at play behind the scene2. The function of these processes is to maintain the livelihood of the cognitive system as a whole, and to compensate for surface perturbations (regulatory mechanisms). Piaget's developmental theory emphasises how children become progressively detached from the world of concrete objects and local contingencies, and gradually able to mentally manipulate symbolic objects, within a realm of hypothetical worlds. The focus is on the construction of cognitive invariance as a means to interpret and organise the world. Piaget's empirical studies shed light on the conditions under which learners are likely to maintain or change their views of a phenomenon when interacting with it during a significant period of time. The child that Piaget portrays in his theory is an idealised child. Often referred to as an epistemic subject, s/he is a representative of the most common way of thinking at a given level of development. And this "common way of thinking" is similar to that of a scientist driven by the urge to impose stability and order over an ever-changing natural world. Piaget's child, one may say, is like a young Robinson in the conquest of an unexplored territory. Robinson's conquest is solitary yet exciting since the explorer himself is very active. Piaget's child is an inner-driven, very curious, and independent character. The ultimate goal of his adventure may not be the navigation per se, but the joy of mastering the territory under exploration. In essence, Piaget the rationalist portrays children's intellectual development as a progressive move away from intuitive towards rational thinking, from everyday cognition towards scientific reasoning. In his view, the path leading to higher forms of reasoning, or 'formal operations', proceeds from local to general, from context-bound to context-free, from externally-supported to internally-driven. Accordingly, cognitive achievements are gauged according to three major acts of distancing. 1. The ability to emerge from here-andnow contingencies (characteristic of practical intelligence); 2. the ability to extract knowledge from its substrate (i.e. from contexts of use and personal goals); and 3. the ability to act mentally on virtual worlds, carrying out operations in the head instead of carrying them out externally. For more on this cf. Piaget (1975) "1'Equilibration des structures cognitives. PUF, Paris.

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The implications of Piaget's theory for education are profound, even if Piaget himself didn't think of his work as being "educational". Let me mention three aspects that have captured my attention as a researcher and educator, or the main lessons I learned from working with Piaget: 1. Teaching can't ever be direct. Children don't just take-in what is being said. Instead, they interpret, or translate, what they hear in the light of their knowledge and experience. Willingly or unwillingly, that is, they transform the input to fit their level of understanding. This occurs whether we like it or not. A more radical formulation of lesson 1 would be to say that learning does not occur as a result of teaching or, in Piaget's own provocative terms 'whatever you tell a child, you won't allow her to discover it by herself. 2. Knowledge is not information to be delivered at one end, and encoded, stored, retrieved, and re-applied at the other end. Instead, knowledge is experience to be constructed through interactions with the world (people and things). To equate knowledge with information—and knowledge construction with information processing—confuses matters when it comes to human learning or teaching. 3. A theory of learning that ignores resistances to learning misses the point. One of Piaget's main teachings is that children have extremely good reasons not to abandon their current worldviews in the light of external surface perturbations. And this is so no matter how relevant the suggestions. A good teacher, in this sense, is one that helps learners explore, express, exchange—and ultimately expand— their views, from within [ not a sage on the stage, but a guide on the side] To conclude, while capturing what is common in children's ways of thinking at different developmental stages—and describing how this commonality evolves over time— Piaget's theory tends to overlook the role of context, uses, and media, as well as the importance of individual preferences, or styles, in human learning and development. That's where Papert's "constructionism" comes in handy! Media Matters - Papert, the intuitionist If Piaget did not see himself as an educator, Papert, on the other hand, used what Piaget learned about children as a basis for rethinking education in the digital age. He coined his theory "constructionism". In his words, "Constructionism—the N word as opposed to the V word— shares contructivism 's view of learning as "building knowledge structures "through progressive internalisation of actions... It then adds the idea that this happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it's a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe (Papert, 1991, p.l) To Papert, projecting out—or externalising— inner feelings and ideas is as important as internalising our actions. In expressing ideas, or giving them form, we make them tangible and shareable which, in turn, shape and sharpen these ideas. Externalising ideas is also a key to communicating with others. We can only negotiate meaning through tangible forms: our own expressions or existing cultural mediations (language, tools, and toys). The cycle of self-directed learning is, to Papert, an iterative process by which learners invent for themselves the very tools and mediations that best support the exploration of intriguing


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ideas. Because of his focus on learning through making (on could say learning as design) Papert's "constructionism" sheds light on how people's ideas get formed and transformed when expressed through different media, when actualised in particular contexts, when worked out by individual minds. The emphasis has shifted from general laws of development to individuals' conversation with their own representations, artefacts, or objects-to-think with. Stressing the importance of external supports as a means to augment the unaided mind is not new. As will become clear in the next section, Vygotsky has spent his entire life studying the role of cultural artefacts—tools, language—as a resource for drawing the best out of every child's potential. So have many other researchers in the socio-constructivist tradition. The difference, as I see it, lays in: • The role such external aids are meant to play at higher levels of a person's development. • The types of external aid, or media studied (Papert focuses on digital media and computer-based technologies) and more important, • The type of initiative the learner takes in the design of her own "objects to think with". Papert's constructionism is more situated & pragmatic than Piaget's. This is so even if Papert himself doesn't make explicit use of the terms when describing his enterprise. One of its main contributions is to remind us that intelligence should be defined and studied insitu; alas, that being intelligent means being grounded, connected, and sensitive to variations in the environment. To Papert, abstract or formal thinking may well be a powerful tool. Yet, it is not necessarily the most appropriate in all situations. Unlike Piaget, Papert thinks that "diving into" situations rather than looking at them from a distance, that connectedness rather than distanciation are powerful means of gaining understanding. Becoming one with the phenomenon under study, in other words, is a key to learning. The child that Papert studies is more relational than Piaget's Robinson. S/he likes to get in tune with others and situations. S/he resembles what Sherry Turkic described as a "soft" master (Turkic, 1984). Like Piaget's Robinson, s/he enjoys discovering novelties, yet more than him, she wants to be in the flow of things, and in tune with people. S/he likes to feel at one with them.3 Like Robinson, she likes to try out things rather than being told. Unlike him, S/he is more of a conversationalist than a builder. She may prefer sharing what s/he understands while in context, rather than telling what s/he experienced in retrospect. To conclude, while Piaget best described the genesis of internal mental stability in terms of successive levels of equilibrium, Papert is interested in the dynamics of change. He stresses the fragility of thought during transitional periods. His great contribution, as an educator, is to focus our attention on how people think once their convictions break down, once alternative views sink in, once adjusting, stretching, and expanding their current view of the world becomes necessary. Papert always points toward this fragility, contextuality, and flexibility of knowledge under construction. A strong believer in the ideas that momentary losses are a key to learning, and that people are good at using what they don't know as a lever to grow, Papert has spent much of his life creating technology-enhanced environments, or micro-worlds, in which learners can mess around with otherwise risky ideas, on safe ground.

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It takes a whole village to raise a child - Vygotsky: the socio-culturalist At the heart of Vygotsky's socio-constructivism lays a simple idea. From the day they are born, people learn, thrive, and grow in relation with others. We "are" because of others. The theory in stresses the importance of caring and knowledgeable adults in helping a child thrive. Vygotsky also emphasises the role of language—and other cultural artefacts—in mediating human transactions. In spite of his focus on culture as a teaching machine, Vygotsky saw a child's intellectual development as constructive process. This is why his socio-constructivist approach cannot be put at odds with the theories of Piaget, Papert, Bruner, and others. To Vygotsky, and socio-cultural theorists, the "social" has a primacy over the "individual" in a very special sense: Society is the bearer of a cultural heritage without which the development of an individual is simply impossible. Parents and other members of a community create a developmental niche for the newcomer, which embodies the adults' cultural past and impacts the new generations' future. It is at once a habitat and a cultural medium, or mediation. It is at once a "terrain," or stage, for human experience and a lens, or interpretative frame, at the disposal of the terrain's inhabitants. Vygotsky's theory of cultural appropriation is not so different from Piaget's notion that children learn through acting in the world—i.e., through relating to people and things. This being said, Vygotsky puts greater emphasis on how the presence of adults with greater expertise can "speed up" and enhance a child's self-directed learning, and how shared cultural artefacts are used to help mediate this process. More than Piaget and Papert, Vygotsky stresses the role of adults as teachers, and cultural artefacts as teaching tools. One of the key concepts in Vygotsky's theory is the notion of zone of proximal development. Much quoted and often misunderstood, the "ZPD" has become a buzzword among many educators. The ZPD defines a potential area of expansion that each individual has at their disposal to overcome their limits, provided the social environment in which the learning takes place "pitches in". In other words, the zone of proximal development tells us "how far" we can push the envelope of what we know, when helped by others. It is, again, through social interaction, that learners can mobilise, and best use, the psychological tools available to them. To Vygotsky, a person's cognitive development proceeds outside-in, i.e., from other to self: "Every function in the child's development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later on the individual level; first, between people, and then inside the child" (Vygotsky, 1978:57 in Lock, 1989). Inter-personal relations are the precursors, and necessary conditions, for the emergence of individual/intra-mental processes: Youngsters first share their experience with others, before they become able to master and understand them, for themselves. Their development proceeds from socio-centric to egocentric.

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Vygotsky introduced the concept of psychological tool to capture the idea that the cultural artefacts that surround us, once appropriated, become part of our own "psychology". Psychological tools include: various systems for counting; mnemonic techniques; algebraic symbol systems; works of art; writing; schemes, diagrams, maps, and technical drawings; all sorts of conventional signs, and so on. (Vygotsky, 1982:137, cited in Cole & Wertsch, 1996). Note that of the psychological tools that mediate our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, language was the most important to Vygotsky.


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Vygotsky's child, as I see it, is more of a trusting disciple than an autonomous agent, in Harris's sense is (Harris, 2002). While curious, active, inner-driven, and autonomous, s/he also trusts that others, more experienced, can tell her things that she cannot directly experience. In other words, s/he knows that she can learn vicariously by listening to what others say about what interests her. The autonomous agent, in contrast, is not comfortable if he cannot check out for himself what others propose, at the cost - sometimes - of reinventing the wheel! Integrating the views: People as World-Makers, Dwellers in the World, and Social Creatures. In The Evolving Self, Kegan portrays human development as a lifelong attempt to resolve the unsolvable tension between getting embedded and emerging from embeddedness (Kegan, 1982). In a similar way, 1 think of cognitive or affective growth as a lifelong attempt on the part of people, young or old, to find a viable balance between fusion and separation, openness and closure, or in Piaget's own words, between assimilation and accommodation. Imposing one's order upon things [building cognitive invariants as selforienting devices] goes hand in hand with being sensitive to variations, and letting go of one's obsolete believes—should this not jeopardise previously attained balance, or equilibrium. Along with Piaget, I view separateness through progressive decentralisation as a necessary step toward relating even more intimately and sensitively to people and things. In any situation, no matter how engaging, there are moments when we need to remove ourselves and reconsider what we did, from afar. This view of separateness does not preclude the value of being embedded in one's experience. I also share Papert's view that diving into the unknown, at the cost of experiencing a momentary sense of loss, is a crucial part of learning. Only when a learner actually travels in a world, by adopting different perspectives, or putting on different "glasses," can a dialogue begin between local and initially incompatible experiences. What Vygotsky adds to this equation is the notion that "it takes a whole village to raise a child". In other words, no human can "be" or "grow' without the help of many people, peers or adults. Belonging to a caring community, and knowing how to relate to others are needed to build a sense of self. And since people relate to one another through cultural mediations—tools, language and artefacts —these, in turn, get woven into—and become an integral part of— the social transactions. To conclude, both "dwelling in" and "stepping back" are equally important in getting the cognitive dance going. Both individuation and socialisation are needed for us to grow as people. How could anyone learn from experience as long as they are totally immersed in it. There comes a time when viewing things from afar, or adopting a 'god's eyes view', is a must (Ackermann, 1996). From then on, a new cycle can begin, and the stage is set for new and deeper grounding and understanding. How could anyone get to know who they are—and what's they are worth—of they are not "held" by others. In other words, to get the cycle of self-directed learning going, learners need to exist as persons. And to exist as a person —or know who they are—to need to belong: Any child stops to speak if her words are not heard.

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2. Powers of Pretense, Seductions of SIM, Virtues of Virtual 4 "Imagine a child playing with other children, and using a stick as a horse: the child jumps around his friends, goes places, feeds the horse, claims that the horse is lazy. In creating this make-believe play, the child is making present the horse, a horse that otherwise would be absent in this child's life. Furthermore, she is not only making the horse present but doing things with it. We say that the horse is ready at hand to convey this idea that the horse is made to participate in the child's playful activities. This scene exemplifies what we call symbolising: a creation of a lived-in space in which the absent is made present and ready at hand". (Nemirovsky and Monk, 1998) The formulation by Nemirovsky and Monk frames the act of symbolising as a means to sustain a dialog between what is [believed to be] and what could be, between fact and fancy. It highlights that to represent is not merely to describe what exists but to make tangible what doesn't. The authors also remind us that beyond replicating, young pretenders often modify outcomes, and subvert the meaning of things. As in improvisational theatre, they recast unfolding events, opening up new paths as they play along. Meaning and coherence both emerge as a result of this creative process. In what follows, I challenge the prevailing theory of representation, often referred to as correspondence theory (Lakoff, 1993), suggesting that there is an a-priori object out there (a territory), that the act of representation duplicates one way or another (map). I show that representations are better thought of as performing acts, or fictionalising techniques in Iser's sense5 (Iser, 1987) The enactive/generative aspects of representations are particularly relevant in design activities where an artefact to be built doesn't exist before the process comes to an end. In design, it becomes clear that the representations needed to generate new forms couldn't possibly be conceived as descriptions of what's out there—since not much is out there yet! Designers are left with envisioning and engaging forms in the becoming. They build sketches, prototypes, and simulations as intermediary objects to generate these forms. What is true of design is also true of other constructive processes. Most striking in this respect is children's natural tendency to invent for themselves the supports and mediations they need to reach their goals, whenever the tasks they face lay beyond their mastery. Children's extraordinary talent as learners comes in great part from their ability to set the stage that allows them to safely project themselves in the unknown. Doing as if and playing what //are the techniques they use to achieve this balance. Nemirovsky and Monk's notion of "ready at hand" (above citation) further suggests that the props used in pretense play need not be [treated by the child as] arbitrary tokens, nor do they have to be at the image of what it stands for. In other words, the stick that the child "rides and feeds" in her play is a double (ersatz) in that it acts on the imaginary horse's behalf. Yet, this doesn't imply, 4

An extended German version of this paper appears in Ackermann, E. (1999) "Sich einrichten in Fantasie Raumen: Untersuchungen zum Gebrauch von Symbolen" (E. Renk Ed.) Lernen und Leben am der Welt im Kopf: Konstruktivismus in der Schule. Neuwied, Kiftel: Luchterhand, pp. 79-99. ' To Iser , the English term 'representation' causes problems because it suggests a given which the act of representation duplicates. This conceals the performative qualities through which the act of representation brings about something that hitherto doesn't exist as a given object (Iser, 1987,p.217). Iser proposes to replace the English term with the German Darsellung, which does not drag this mimetic connotation.


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again, that the double mimics its behaviour or mirrors its appearance. Symbols often take on a life of their own, and it is their ability to do so—both be and not to be what they stand for—in the pretender's mind, that enables their creative use. We know from research on early pretense play that children's abilities to treat a stick as j/it were a horse requires a de-coupling between signifier and signified (Piaget, 1962, Perner, 1993). In other words, a child who uses a stick "as if it were a horse also knows that it is not "really" a horse. What is less obvious is the notion that de-coupling has to go hand in hand with its opposite, fusion, for the symbolic transform to be complete. Along with Nemirovsky and Monk, I suggest that a child's ability to engage an "ersatz" as if it were the thing itself, i.e., to fuse signifier and signified, is a necessary condition for creative symbol-use. Fusion is what ultimately gives symbols their dramatising power. Without empathic projection—engaging the double as is—no "lived" experience would be possible. Working out intriguing materials, fictional or real, requires both the creation of make-believe ground and an occasion for "true" identification. Engaging in symbolic activities, in this sense, is not just a matter of giving form to ideas, making them tangible and shareable. It is also a matter of bringing ideas and forms to life. Treating doubles as if they were [as vivid and vibrant as] the ideas they stand for, is what brings the materials engaged in pretense closer to mind's reach. Like a mythical character, the make-believe horse-companion that the child plays with in her pretense is more like a unicorn than a real horse: a fictional creature that embodies hidden fears, desires, and purposes. And its appearance, the stick, once made to participate in the child's activities, helps reshape her original ideas about unicorns. It is, again, the ambiguous nature of the stick in the child's eyes, at once double (de-coupling), object in its own right (separation), and extension of self (fusion) that lends it its evocative and dramatising powers. To conclude, making the absent present, giving form to ideas, and bringing form and ideas to life are 3 important functions of the act of symbolising. Not just a kid's thing! Pretense or symbolic play is not just a kid's matter. Nor is it a privilege reserved to artists and poets alone. People of all ages, stages, and styles engage in symbolic recreations. And they do so in ever more sophisticated ways as they grow older (Ackermann, 1999). As Sayeki points out in his paper "Anthropomorphic epistemology," adults, from lay people to scientists, use their imagination to project themselves into situations (Sayeki, 1989). They too dwell into their mental constructs to reach deeper understanding, and they do so, according to Sayeki, by literally dispatching little pieces of self, that he calls "kobitos" to inhabit their object of interest (little people in Japanese). Once "in there" via their imaginary doubles, they can act out and feel for what their kobitos experience, while remaining physically removed (Sayeki, 1989). Obviously, diving into situations and putting oneself in other people's shoes, or minds, won't suffice to learn, or grow. Being well-grounded, also requires its share of distancing and calls for achieving a balance between getting embedded and emerging from embeddedness (Kegan, 1982). In other words, every so often, people need to re-emerge by extracting themselves from the deep waters. They need to step back and look at things from afar. In their imagination, they generally achieve this by changing their stance in the world, by putting themselves in other people's shoes, or by adopting a god's eye's view, an

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altogether removed and all-encompassing view, that miniaturises the worlds they just inhabited (Ackermann, 1996). To conclude, people are both world makers and beings-inthe-world: they at once create their habitats, inhabit their creations, and become "inhabited" by them. In the world of their imagination, fusion (becoming one) and separation (removing oneself) coexist. Both contribute to their personal and cognitive growths. Creative Playpens for Constructive Learning The uses of projective imagination are at play in many forms of symbolic activities, from drawing to scientific modelling, from remote chats in social virtual environments (VE), to reading and writing. So are our attempts at anthropomorphizing and role-play. In the following sections, I focus on two specific aspects of pretense and symbolic play: people's abilities to dwell into their creations, and to fuse signifiers and signified as ways of becoming mindfully engaged. Their role in the constructive process is discussed in different contexts: from architects' drawing, to children's exploration of mathematical ideas, to digital kids' love affair with social virtual environments. The chosen contexts, or learning stories, are of two kinds: 1. Handling tools and driving machines 2. Exploring conversational writing in digital media. In both cases, the interactivity afforded by responsive artefacts (computers) is used to tap into people's tacit body smarts and situational wisdom. I show, through examples, that the apparently most primitive side of symbol use, empathic projection, is not just a key for natural learning but can be promoted by design to help children learn better. To conclude, I draw some implications for developmental psychology and education.

Dwelling into the Drawing A few years ago, Bonne Smith, a former student at the School of Architecture, MIT, designed a simple and compelling experiment. She asked some of her fellow students to sketch a floor plan of the house in which they lived when they were 5 years old. She encouraged her subjects to think aloud as they drew, and she videotaped the process (Smith, 1991). What this experiment revealed, is that the act of drawing was in itself a worldmaking technique. Moreover, the draftsman's engagement in the represented "site under construction" was quite anthropomorphic, surely more than one may expect from sophisticated architectural students. Alternatively becoming dwellers and creators, or giants and dwarfs, Bonne's subjects mentally moved in and out of the situation, seamlessly. They projected themselves into the pen-ball "as if it were a prosthetic device, and driving the pen around made it possible for them to travel along in their mind. The pen became a vehicle of mental teleportation. Dwelling in the drawing is what allowed Bonne's subjects to evoke, revisit, and reconstruct their lost memories. The most surprising aspect of this experiment is that the subjects' use of projected movement to bring back the place of their childhood increased with their level of sophistication as architects. It was much less prevailing among young children and nonarchitects. This came as no surprise to Bonnie, an architect herself, who reminded me that designers often imagine themselves and set themselves in motion in a space to be. They do so proactively to envision what that space may be. In her eyes, the experiment confirmed


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her intuition that people's ability to dwell into their drawing, or use drawing as a trailmaking technique (Nemirovsky and Monk, 1998) is one of the expertise that architects develop in the course of their studies and work. Here are 3 vignettes by Roy, Emily, and Andrew, architectural students whose protocols were rich with imagined movement (Smith, 1991): Roy: (thinks aloud) "/ am starting from the exterior and I'll be moving in. Here's the car (draws a car), the sidewalk moves perpendicularly from the driveway, past three shrubs, and up to the porch and then the front door. Then you move into the front hall like that..." (traces gesture of moving in and completes by drawing front door and entrance). What's remarkable in this account is that Roy is not the only one to move about. The sidewalk "moves" too, perpendicular to the driveway and past shrubs! Andrew reconstructed the lived space around the concept of "boxiness" —rectangular container —the shape and content of which he adjusted and refined as he moved through the virtual house. "This house was a breadbox. Just a good old American colonial [draws rectangley, brick box. Do you enter in the middle? OK [draws entry]. So you enter and there is this staircase [draws stairs middle of rectangle/ Yeah, that's pretty much the main focus when you come in [Andrew then proceeds to locate different spaces around the stairs and adjusts sizes by invoking action in and around them]. As he mentally moves into the salon "Wait? Can you walk behind the couch? the door? [He reaches out to grab an imaginary doorknob to determine the door swing]. Emily's use of imaginary projection was different yet. She spoke about the visual fields, or "perspectives," that unfold before her eyes as she walked through space in her mind: the view down the main street, the view of the facade. Holding these perspectives in mind helped her re-institute otherwise forgotten adjacencies and directions. Emily: "...whenyou go up the stairs, on each side you have... two regular doors that you can open, that you can push into...first thing you see is the reception desk. You 'II have a lot of, I think there's an old sofa here... " Note that all the subjects used the present tense in their accounts, which reinforces the idea that, in their minds, they were "really in there", as they were when they were kids.

Drawing Shapes by Driving Turtles Our bodies hold quite a bit of knowledge about space in their movement. Yet, much of this knowledge remains tacit, hidden in the beholder's habitual activity and experience. It needs to be brought to the mind's reach. One of Papert's greatest insights in designing Logobased Turtle Geometry, a software environment for building geometric shapes, was to tap children's knowledge about their own movement in space, and to use this knowledge as a lever to help them explore spatial relations and transformations. In turtle geometry, children "instruct" a computational creature to draw shapes by moving in prescribed directions by prescribed amounts. The turtle can be represented by cursor on the screen or, better, embodied as a mechanical toy-robot. The children communicate with the turtle using a language that it can "understand" (Logo programming language). Using

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Logo, a turtle can be made to move by typing commands at the keyboard. FORWARD 100 makes the turtle move in a straight line a distance of 100 turtle steps of about a millimetre each. Typing RIGHT 90 causes the turtle to pivot in place through 90 degrees. Typing PENDOWN causes the turtle to lower a pen so as to leave a visible trace of its path while PENUP instructs it to raise the pen. The commands and procedures available to drive the turtle are fairly intuitive to the child. They are also carefully chosen to enable the generation of many mathematically relevant and intriguing figures in space. The guiding principles behind Turtle Geometry are simple and much in tune with our views: Papert's turtles become extensions of self that the child controls using words. Giving directions — remote driving —encourages the child to reflect upon her own know-how and to express it precisely enough so that the machine can carry it out. "In teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think"(Papert, 1980, p. 19) . More important, Papert's turtles are designed to be "egocentric". Directions are given in reference to a turtle's position and heading and not as a function of some external reference system (xy co-ordinates). This requires that users put themselves in the turtle's shoes, literally, to figure out where it wants to go next. The syntax of Logo further provides a rich toolkit to assemble basic available operations (like rotations and translations) in interesting and surprising ways. Using computational tools and object responsiveness offers instant feedback, which helps sustain the interaction. In Mindstorms, Papert (1980) explicitly states the role of what we call mental teleportation: "A turtle has a position and a heading. In this, it is like a person or an animal or a boat (p.55). Children can identify with the turtle and are thus able to bring their knowledge about their bodies and how they move into the work of formal geometry (...) Drawing a circle in turtle geometry is body syntonic in that the circle is firmly related to children's sense of and knowledge about their own bodies. It is ego syntonic in that it is coherent with children's sense of themselves (one could say children's point of view or stance in the worlds" (p.63). Swinging a Graph Other learning environments have been designed to facilitate the articulation between world-making and world-dwelling. A case in point is the use of a motion detector by researchers at TERC (Technical Education Research Center), Cambridge MA, to help children learn about graphs. The display was designed by Nemirovsky and his team to augment children's control and understanding of graphical representations of mathematical variations over time (Nemirovsky, 1998; Tierney, Nemirovsky, Wright, Ackermann, 1993). I call the micro-world "swinging a graph" because, like Papert's turtles, it uses body motion as a vehicle to generate and control shapes. This time the activity is mediated by a motion detector, and the shape to be "drawn" is a time / graph on a computer screen. The motion detector used in these studies consists of a small button, the position of which is measured, of a sensor or electronic eye (also referred to as tower), and a computer. In interacting with the device, children hold the button or pin it on their shirt and move their bodies. They can also place the button on a moving object such as an electric train. The electronic eye (tower) measures the distance that separates it from the button at each moment in time, and outputs a graph that plots positions over time on the computer screen. Thus, by moving the sensitive button back and forth in front of the "eye," children can


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impact the graph's shape in real time: shapes vary as a function of the direction and speed of their, i.e., the button's, movement. Kids' first encounters with the motion detector are almost exclusively experiential, or sensorimotor. As they move back and forth with their button, they realise that the shape of the graph varies in reliable and somewhat principled ways. Very soon, though, the children learn to identify and to describe some of the changes they provoke. They tell us, for example, that as they move closer (to the tower) the graph goes up, and as they move away it drops; that if they move faster it becomes steeper, and if they slow down it flattens out. Sooner or later, kids also become interested in "swinging" very specific graph shapes. This requires that they understand, at least in action, what causes a graph's specific response. In doing so, they come to learn, for example, that they can't draw a circle or a square because the graph on the screen never goes backwards. As in Turtle Geometry, mediations have been introduced to help children move away from regulation-in-action to reflection. One of the mediations proposed was to remove the distance-sensitive button from the child's body, and to place it on the "face" of an electric train. The train was placed on a straight track in front of the motion detector. The child has now to move aside and to drive the train using a rotating knob, or dial. A next step in the mediating process, which was not explored at the time, would be to let the kids instruct or program the train, digitally. This would complete the cycle between moving one's own body, driving the train by hand using an analogical dial, and programming the train or give it a set of instructions. Switching back and forth between doing it oneself (engaging one's body) and giving instructions to "other" (instructing some responsive artefact) is what brings about deeper understanding (either about geometric or arithmetic operations). In both cases, the dynamic properties of interactive tools are used to tap into learners' knowledge-in-action, while mediations are offered to favour the passage from reflectionIN-action to reflection-ON-action. In both cases, "the idea is to give children a way of thinking of themselves as "doing science" when they are doing something pleasurable with their bodies" (Papert, 1980, p 68). Children learn because they are offered an occasion to use their own experience as a lever to actively explore mathematical ideas. Virtual virtues Social virtual environments (SVE) like chat rooms, Alphaworld, MUDS, offer yet another rich ground to explore how children and adults project themselves into fantasy worlds, as a way to revisit, enact and work through "real" issues. SVE can be thought of as digital stages for improvisational theatre, or psychodrama. They are fictionalising devices in Iser's sense. In MUDS, 6 "players encounter other players as well as objects that have been built for the virtual environment. MUD players can communicate with each other in real time, by typing messages that are seen by other players. Some of these messages are seen by all players in the same "room", but messages can also be designated to flash on the screen of Dungeons and Dragons was popular game in which a master created a world in which people take on fictional personae and play out complex adventures. The term "dungeon" persisted in high-tech culture to connote a virtual place. So when virtual places were created that many users could share and collaborate within, they were deemed multi-user dungeons, or MUDS, a new kind of social virtual reality, and the term MUD and the verb MUDding have come to refer to all of the multi-user environments. Some MUDs use screen graphics or icons to communicate place, characters, and action. Others rely entirely on plain text.

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only one specific player" (Turkic, 1995, p. 181). VE inhabitants, or avatars, are extensions of the human players. Their appearances and modes of interaction are mostly created and staged by the players themselves, in dialog with others. What's particular about Social Virtual Environments, as compared with other playgrounds for pretense, is the intricacy of the connection between users and their avatars, the immediacy and unpredictability of other player's response to one's virtual appearance, and the hybrid nature of the world itself, neither representation nor reality. As Turkic points out, VE-mediated exchanges deeply change the nature of our commitment to others, as well as our sense of selves. MUDs provide a stage for anonymous interaction in which players can choose a role as close to or as far from their "out of MUD self(ves)." (Turkle, 1995, p. 180) In social VR, as in good improvisational theatre, players do not recite scripts that are written by someone else. Instead, they are their own playwrights, choreographers, and actors. As in pretense play, staged events are both lived in and acted out. Players unfold scenarios and make drama come to life. Dwelling in social VE allows them to mediate their experience—live their lives on the screen—while remaining mentally engaged. It is the make-believe nature of the virtual space created, in conjunction with the truthfulness of the thoughts and feelings experienced through dialog with others, that make for the power of VE enactment. Attached to their avatars like a puppeteer to her string puppets, players act and feel through them. Virtual string puppets are both built by the puppeteer and brought to life by her. They are masks for idealised identities, allowing players to appear in a desirable light and hide those aspects of self that are not thought of too highly. Like Sayeki's kobitos, digital avatars are extensions of self that can be launched into the VE and made to act on one's behalf. It is the creator's strong connection / identification with their avatars that allows them to vicariously experience what they "go through". More easily than traditional puppettheatre, players can endorse multiple personae and launch them into different habitats at the same time. People's ability to put on the hats of multiple personae is not new in itself, and has its offline equivalents in adult psychodrama and face-to-face role playing games. What's different in VE, is the ubiquitous quality of self-appearances. It's like being in two "bal masques" at once or maintaining parallel streams of conversation. Along with Turkle, I think that digital fictionalising tools, enriched MUDS of sorts, can be used to help people, young and old, work out intriguing mental events, foster projective imagination, and construct their inner and outer worlds. To summarise, in VE, players can live things at a distance and get in touch with them at the same time. They can take risks on relatively safe ground. Using avatars allows them to remain anonymous, filter their appearance and control their level of engagement. Last but not least, the opportunity to come back again and again, changing face, and reconfiguring habitats (changing props) allows them to work out different versions of intriguing scenarios over extended periods of time. As in pretense, MUDers vary outcomes and rearrange story elements. Yet, as in psychodrama, they interact with others for good. What's unique in VE is that players can engage multiple dramas at once, or take on multiple hats in a same drama.


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3. Conclusions Fusion and separation are two poles of a continuum that are too readily opposed or placed in a developmental sequence. It has been our view, in this paper, that the abilities to put ourselves in another person's shoes, or mind, i.e. to change perspective and switch roles requires both fusion and de-coupling, being simultaneously "there" and "not there," embedded and disengaged. Fusion doesn't precede de-coupling, it accompanies it. Playing "what if or the ability to pretend (establishing a dialog between what is and what could be) is the means by which children as well as adults achieve the difficult a balance between getting immersed and emerging from embeddedness. Play is an important aspect in human learning, from identity building to constructing knowledge about the world. Erick Erickson defined play as a toy situation that allows us to reveal and commit ourselves in its unreality. Play operates within a transitional space (Winnicott, 1989), halfway between self and world, distinct from self yet under its control and, above all, more resilient that the world, in which the child can take safe risks. Throughout this paper, the articulation between make-believe and symbol-use has been a guiding connection to rethink the aims of representation. I explored the ways in which doing as if and playing what if inform people's conversations with—and through—artefacts. I discussed the benefits of children and adults' abilities to dwell into their symbolic creations and to treat symbols as objects in their own right. To situate my argument, I presented a series of learning stories or learning environments that support both world-making and dwelling into one's world. By way of conclusion, let me offer two suggestions that I wish were taken more seriously by developmental theorists and educators alike. The first suggestion is that people's abilities to fuse signifiers and signified and to treat signifiers as interesting objects by themselves are two powerful heuristics in creative symbol use. Their role in knowledge construction and scientific activities has been generally underscored as being primitive and generative of confusion. A second suggestion is that we seriously consider the significance of enactive forms of representations, from pretense play or simulacre, to simulations. As mentioned before, the French word simulacre and simulation sound very much alike. In both cases, a scenario or sequence of actions is being played out, which has been decoupled from its usually associated contexts. What's more, scenarios are not just described, as in writing or drawing, but they are actually run, or executed, as by a calculator. From objects-to-think-with (Papert, 1980) they become operations embodied, and people tend to relate to them as partners, with whom they share a task (Ackermann, In press). The difference between the two is the medium through which the performance is run. In simulacres and rituals, the medium is a human actor, or an actor's extension. In simulations, the medium is a human-made artefact, machine or program that runs a sequence of operations on your behalf. Simulations need not mimic something that exists. Their particularity is to execute operations that are only posed in language or notations. At a time when computational objects make it easy to run programs, model dynamic interactions, and simulate behaviours, people's ideas on what modelling is all about are deeply changing. So are their ways of relating to existing modelling tools. More than in the

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past, performance and simulation are granted a new place alongside language. It's time for us, researchers in cognitive development and educators, to catch up and revisit our own views.

Acknowledgements I thank Luc Steels and Mario Tokoro for having given me a chance to participate in the Future of Learning Workshop in Paco de Calheiros. It was a deeply engaging experience in many respects. I am grateful to my mentors, Jean Piaget, Barbel Inhelder and Seymour Papert, for their inspiration and support. I thank Ricardo Nemirovsky, for having given me an opportunity to work with them, and Sherry Turkic for her insights into MUDers' minds. I thank Herta Renk for encouraging me to write an earlier version of this paper, and Marleen Wynants for editing and improving it.

References Ackermann, E. (2001) Constructivism et Constructionism: Quelle difference?. In Constructivismes: usages et perspectives en education. (Volumes 1 et 2). Actes de Colloque. Geneva: Service de la recherche en edication / Cahier 8 / September 01. Pp. 8594 Ackermann, E. (1999) "Sich einrichten in Fantasie Raumen: Untersuchungen zum Gebrauch von Symbolen" (E. Renk Ed.) Lernen und Leben aus der Welt im Kopf: Konstruktivismus in der Schule. Neuwied, Kiftel: Luchterhand, pp. 79-99. Ackermann, E. (1999) "Enactive representations in learning: pretense, models, machines". In Learning Sites: Social and technological Resources for Learning (J. Bliss, P. Light, & R. Saljo, Eds) Elsevier Serie: Advances in Learning and Instruction, 144-155 Ackermann, E. (1996) "Perspective-taking and object construction: Two keys to learning". In Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and learning in a Digital World (J. Kafai, & M. Resnick, Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaun, Publishers, pp. 25-37. Ackermann, E. (1993). "Systemes de notations chez 1'enfant: Leur place dans la genese de 1'ecrit". In Entretiens 3: Parole, Ecrit, Image. Paris: Editions Nathan, 51-69 Brown, J.S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated knowledge and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher. Vol. 18 (1). pp. 32-42. Carey, S. (1983) Cognitive Development: The Descriptive Problem. In Gazzaniga (Ed.). Handbook for Cognitive Neurology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence & Erlbaum. Carey, S. (1987). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cole, M. (1996) Culture in mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Fox-Keller, E. (1985). Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven. Yale University Press. Harris, P. (2003). Paper presented at the Jean Piaget Society Conference On Play and Development. Chicago, IL. Iser, W. (1987). "Representation: A performative act". In (Krieger, Ed.) The aims of Representation: Subject/text/History. New York: Columbia University Press. Reissued (1993) Stanford, CA. Stanford University Press. Kegan, R. (1982). The Evolving Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, T. (1970) The structure of scientific revolutions. SecondEd. . University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G. (1993) "The contemporary theory of metaphor" In Metaphors and Thought (Ed. A. Ortony). Cambridge University Press, pp. 202 -252. Lock, A., Service, V., Brito, A. & Chandler, P (1989) The social structuring of infant cognition. In A. Slater and G. Bremner (Eds) Infant Development Chapter 10. Pp 24372. Nemirovsky R., and Monk, S., (1998) "If you look at it the other way: An exploration into the nature of Symbolizing". In Cobb, Yackel, and Me Clain (Eds.,) Symbolizing and Communicating in Mathematics Classrooms: Perspectives on Discourse, Tools, and Instructional Design. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms. Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basic books. Perner, J. (1993). Understanding the Representational Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. A Bradford Book. Piaget, J. (1962) Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Piaget, J. & Inhelder, B. (1967). The Child's Conception of Space. See especially "Systems of Reference and Horizontal-Vertical Coordinates." p. 375-418. New York: W. W. Norton &Co. Piaget, J. (1975). L 'equilibration des structires cognitives. Paris: PUF Reddy, M. (1993). The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language" In: Metaphor and thought (Ortony Andrew, Ed.). Cambridge University Press, Chapter 2 p. 164-202. Rogoff, B., Lave, J. (Ed.) (1984). Everyday Cognition: Its Development in Social Context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sayeki, Y.(1989) Anthropomorhic Epistemology. Unpublished Paper. Laboratory of

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Comparative Human Cognition. University of California. San Diego Smith B. (1991) Dwelling in the Drawing: An inquiry into actual movement, imagined movement, and spatial representation. Unpublished Paper. Cambridge, MA.: MIT School of Architecture. Suchman, L; (1987). Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Tierney, C., Nemirovsky, R., Wright, T., and Ackermann, E. (1993) "Body motion and children's understanding of graphs. In (J.R. Becker & B.J. Pence Eds.) Proceedings of the XV Annual Meeting of the North American Conference for Mathematics Education, pp. 192-198 Turkle, S. (1984). The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster. Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the Screen. New York: Simon and Schuster Vygotsky, L.S. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertsch, J. (1991) Voices of the Mind: A Socio-culotural approach to mediated action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Winnicott, D.W. (1989) Playing and Reality. London, New York: Routledge. Witkin, H. & Goodenough, D. (1981). Cognitive Styles: Essence and Origins. International University Press.

Suggested Readings Aries, P. (1962) Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life. New york: Vintage Books. Ginsburg, H., an Opper, S. (1969) Piaget's theory of intellectual development. Englewood Cliffs. Prentice Hall, Inc. Harel, I. and Papert, S. (Eds) (1991). Constructionism. Ablex Publishing Corporation. Norwood, NJ. Hutchins, E. (1995) Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Leont'ev, A.N. (1932) Studies on the cultural development of the child. Journal of genetic psychology, 40, 52-83. Luria, A.R. (1928) The problem of the cultural development of the child. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 35, 493-506.


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Piaget, J. The Essential Piaget (Gruber, H. and Voneche, J. Eds) Basic Books, Inc. New York: 1977

EDITH ACKERMANN is professor of developmental psychology at the University of AixMarseille, France, on absence of leave. She is interested in the interaction between learning, teaching, children and the media, in collaborative learning, constructive play, and creative work / design, in technology-mediated environments. She studies how the conjunction of virtual and physical spaces support human learning, and how people-mostly childrendevelop senses of identity and community as they meet in actual, symbolic, or virtual worlds. She has pursued these interests in working with technologists, students, designers, and researchers in milieus concerned with learning and education. Ackermann teaches at the M.I.T. School of Architecture, Design Technologies, where she is appointed Visiting Professor, and consults for LEGO and MIT Media Laboratory. Previously, she was a Senior Research Scientist at MERL - A Mitsubishi Research Laboratory; a Junior Faculty at the MIT Media Lab and University of Geneva; and a Research Collaborator at the Centre International d' Epistemologie Genetique, Geneva, Switzerland, under the direction of Jean Piaget.


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"In teaching and learning, one kind of event that arises naturally between children and their friends, or between parents and children in play, is affectionate, mutually enjoyed joking and teasing, the sharing of surprises inside familiar rituals. Learning should have surprises, and great pleasure can be had from taking part in unexpected events, or events that come too soon, ahead of the usual plan. That is why Jerome Bruner, a famous professor of psychology and education, became interested in how a baby can enjoy 'peek-a-boo' over and over again. He thought that the 'format' of a 'build up' that creates an expectancy in playful communication has an important message for educational theory, as well as for a theory of the grammar of language." Colwyn Trevarthen

A Learning Zone of One's Own M. Tokoro and L. Steels (Eds.) IOS Press, 2004

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3.

How Infants Learn How to Mean Colwyn Trevarthen

About 30 years ago developmental psychologists could not believe it when they were offered proof that newborn infants express states of mind and respond like persons. They had to accept a new explanation for behaviours that the famous modern developmental psychologists Freud, Piaget and Skinner had thought were impossible in such immature and inexperienced humans. Newborns actively seeking for experience and for communication must be doing something that is important for cognitive development and for the learning. Charles Darwin (1872) proved with photographs that infants show a variety of emotional expressions that communicate. He believed infants are sensitive to the emotions of other people. It seems clear now that babies have the essentials of a whole 'self with conscious awareness; they have a capacity for coherent purposefulness, all parts moving efficiently together, seeking experience (Figure 1 A). Within minutes of birth an awake baby can listen to changing sounds and turn to locate them in space, can feel the difference between her/his own parts moving and a different object that touches or moves against her/him. A newborn can see patterns in light, is curious to track a moving object, and is especially responsive to the odour and sound of the mother, identifying her as a person different from others. And all these innate abilities, now proved in many careful studies of babies' reactions, are adapted to learning through communication with a known person. Newborns can also imitate simple expressions of face, hands or voice, and expect to get a response from the person they are attending to (Figure 1 B). It seems that they are ready for picking up the motives of other persons, and this is now confirmed by a very original study carried out by a young Hungarian doctor and psychologist, Emese Nagy. She not only invited newborns to imitate attitudes, expressions and gestures, she patiently tested the infant's communicative initiative by withholding her presentations of expression after she had gained imitation, tempting the infant to 'provoke' an imitation from her. This was successful (Nagy and Molnar, 2003). Recordings of the infant's heart beat proved that he or she was in two quite different states of expectancy when imitating or when 'provocating'. Just before the time of imitating, the heart accelerated, indicating an intention to be active in a new way. With provocation there was an heart rate deceleration starting just before the baby moved, signalling a receptive focussing of attention, waiting for a response (Figure 1

3. How Infants Learn How to Mean

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C). Thus Nagy showed, in agreement with observations of the Greek psychologist Giannis Kugiumutzakis, that a newborn baby can seek two-way imitative communication with a 'respectful' partner, exhibiting intentional preparation of complementary expressive and receptive conscious states. Kugiumutzakis (1993) had shown that neonatal imitations have two characteristics that prove they really are communicative:a) they are voluntary, in the sense that a goal-directed effort by the baby shapes them towards the form of the 'model1 by successively improved approximations. b) they are selective, matching 'special' forms of conversational expression that can be part of a communicative exchange with invention in it.

Figure 1

1. Intuitive Parenting Any person who wants a close and affectionate contact with a newborn infant has to display behaviours of gentle, playfully happy kinds that are unconsciously controlled and cannot be learned (Murray and Andrews, 2000). The similarities that appear in mothers' vocalisations to very young babies in different cultures, like the features observed when men or children attempt to talk with a baby, too, are evidence both for the universal needs of the newborn


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and for what Mechthild Papousek (1996) called 'intuitive parenting' motivation to meet these needs. The emotional 'codes' in infant and adult express the same kinds of impulse. Their affective expressions are adaptive to one another as sympathetic complements that confirm mutual awareness. Papousek thought this is the foundation for cultural learning. Who it is that addresses an infant is always important, as well as how they do so. Experiments that measure the preferential orienting of newborns to voices have proved that some foetuses have already learned in utero to identify their mother's voice. A newborn human can be alert to the face of a sympathetic caregiver speaking, drawing comfort from the expression of affection carried by the eyes and the loving voice. A mother greets her newborn with ecstatic cries in falling pitch, and gentle fondling, unable to look away from her baby. She touches hands, face, body with rhythmic care, and holds the infant close to her so they can greet one another. Her speech is a kind of singing, with high gliding gestures of pitch and repetition of regular gentle phrases on a graceful beat, leaving places for the infant to join in with coos, smiles and gestures of the hands or whole body (Fernald, 1989). Every move of the baby elicits a reaction from her. These exchanges are intricately co-ordinated with a subdued choreography that brings out matching rhythms and phrasing in mother and infant. And not only mothers are affected in this way. The example of a 'conversation' of coos between a father and a two-month premature newborn that has been subjected to acoustic analysis by an Australian musician, Stephen Malloch (1999) illustrates the essential features of a syllabic beat, phrasing and sympathetic co-ordination of emotion. In this case it is likely that the father's voice was transmitted to his daughter by vibration as much as by air-born sound as she rested one ear against his chest. The beautiful quiet games of expression that engage an affectionate parent with an alert young baby start the process of sharing experience that will carry the child's curiosity and eagerness to learn into a world of meaning that other people have created, and by which they direct their lives (Figure 2).

2. Sympathy Neurons A few years ago, physiologists recording from cells in the cortex of awake monkeys busily grasping pieces of food found neuronal "mirroring" elements. These appear to anticipate the evolution of imitations that make learning of human speech and language possible (Rizzolatti and Arbib, 1998). Cells in prefrontal cortex were active both when the monkey carried out a particular hand movement, and when the monkey sees or hears someone else making a similar movement for the same purpose. Apparently the monkey's 'picking up' nerve system 'resonates' with the action produced by an equivalent part of the human motor brain. It has become clear that the cells from which 'mirroring' effects have been recorded are part of widely distributed systems through the brain, that both move and feel with another subject. It might be better to call these the neural mechanisms of sympathy, which is a Greek word meaning 'moving with'. They reflect states of intention, awareness and feeling, not just shapes of movement, and they require a radical re-conception of the 'social brain' as an organ for sympathetic engagement between motives in physically separate moving bodies. Functional brain imaging with human subjects is beginning to explore the neural basis of sympathetic emotions that enable us to share the quality and vitality of consciousness as it comes to life in our separate bodies (Decety and Chaminade, 2003).

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More than in any other species, brain and behaviour development in humans makes no sense if the individual is considered in isolation, or if the impress of stimulation on 'plastic' neural circuitry, or the influx of information into a computational mechanism, is taken as the principle process driving development. We intuitively get into other persons' minds by actively sensing the impulses to action in their brains that enable them move the way they do (Trevarthen, 200la). One finding is particularly startling. When a 6 week old baby looks at a picture of a woman's face, this excites all the brain parts that, nearly two years later, will begin to acquire the skills of recognising a partner who is talking to us and for making and hearing speech in a particular language — including a 'face recognition' area, and areas for 'talking' and for 'hearing speech' (Tzourio-Mazoyer, et al., 2002). The baby is already trying to find 'common sense1 with the other person.

3. Human Companions Support Both Growth of Intelligence, and a Child's Emotional Health Babies communicate with caregivers to receive assistance with the regulation of their state of physical well-being. But they also do so to share motivation for learning. Older and younger brains are linked by emotional systems in the processes of care, and also in the quest for skill and understanding (Schore, 1994). Clever work by Jaak Panksepp and colleagues on 'laughter' in rats, attempting to identify its neurochemistry, has brought the wonderful realisation that 'joy' from tickling by playful companions may be good for the brain and for friendship between the playmates (Panksepp and Burgdorf, 2003). This study is part of a growing body of research that encourages belief in the importance of shared exuberance and pleasure in cognitive functions of the mammalian brain, in development of social collaboration, and in learning. The power of a child's brain to find motivation and confidence from sensitive communication with other persons gives a lifetime opportunity for compassion, and for assisting those in whom feelings and thoughts have become dysregulated by inherited or acquired damage to motives for companionship — for therapy. Activating beneficial states in brainstem and the right limbic cortex, which have been identified as the most important components in the regulation of states of self-awareness and of sympathetic communication, must be the principle effect of therapy aimed to restore healthy psychosocial life. The emotions brought about offer the means for recovery from dysregulation of the self (Trevarthen, 200 Ib; Schore, 2003a, b).

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Figure 2 Protoconversational Give and Take: Telling and Thinking in Turn, Before Language From birth to the beginning of language the child makes expressive moves to show impulses of thought that gain in meaning by being shared. These developments in the child's eagerness for communicating have profound effects on the behaviour of an affectionate, firmly 'attached' parent. The child is 'educating' the adult how to discover meanings that make sense, and joy, for both of them. Memories and ideas are built in communication, in increasingly rich narratives and games of imaginative 'mimesis' - the telling of imagined or remembered experiences by moving the body in a dramatisation (Goldin-Meadow and McNeill, 1999; Donald, 2001). All parts of the body, and all the modalities of sense, can play a part in this 'mind and memory sharing'. Visual life before birth must be almost zero, but, as the imitation studies show, newborns can see, and in a few weeks a baby is watching the other's eyes with clear focus, and obviously reacting to their direct regard. By 2 months baby and parent create a lively 'protoconversational' form of communication, the most obvious developments being a marked increase in the accuracy of the baby's eye-to-eye contact and a quickening of all responses (Trevarthen, 1977, 1980). Now the baby can be attracted to play a part in an exchange of expressions that resembles the body movements, gestures and vocal intonations of adult face-to-face conversation - it is conversation stripped of words (Figure 2 A). Sight of others, and how they express themselves, is not the only way a baby can get into communication, of course. Well supported, a totally blind baby, or one that is both deaf and blind, can develop happily and well, seizing other ways of sensing a partner and engaging with them. The communication is carried by any awareness of the impulse by which a person can express their mind (Trevarthen, 1993; Trevarthen and Aitken, 2001). The behaviours of protoconversation have been analysed in great detail now, and researchers are impressed with the infant's sensitive responses and fine appreciation of

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timing (Trevarthen, 1993, 1999; Trevarthen, Kokkinaki and Fiamenghi, 1999). The attention of the infant to a partner's voice and face expression, shown by a 'knit brow and jaw drop' expression of fixed orientation, is followed promptly by recognition of positive, affectionate elements in the sight and sound of a partner's feelings. The rhythms of a parent's inviting vocalisations, touching and movements of the head, eyebrows and mouth evoke first a smile of recognition then an animated 'utterance1. At the climax of expression the 6- to 8-week-old assumes an attitude of declamation, vocalising, gesturing and changing head posture in a co-ordinated assertion of communicative purpose, frequently removing orientation from the partner, who has been closely attended to until this moment, as if 'carried away' by the ideas being expressed. The adult, seeing this, is stimulated to give an encouraging, praising kind of reply that matches the level of affect of the infant's 'utterance', interpreting it with a parallel emotional form or 'affect attunement' that gives back or complements the feeling (Stern, 2000). Then the infant re-orients to the adult and observes 'thoughtfully' what they are expressing, before being excited again to smile and make another utterance (Figure 2 B). For some moments the baby really seems to be 'thinking', watching the partner with a quiet unsmiling face. Each phase of the 'chat' is characterised by particular initiatives and emotional responses in interaction with the other person's mind. Shifts in interest are growing in the baby's consciousness that will lead to shared exploration and use of places and things. After 3 months, the baby will develop increasingly adventurous plans, making more vigorous use of their senses and limbs, seeking to explore and to form concepts of objects, negotiating purposes and the tempo of experience more vigorously with others (Figure 3). Then the infant starts also to become interested, not only to look about for himself or herself, but also to follow the shifts of gaze of the other person who is occupied in seeking and acting on objects. The mother is likely to be the first companion and teacher in these games with objects, but soon father, siblings and others can join in the infant's expressions of curiosity and anticipation as they seek information together. The developments in expressive body signs before speech — from protoconversations of 'primary intersubjectivity' with two-month-olds, through games of the person and person-personobject games in the middle of the first year, to 'secondary intersubjectivity' or 'co-operative awareness' and protolanguage at the end of the first year — show that communication of intentions, experiences and feelings is the foundation on which co-conscious use of experience and the precise references and recollections of language are built (Bruner, 1983; Trevarthen, 1980, 1988; Tomasello, 2003) (See Figures 4 to 7). The Sadness of Lost Contact The emotions in protoconversation have been tested by observing what happens when the human response to a baby's interest is blocked or fails. If a mother holds her face still for a minute in the middle of face-to-face play with her two-month-old, this causes the infant to turn away and show distress (Tronick et al., 1978; Murray and Trevarthen, 1985). A similar pattern of anxiety and sadness appears when the mother presents the uncommunicative manner of simulated depression. Real post-natal depression interferes with the infant's communication and cognition, and, if it persists, is accompanied by limited cognitive development in later months (Murray and Cooper, 1997; Tronick and Weinberg, 1997). An unhappy, unresponsive adult cannot be a good companion and teacher. A Double TV apparatus, in which a young baby and the mother are communicating via a video and sound link while in separate rooms, seeing and hearing each other face-to-face


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and life size on two monitors, allows a critical experiment to be performed. A lively, positive portion of the recording from the mother is replayed a few minutes later to the infant (Murray and Trevarthen, 1985; Trevarthen, 1993). The distress this produces shows that a 2-month-old is extremely sensitive to the contingent responsiveness of the live mother's expressions, which is lost when a physical recording is offered of what was a cheerful live conversation. If, conversely, a portion of the recording of a communicating infant is replayed to the mother, she experiences an uneasy loss of contact, and she may conclude that the infant is avoiding her or that she is somehow giving the wrong signals. This makes her confused and unhappy. Live communication has to be just that, a real time engagement of feelings and impulses to communicate. A delay or an inappropriate response proves that the other is 'out of touch'.

Figure 3

4. Playing Games and Tricks: Using Rules of Moving to Make Surprises and Share Ideas About Acting with Friends In the games infants play with their mothers we observe first signs of an intelligence that wants to share ideas and fix meanings in a conventional, 'made up', code. We can trace the stages by which the baby's mind grows to think in prepositional narratives (stories) and in metaphorical representations (imaginary connections between feelings of being involved with things, happenings and people) (Figure 7). These are the kind of events in the mind that can be put into language. The infant, we find, is much more than the self-sufficient, solitary explorer and problem-solver that Jean Piaget studied, more than a private mover and thinker. A baby's mind has an appetite to learn by picking up ideas from a community

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of people, accepting what they have invented (Figures 5 and 6). The baby's consciousness is adapted to 'being moved' or being taught. It is ready for 'cultural learning' (Vygotsky, 1978; Bruner, 1996; Rogoff, 1990; Trevarthen, 1988). After 3 months, a baby's games show the infant leading the mother's attention out of conversation to explore the shared world. The baby is curious about things that invite sensory tracking and manipulation (Figure 3 A and B). Developing strength in body and brain confer a power to support the head in free rotation and project the arms out to grasp objects. Objects are now discovered at an accelerating pace, by the combined application of hands, eyes, ears and mouth to pick up useful information. Because the baby often shifts attention from her face to an object, the mother has to change her tactics to keep the dialogue alive. Often fathers, with a more vigorously playful approach, find they have a special appeal as playmates, too, now (Figure 2 B). Either parent adopts a challenging, quick-changing way of making fun. Soon play routines are discovered that facilitate lively and enthusiastic participation and make the baby laugh when half-expected surprises occur, or when the baby knows they are coming (Figures 3 B, 4 and 7). The force and rhythms of movement in games of vocalisation and dance get stronger. Patterns of expression are created with a person that are more complex than any play an infant can have with an object. The parent's game can be a bit frightening, but great fun. It is like the rough and tumble play that many young mammals (such as kittens, puppies and young rats and monkeys), and some sociable birds (e. g. parrots), develop with their peers (Beckoff and Byers, 1998). But humans begin this experimenting with communicative action early, long before they can move about on their own, and in the company of exceptionally playful parents. Baby and parent are exploring ways of negotiating plans and projects in ways that will lead before the end of the first year to the learning of highly conventional 'acts of meaning', and then to a sense that words people say are of special importance as signs (Halliday, 1975). These 'dispositions to learn', and the matching parental 'dispositions to teach', are uniquely human (Figures 5, 6 and 7). In the teasing and joking games and musical/dancing entertainment of infants approaching the middle of the first year, communication is complex and highly productive, but the topic remains the communication itself, i.e. it remains 'metacommunicative' or 'communication about communication' (Bateson, 1956). The baby anticipates and responds with increasing skill, and seems to be learning rules that students of the grammar of language recognise: such as 'entailment', 'qualification', 'contrast', 'repetition with changed emphasis', 'subordination', 'opposition', 'release' and so on. The infant senses different poetic or dramatic forms or 'melodies', and enjoys their repeated presentation. This provides the 'text' for awareness of causal relationships between the many objects that now can be discriminated, identified and recognised in the infant's awareness. It all depends on a very special human imagination for planning how the body will act. Child games, and pedagogy, show what Merlin Donald calls an 'executive suite' of 'domain general skill clusters' (including metacognition or cognition about cognition), 'self reminding', 'self-triggering of memory', 'whole body imitation', 'symbolic invention', 'complex skill hierarchies') that are absent or poorly developed in apes (Donald, 2001). The mind of the baby is well on the way to sharing the thinking of and invented common sense.


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5. Narratives of Experience with Increasing Meaning The 3- to 6-month-old baby can now share the drama of a favourite game routine over many seconds (Bruner and Sherwood, 1975; Trevarthen, 1999). A 'narrative sequence1 of feelings and expressions is created that has a beginning, a development, a climax and a resolution or denouement, the last being carefully paced to be startling and provocative of laughter, is what catches the infant's interest in a classical baby song or action chant (Ratner and Bruner, 1978; Trevarthen and Malloch, 2002). These songs and rhymes have the same prosodic or musical features in different languages, which testify to the complexity of infants' communicative motives everywhere at this age, motives that will later serve for catching the meanings in an historical heritage of symbolic forms.

Figure 4 'Person-person games' become transformed into 'person-person-object games' (Figure 3) and the baby is given reactive 'toys' that make noises or roll or bounce when handled, shaken or thrown (Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978). Again, the incorporation of such objectexploring behaviours into communication games or negotiated 'formats' (Bruner and Sherwood, 1975) is peculiarly human. The narrative 'plots' of such play have no equal in the fighting and chasing games of young mammals, even though some animal play may incorporate objects that are chased-for or fought-over. In a modern home there are electronic toys that are programmed to play tunes or carry out spontaneous simulations of human or animal action. Such 'robots' are exciting, indeed - but we have to wonder if they

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threaten to eliminate the creative interaction such as a baby can only have with a live mind in a live body. The infant can gain interest in experiences through the presentations that others make to change these experiences in momentarily surprising but quasi-predictable and often repeated playful ways. Identities and relationships or operations are 'dramatised' by the emotions coupled to their demonstration (Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978; Papousek and Papousek, 1981). The infant's imitative awareness appreciates the excitement of a partner's attempts to 'attune with' what the infant is doing and the changes of action and experience that the infant is showing (Stern, 2000). Soon the infant is expert at seeking for these feelings of the other and for the habitual forms of display (Figure 3). Upon meeting a new situation or object, or after performing some deliberate 'act', the infant's learning and skill is evaluated or 'tagged' by the other person's emotions. Hopefully that person is amused and impressed by the baby's 'cleverness' when he or she 'shows off (Reddy, 2001 a, 2003). Usually parents are very proud of what their children can do (Figures 1 to 7) The infant about 7 or 8 months old is about to crawl. Now he or she can also share interest in an expanded world of places and things with other persons, taking up their direction of gaze or their pointing (Scaife and Bruner, 1975). This means that by that age, at least, the other person's awareness can be linked to the infant's awareness in a common space of experience (Figures 5 and 6). Such 'joint awareness' is recognised as a key element in communication that leads to language (Tomasello, 2003).

Figure 5 Cultural learning is what sets human beings apart. All historically contrived communities of meaning and belief, including languages, depend on motives and passions of 'companionship' different from those involved in primary regulation of a child's attachments. Thus a mother's play with her infant is a 'cradle of thought' (Hobson, 2002) as well as an 'external regulator' of what the baby's body needs or a protector from stress. Importantly, her role as playmate and companion in meaning can be taken over by any other sympathetic person, even a child, whom the baby has learned to trust. A 6-month-old can negotiate interests, intentions and feelings with two same age peers, with no adult help (Selby and Bradley, 2003). Infants are sociable in the community before they walk or talk. This is the beginning of friendships in learning that form naturally between playmates long before the child is ready for classroom instruction. Play among toddlers is imaginative,


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creating invented worlds and 'myths' of adventure that range far beyond present circumstances (Nelson, 1996).

6. Reflecting on Oneself in the 'Moral' Appraisal of Others, Being 'Sensible': The 'Me' Who 'Shows Off, and is Wary of Strangers Around six months after birth, an infant can be observed imitating gestures and mannerisms, and showing them to companions (Uzgiris, 1984). Affectionate praise from family members entices the baby to perform a 'trick' that impresses other persons — he or she is acting like a performer or clown (Reddy, 200la). Sometimes the baby's 'sign' is offered to a stranger, apparently in an attempt to 'break the ice' of an awkward, anxious confrontation. But it is usually puzzling to the stranger and may be laughed at, which is a kind of mockery that distresses the infant (Trevarthen, 1990). A bold baby may act coquettish as if to impress a stranger, but remains ambivalent. Babies laugh easily now, but this is combined with a sensitivity to who laughs 'at' or 'with' the infant. What is called 'fear of strangers' seems to be linked with a tendency to try out supercilious expressions and clowning when the baby is with a partner who is either not supportive — for example, when the mother keeps a still face — or observant of the infant's self, as when a stranger is trying to 'make friends' (Trevarthen, 1990). I think the baby knows that the meaning of actions is connected with relationships, with a history of being with the persons who shares them. All self-referred, other-sensitive emotions become stronger and clearer in the second six months. The baby begins to recognise his or her self in a mirror (Figure 4) and toward the end of the first year infants prefer pictures of infants of the same sex as him or her self. When looking in a mirror the baby makes 'experiments' with babbling, face grimaces and hand gestures, and repeats imitations of the exaggerated expressions others offer in play. By 8 and 9 months boys and girls are different in this; the boys tend to posture or 'challenge' more, while the girls show a greater range of expressions and are generally more 'friendly' (Trevarthen, Kokkinaki and Fiamenghi, 1999). From 6 months both boys and girls are clearly interested in their images and entertained by them at the same time as they are very aware when they are the focus of another's attention and interest (Reddy, 2003). Self-consciousness in the presence of others' appraisal would appear to be preparatory to learning in an active 'zone of proximal development' in which the partner can give cognitive, logistical and practical support (Vygotsky, 1978), and the child can begin to learn through 'guided participation' (Rogoff, 1990) (Figures 6 and 7). The infant is getting insight into the other's states of mind, and can be said to have a more critical 'sense of intersubjective self (Stern, 2000).

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Figure 6 Humorous teasing provokes the older infant to laughter and coyness (Reddy, 200 Ic), but subtle signs of self-other -awareness are seen very early. Reddy (2000) has documented coy smiling at a mirror image in 2-month-olds, and she lists many other behaviours that signify awareness of others at this age (Reddy, 2003). In the development of selfawareness we observe a transformation of motives to share consciousness and purposeful actions with others that were evident at birth. As the baby picks up comical ways of handling things, and starts showing objects for others, seeking congratulation, holding them up as a joke with a look, a gesture, a grimace or a vocalisation that can become a coded act that is transmitted between the child and the 'audience' of the other, the object is part of an 'act of meaning' (Halliday, 1975) or 'protosign (Trevarthen, 1990)' (Figures 6 and 7). They 'make sense' in the loyal and affectionate communication of the family or with familiar playmates, but may not with strangers (Trevarthen, 1990, 2002). It is the quality of assured mutual friendship that counts. My observations lead me to believe that 'stranger fear' is an anxiety of seeming foolish with a person who can't comprehend. It is a direct and strongly felt emotion — one of the 'complex' or 'relational' emotions, expression of which makes the infant seem a sophisticated social being long before language, and before any system of beliefs or explicit 'theory of mind'. The fact that it increases as the infant gains in self-awareness and


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'showing off with familiars, suggests that the beginning of coded communication is part of a motivation for defining a cooperative group in which meaning is consolidated by daily practices that must be protected against 'strange' customs or beliefs. Subsequent developments into language confirm this idea. Around nine months it may be observed that an infant is taking a new, much more definite initiative in games, attempting to direct a partner to behave in a certain way or to repeat a playful act (Trevarthen, 1977; Hubley and Trevarthen, 1979). The infant may show considerable skill in teasing an adult, as if knowing how to manipulate feelings and predict reactions (Reddy, 200 Ib). Such behaviours appear to be part of the transition to a new constructive sharing of interest in things and tasks, the beginning of 'protolanguage' (Halliday, 1975).

7. The Musicology of Human Communication Rhythm and the Nature of Moving In the 1970s and 80s psychologists and developmental linguists found fascinating evidence of musical talents in babies (Papousek, 1996; Trehub, 1990). Hitherto unsuspected musical listening skills were proved for infants as young as 4 months. The Papouseks described the 'intuitive parenting' mode of vocal communication with infants in musical terms, stressing the modulation of affect provided by parental tones and rhythms (Papousek and Papousek, 1981). A diary study of their daughter documented the infant's enjoyment of nursery songs, and her private practice of acquired musical forms. The concept of 'attunement', by which Stern describes how the parent picks up on infant expressions reflecting their beat, emphasis and intonation, encapsulates his strong musical sensibility (Stern, 2000). By 5 or 6 months infants quickly recognise songs or recorded music often heard ~ stopping to listen, smiling in recognition, then bouncing and waving arms and legs with the tune (Figures 3 and 4). A baby's selective orientation to musical sounds, critical discrimination of musical features of sound, and vocal and gestural responses that are timed and expressed to contribute to a joint musical game confirm that music, which is clearly a cultural achievement of human society, has strong roots in human nature (Trevarthen and Malloch, 2002. Why are babies, and mothers, so musical? What ways of behaving show their musicality? Research on the temporal foundations of expression and the development of narratives of expression has been advanced by musical acoustic analysis of vocal interactions between mothers and infants, and a theory of Communicative Musicality has been developed (Malloch, 1999), which defines features of'pulse', 'quality' of sound, and 'narrative' form that underlie the innate dynamics of moving and thinking and the sympathetic transmission of mental events between subjects of any age. Clearly, the expression of'music' for an infant is to be understood in the sense of the ancient Greek word, UA)aiKe (musike), i.e. inclusive of all temporal arts — theatre, dance, poetry, as well as what we know as 'music'. Musicality manifests its fundamental features in the ways that infants behave in interaction with the expressions of motive forces in other human beings (Dissanayake, 2000). The core element of a cheerful baby song is a four line stanza lasting about 15 to 30 seconds, with a base pulse around andante , a tripping iambic rhythm, simple pitch shifts

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and rhyming syllables at specific points, and variations in the beat to regulate excitement in the last two lines (Trehub, 1990; Trevarthen, 1999). A lullaby to sooth a sleepy or unhappy infant will be slower with gentle rocking rhythms. Infants quickly learn to recognise songs and hand clapping or bouncing games, eagerly joining in when invited (Figures 3 and 4), and old people remember songs and games they learned as infants. Early musicality certainly has a powerful role in building memories. It marks with emotional signatures the identity of persons and ritual events. After very few months an infant can 'make music', making singing sounds and banging objects rhythmically. He or she seems to have found a proud performer's personality, who can share a musical 'joke1 that surprises and pleases. Taken with the infant's clear preferences for particular companions, this musical 'showing off looks like the beginnings of his or her social identity as member of a group with known habits, celebratory experiences and acting skills that are valued for the bonds that they represent and reinforce (Trevarthen, 2002). Cultivation of intrinsic musicality is a way of declaring allegiance with a friend or to a social band (Blacking, 1988). New evidence on the place of affect in intelligence, and on how emotions regulate brain development, cognition and learning, makes the infant's sensitivity to expressions of emotional narrative in musical form more comprehensible (Panksepp and Bernatsky, 2002). Musicality may be at the source of the ability to be socialised in the human way. The Prehistory of Human Narratives An infant enjoying the message of a familiar baby song is showing us how human meaning began. As Marc Turner has made clear, the whole of our consciousness and life together is made of story-telling (Turner, 1996), and the stories are made of metaphors with affective quality that describe agents going places and doing things with energy and style, conscious of how their bodies move and how experience is made by moving. John Blacking asked if dance, music and other artistic activities are not, "essential forms of knowledge which are necessary not only for a balanced personality but also for the development of cognitive capacities." (Blacking, 1988, p. 91). In arguing the case for 'affective culture', he said, "Passion is as important in scientific endeavour as is compassion in artistic vision." (loc. cit., p. 93). The ways in which infants present themselves as performers and masters of creative acts indicates that one of the principal outcomes of affective understanding with others is the development of a secure recognised and valued 'identity' — being somebody, placed in the world with others as a 'knower' and 'doer', 'making sense' of oneself. All humans revel in a freedom of gestural action that is intensely shared, and we use our whole bodies to act out meanings (Goldin-Meadow and McNeill, 1999; Trevarthen, 1999). We need this whole body sense to learn language (Trevarthen, 2003). These are the reasons why prehistorians are giving the evolution of music precedence over the emergence of language as a means of communicating experience (Cross, 1999; Morley, 2002) Contemporary human minds, and certainly the minds of our distant ancestors were not simply rational devices for categorisation of perceptions or strategic processing of instrumental tasks. Aesthetic and mythic forces are integral to the management of a human view of the world. These forces come from the impulses to act and create with anticipation, from dynamic evaluations of experience in action, and from memories of exciting contingencies of acting in the natural world. They must also have depended on enriched


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sense of being in intelligent company sharing an affective culture (Dissanayake, 2000). Hominids acquired the semantic power of words, and the rational abstractions that words facilitate, after evolving messages of 'mimesis', in rhythmic narratives turning experienced events into allegories of body posturing and stepping, gesticulations of the hands, facial expressions of eyes and mouth, and modulated cries of the voice (Donald, 2001). The important addition Merlin Donald makes to cognitive theory is that he defines a form of story making that is embodied and performed in regulated rhythmic time, that conveys narrative in transitions of feeling. In this he agrees with Blacking's insistence on the vital role of an 'affective culture'. The greatest challenge for the psychology of language is how narratives in thought are composed by blending an infinite variety of impressions with a sense of agency—of actors doing things with purpose and emotion, seeking and evaluating goals in a world of territories, places, objects and natural events, as well as animals and people (Turner, 1996). Being involved in talk or writing and reading is being involved in conceiving and executing movements in a world that has other persons. Language is not an object that has existence outside active human hopes and interests, and outside the history of friends, families and communities. It results from brains regulating bodily events in time and space, and recording the experiences (Varela et al., 1991; Damasio, 1999; Donald, 2001).

8. Education for Culture: How Common Sense Grows in the Community Knowing and Belonging: Meaningful Relationships It may be convenient for the management of a complex industrial society to plan education as a construction of skills according to curricular formulae that are 'quality tested' at each prescribed stage. It may be practical to focus on each child as an intellectual athlete in training, who strives to master facts and rational skills that society wants. But this is an artificial, one-sided, cultivation of the natural process by which children can and want to master cultural knowledge, and for which adults enjoy giving natural encouragement. The 'intent participation' of the child in mastery of meaning (Rogoff et al., 2003) must be respected, and shared (Figures 5, 6 and 7). The emotions involved in teaching and learning are often overlooked. It is perhaps a product of social organisation and planning in industrial societies, and a reaction to the abuses of child labour as Rogoff and her colleagues (loc. cit.) indicate, that mothers are seen primarily as protectors or keepers of their infants, who may or may not be substituted by sufficiently sensitive surrogates, and teachers are seen as instructors, neither being understood as available friends and collaborators who benefit from the infant's or child's instinctive companionship and playfulness. The psychology we have created to support our society and measure its effects on individuals is one that treats the emotional and intellectical success of each person separately. We have come to think of ourselves as communicating just information about what each of us perceives is real and practical, and, perhaps, what each of us thinks. Inevitably our conceptions of sympathetic and intuitive mental life have become over-cognitive and impoverished. Sigmund Freud made a powerful effort to redress this imbalance, but left the unconscious mind at the mercy of language, the vehicle of clear thought. He did not have full confidence in the intuitive communication of purposes and concerns by non-verbal means. He did not investigate how

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the process of interested, practical and joyful communication of thoughts and imagining begins in infancy, and nor did Jean Piaget. Research on the development of communication and cooperation in the first two years of a child's life indicates a different way of conceiving human teaching and learning and the propagation of cultural knowledge (Bruner, 1996; Trevarthen, 1988; Trevarthen and Aitken, 2001; Hobson, 2002). And it leads to a new view of the relationship between cultural learning, the form and movement of the human body and the anatomical peculiarities of the human brain. The rich and rapidly developing sociability of infants and toddlers indicates that this brain has evolved for sharing knowledge and skill. The essential motivating and emotional systems are laid down long before birth as generators preparing the capacity of a human being for initiative in acting and experiencing, and for intersubjective communication. Being at home in a community is essential for the confident teaching of a parent, and learning of a child. Maya Gratier (1999) has found that the musical quality of a mothers communication with her infant, which signals her intimate pleasure with the baby and confidence in herself, maybe affected if she has been taken from her home culture to a strange land. Gratier calls this the effect of emotions of 'belonging'. She believes she has shown that consciousness of meaning, begins in an intimate coordination of the motives of mother and infant, in their seeking to generate and share experience within one space and time of companionship. Her data show that the capacity of the mother to successfully share experience with her infant through dynamic negotiation of states of interest, purpose and emotion is predicated on her having her own 'sense of belonging'. If a mother cannot find a secure attachment to her adult world that gives her a coherent identity with its specific grammar and expressive signature, she may not be able to meet her infant's desire for company. A mother brings to her child both personal and cultural ways of moving, speaking and singing. These influences shape the infant's developing sense of self and agency. They may be said to constitute a person's primary sense of belonging or "core culture" (Hall, 1989), the deeply rooted sense of being in tune and in time with certain nonverbal, intuitive, communal ways of being. In happy communication mother and infant are anticipating the other's intentional motions. They balance one another on the cusp of the future, each poised to step in at exactly the right moment, that is at the moment which is most meaningful to the other and most motivated by them. This concept of 'looking ahead' to the course of agency recalls Husserl's notion of'protention'. Infants appear to have an innate "future sense", and they instantly sense meaning in the timing of the other's expressive gestures. By making joint narratives, mother and infant come to share history and invoke community (Figures 5 and 7). The narrative form contains both the security of an ending and the exciting tension of its timing. The contrasting elements of security and tension, or familiarity and novelty, or repetition and variation, constitute the crucial vectors that give impetus to the infant's developing mind, and the one-year-old has begun to find fascination for the 'topics' of this sharing. This is the 'flow of common sense' (Figure 8). The infant's future sense may loose clarity and direction if he or she is not provided the opportunity to develop these natural skills. And a mother's future sense may become perturbed in a variety of ways. A depressed mother, for instance, seems to have trouble in precisely that way: her interactive behaviour, as we know, is less contingent and thus less meaningful to the infant, she has lost her sense of time and within a dialogical framework is


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unable to share her mental space with her infant with an even, playful grace. This difficulty of maintaining hopeful 'time in the mind' has been highlighted by many researchers as being characteristic of depression; people who suffer from depression have difficulty projecting themselves into the future, making plans, envisaging possible worlds. A depressed person lacks self esteem — he or she experiences shame in company of confident others. Gratier applied Malloch's musical acoustic analysis to talk and games between mothers and infants over the first year. She identified episodes lasting between 20 and 30 seconds presenting the universal phases of a narrative -- introduction, development, climax, and 'resolution. Recordings of the spontaneous vocal interaction of mothers who recently emigrated (from India to the U.S.) and their infants aged 2 to 6 months were compared with those of non-immigrant dyads. She analysed the spontaneous interactions of 30 dyads where the mother had recently emigrated and compared them with those of 30 nonimmigrant dyads. The immigrant dyads were less expressive in their timing than the non-immigrant dyads. They tended to present more predictable or rigid timing patterns as well as less clearly defined narrative constructions. Certain of these mothers, although they did not fulfil diagnostic criteria for clinical depression, also presented lower levels of self-esteem, clear signs of withdrawal, with lack of social support and 'cultural conflict' in their representations of mothering. This study highlights the link between the mother's sense of 'being at home' or belonging, and the self-confidence and pride that go with it, and her ability to share and negotiate coherent and meaningful experience with her infant. Most immigrants are able to adjust their ways of being and thinking so as to be in tune with their new world, and they do so by negotiating feelings and behaviors with people around them. For others, this process of rebuilding a world-view and an identity is inhibited or thwarted. Motherhood itself can bring about a certain amount of stress and identity confusion, and some immigrant mothers become "trapped" between two world-views, experiencing conflict with regard to their own identity and to the representations they have of their infants. Human consciousness is communitarian. It develops through cooperative awareness, and depends on communicating a personal narrative. The essential motive for cultural learning is a sympathetic, mimetic sense of being an actor having adventures with companions, not just imitating or sharing joint attention to objects and events. It is best to feel 'at home1 (Figures 5, 6 and 7). Getting Hold of Symbols as Cultural Tools, and Starting to Talk There are impressive gains in social awareness as children begin to speak in second year. (Trevarthen, 1988, 1990). They have fluent inventive or creative fantasy, recognising objects of technical, industrial or artistic importance; roles and postures; socio-dramatic performances with pretend emotions; moral positions. These ideas and skills are imitated from others and spontaneously displayed to portray child's personality as observed by others. The way a child gains entry to language brings out the primacy of interpersonal cognitions and their emotional regulation. Emotions enable transfer of evaluations and reinforcements to the infant and the orientation of the infant to present circumstances. They enable the infant to learn by being taught.

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Figure 7 As words are learned, they attach to the known persons in communication, to their actions or to the objects that are indicated in their shared interest and actions, and that give an account of shared memories. Different toddlers with differing parental support and differing temperaments may show preference for objects or persons as topics in their first speech (Locke, 1993). Conventional use of tools, roles and rituals of performance is mastered in the second year, beginning before speech, preparing the way for rapid learning of the maternal language (Figure 7). The change from manipulating for private gain or discovery to imitation of others' directives, indications and evaluations leads to ideas that have already been coded in words in the communication of older members of the community round the child (TomasellO, 2003). The cooperative learning of language needs flexibility of imagination, which is expressed in the pretend play that flourishes among toddlers and preschool age children (Trevarthen and Logotheti, 1987; Nadel et al., 1999). Objects and actions become assimilated into shared purposes, and this can change identity or meaning. Things can stand for other things - a banana can be a telephone (Leslie, 1987). When the desired objects or events are absent and no substitute presents itself, they may be created entirely in imagination to satisfy the motive for shared play and communication. The child can invent play actions alone, too. But all play motivated by pretense is creating meanings that are ready to be shared. The development of the child's imagination and future learning are dependent the ability to exchange points of view and imitated ideas with a companion, an ability that is deficient in an autistic child. Jacqueline Nadel shows how quickly collaborative parent-infant play transfers to communication between toddlers (Nadel and Peze, 1993). She has recorded how immediate imitation of actions and utterances is used by 18-month-olds for non-verbal negotiation of purposes and for sharing meaning, and she underlines the pleasure and humour of sharing signalled by exuberant gesture and vocal prosody. Social 'self-


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confidence1 depends on a sense of security with communication of meanings and actions, and this confidence fluctuates with developmental change (Trevarthen and Aitken, 2003). Around the middle of the second year, at 15 fo 20 months, a child has a fragile social identity, and (as in a 'replay' of the sensitivity of the 7 to 8 month-old) is acutely aware of the potential difficulties of communication with strangers (Kagan, 1981). It would appear that the imagination that is reaching out to learn how other persons categorise their experiences is sensitive to the risks of imitating without understanding. The withdrawal of a shy child into a private fantasy world may have much to teach us about the pathology of symbolic thought. Developments in preschool years show how mastery of thinking is dependent on a free and flexible regulation of contact with other minds by emotions (Figure 7). Identity and Pride, and the Shame of Misunderstanding: Emotions Beyond Attachment for Care In every human relationship the pleasure of active discovery and the mastery of experience and skill are regulated by interpersonal or moral feelings. As long as essential needs are provided for and the child is not distressed, sick or exhausted, these feelings, of pride in knowing and doing, and embarrassment or shame at not understanding or 'being out of things', are asserted powerfully in every young child. They guide the growth of experience, and they do so by emotional regulation of the growth of the brain. They are manifested out of control in disorders of mania and depression. I believe that the intensely shared pleasure of pride in knowledge and skill that others applaud, as well as the feeling of shame in failure that threatens loss of relationship and hopeless isolation, are as important to the mental health of every human being as the emotions that seek comfort and care for the body (Figure 4). Indeed, I would suggest that attachment itself, if it is a friendship and not just the very asymmetric relationship between a weak and immature 'patient' and sensitive caregiver, is animated by emotions of shared discovery and the creation of inventive art. Even the most disciplined and authoritative teaching regime requires a minimal mutual respect between teacher and taught, or its purpose is totally defeated. I suggest we need a 'circle of attachments' - of emotionally charged relationships to care and comfort givers, to places and things that foster our discoveries and activities, and to friends and companions in adventure, discovery and invention, persons who share the impulses of our thinking and acting, and of play with roles and meanings (Figure 8). I believe human relationships are motivated by innate emotions that display and evaluate shared purposes and interests, and that these emotions of 'attachment for companionship' are just as important for mental health as the emotions of attachment for care. Darwin (1872) is the acknowledged pioneer of modern studies of emotions. He sought to classify human and animal emotions according to their expressions in body attitude and movement. He did not restrict his classification of human expressions to a short list of discrete 'basic' emotions (fear, anger, surprise, sadness, joy, disgust and perhaps contempt). He included such moral qualities of motivation as 'love', 'tenderness', 'sulkiness', 'hatred', 'contempt', 'guilt', 'pride', 'shame' among those he attributed to expressions of animals and children, and he called them emotional expressions. His other terms denote different states of bodily feeling or of reaction to objects ('suffering', 'anxiety', 'grief, 'despair', 'joy', 'anger', 'fear', 'disgust'), or states of experiencing and thinking ('meditation', 'determination', 'patience', 'surprise').

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Stern (2000) has insisted on the importance for communication with infants of 'dynamic' and 'relational' emotions which cannot be described by the names of'categorical' emotions. For the dynamic emotions Stern uses the descriptive terms: "crescendo," "decrescendo," "fading", "exploding," "bursting," "elongated," "fleeting," "pulsing," "wavering," "effortful," "easy". These invite comparison with the 'sentic forms' of the musician Manfred Clynes, who attempted to identify different force curves or gesture shapes that convey momentary feelings in musical sounds (Clynes and Nettheim, 1982). Human sympathy and shared consciousness is governed by powerful emotions of pride and shame, of generosity and guilt, of moral goodness or evil. A case can be made that such 'complex emotions' have primary importance in the development of human consciousness (Draghi-Lorenz, Reddy and Costall, 2000). These feelings of human relating cannot be derived from the cognitive emotions of surprise, curiosity, and pleasure in mastery, which are appropriate for regulating actions on non-sentient objects. Emotions of satisfaction, or of disappointment and annoyance, expressed by young infants solving, or failing to solve, instrumental problems, are significant to others as manifestations of knowing and discovering 'in a human way'. They 'communicate' what is going on in the infant's mind. Evidently the 'relational' emotions of companionship are by far the most elaborate and significant for human mental growth and integration of the child into society, even though the emotions implicated in the making and breaking of attachments may have greater immediate importance in psychosomatic health and well-being. A sense of beauty, and of what looks or sounds ugly, also is a vital part of human emotion (Turner, 1991). The pleasing or disturbing properties that persons feel in empathic awareness given to objects of shared interest, especially in the appreciation of rare objects and those made artificially with special care to give them high social value, are made evident in aesthetic judgements.. Thus a carefully crafted artefact, a work of poetry or art, is made part of vital common experience. The human emotions by which cultural experience is propagated, and creativity is given moving value, appear to have evolved by elaboration of'experience seeking' and 'attachment regulating' motives emotions of subcultural species. They are matters of 'taste' that are profoundly influenced by sympathetic response to the preferences and aversions of respected persons. Art is, as Ellen Dissanayake says, the product of the intimacy that brings infants to meaning in parental care (Dissanayake, 2000), and that explains why it can be a source of solace for a trouble human spirit. All human cultural achievements arise shared meaning, even when they appear to be lonely products, of creatively dreaming or of adventurous risk-taking in thought or action. New thoughts, how an individual imagines of experiences generated by actions, make sense through the thinker sharing their originality and 'truthfulness' with others, who judge their value and 'significance'. Human effort is directed to build relationships through cooperative and inventive works. These are the reasons why a cognitive, information-processing, perception-categorising, memorising approach to human cumulative intelligence is unable to comprehend its social motivation or to perceive its intersubjective psychological foundations in evolution. The theory of cognitive modules in separate heads contrasts with a psychobiological theory of culture as a product of human will to make and understand in relationships and communities. Cultural learning is not just a cognitive achievement of the human mind. It is a new development in animal social initiative, and in ways of relating intelligently (Figure 8).


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Artists, painters, sculptors and poets, actors and musicians, explore their private discoveries in consciousness and their deepest feelings, leaving a record of what they find. Their work communicates these lived experiences. When they create in authentic relation to their feelings, they make statements that can open up our consciousness and change how we value what we experience. Scientific discovery and technical invention share with the arts a foundation in human curiosity and the capacity to convey to others the motives and excitements of finding out, or making. That is why an education that is both broad in its scope and democratic in its sharing of opportunities and findings has the most lasting value - socially and practically.

Moving, Being Moved, and Meaning

Sharing Meaning With Confidence

Figure 8 9. Educating Common Sense The Comenius Principle The 17th Century Czech educator Komensky (Comenius) led the way to an enlightened view of how children learn best. He wrote, in a book that was translated into many languages, the following: "My aim is to show, although this is not generally attended to, that the roots of all sciences and arts in every instance arise as early as in the tender age, and that on these foundations it is neither impossible nor difficult for the whole superstructure to be laid; provided always that we act reasonably as with a reasonable creature." (John Amos Comenius (1592-1671) The School of Infancy. Translated by D. Benham. London, 1858. Quoted by Quick, 1910).

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Comenius believed that older persons — parents, siblings, teachers of many kinds — naturally respond to a child's vitality and eagerness to understand. They feel they want to help. They can learn how to do so from the child, who in this is their teacher. A desire to know more and to gain skill in ways that other trusted people recognise and encourage is the defining feature of young human nature. It is the instinct that makes 'cultural learning' happen (Figures 5, 6 and 7). This may be an old and obvious idea, and Comenius expresses it well. Nevertheless, intricately rational and busily occupied adult minds often deny it, forgetting how they themselves learned. The inventive curiosity and love of social attention of the young child is easily seen. But many who assume authority and expertise have difficulty accepting the innateness of human sympathy in action and knowledge, probably because there is no obvious rational explanation for it — nothing in the physical or biological world to compare it with, no computational system that can simulate it. Even in academic psychology, intentions and feelings of the young child are given less attention, simply because they do not fit scientific models of how minds work. This neglect by those who claim expertise can have inhibiting effects on the practice of applied psychology, and on the training of teachers. We do not know how an imaginative sympathy for the human-created view of the world could be born in the human mind, so it is easier to conceive it as constructed from experience, by instruction from outside. Thus is the adult world led to teach, but not to learn from the child. Lev Vygotsky (1978), Michael Halliday (1975), Jerome Bruner (1983), John Locke (1993), and Michael Tomasello (2003) have all emphasised that a child picks up words by noticing what other persons do with it, aided by shared human interest. Acts negotiating social participation with emotion come earlier in development than intention-directing 'protoimperatives1, just as 'person-person games' came before 'person-person-object games' in the middle of the first year (Trevarthen and Hubley, 1978). The early stages of'grammar' learning, getting the syntactic and functional conventions right for sentences, is not simply a matter of coordinating vocalisations with intentions and attentions - requests, pointing, showing, giving. It has concern for human feelings and sensitivities which form the backing texture of all live communication and 'experiencing together'. 'Joint attention', strongly associated with the picking up words, is not just a convergence of lines of sight and directions of instrumental action. It involves 'mutual attention' as well (Reddy, 2003) ~ subtle awareness of moods and purposes, of instantaneous shifts of interest and emotional reactions that the infant has practised with familiar playful company through the first year. Meaning and language continue to grow in personal relationships of shared pleasure and trust (Figure 7). Children and adults alike are easily caught in dramatic make-believe, identifying the roles of'characters'. Infants play with emotional narratives long before they talk, and toddlers create dramas together before they have any demonstrable 'theory of mind'. This gives both the reason and the means for language learning. From 2 to 6 children make things, tell and listen to stories, create drama, acting fantastic parts, dance and exhibit all sorts of musical skills. Their appetite for cultural forms of life is enormous and their perception of human roles is rich and penetrating.


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Teaching Well and Teaching Badly: Teachable Learners Need Learnable Teachers Human learning requires the young to develop deep insight into the thinking behind the moves that elders make, and into the expressions of approval or disapproval that signal the value of experiences. The young learn an historically established cosmology and meanings that were invented among ancestors who were intensely aware of one another's interests and purposes. Discoveries of new ideas and ways of acting are especially attractive to human minds, even to those that are very young and inexperienced. This curiosity for meaning has innate motivation, and it needs an exceptional emotional sensitivity that goes far beyond the expression of immediate bodily needs. The process can build in comfort, confidence and confiding in a loving family and community, or it can fall prey to fear and distress, loneliness and self-doubt. This is why infants crave the consistent sensitive company of an affectionate parent or other person who can be trusted to sustain the shared memories that have been discovered in their company. Research inspired by Vygotsky has shown how an expert and novice interact together in the 'Zone of Proximal Development', where, by collaborating with the expert, the novice becomes able to achieve a goal that would otherwise be impossible by his or her effort alone (Vygotsky, 1978). Wood and Bruner (1976) identified techniques of'scaffolding1 by which adults assist a child's efforts in solving a problem or completing a task (Figures 6 and 7). Rogoff and colleagues contrast 'adult-run' and 'child-run' ways of teaching and describe a 'community-of-learners' model where all share responsibility for learning (Rogoff et al., 2003). In many cultures 'intent participation' in meaningful and immediately useful activities is the way children become able to contribute to their community and culture (Rogoff et al., 2003). This contrasts with the 'instruction' model of education in industrialised and literate cultures where the value of what is taught may not be immediately evident to the learner. Although learning takes place in any, and indeed all, kinds of educational practice, the community-of-learners model has been shown to promote in the pupil greater co-ordination with others, and responsibility for his or her own learning and motivation. Where the adults are supportive and provide leadership, rather than controlling all interactions, the participants work together, with each may serve as a potential resource for the others. The degree to which all are actively trying to learn and understand determines how satisfying a learning environment will be. The teacher should be prepared to learn continuously from the learner, being 'guided, directed and inspired' by the children's understanding. Bruner (1996) conceives this kind of classroom organisation as a subcommunity of mutual learners with the teacher orchestrating the proceedings'. He highlights the crucial role of the school, as an an institution that judges a child's performance and subsequently facilitates a process of self-evaluation. "What characterises human selfhood is the construction of a conceptual system that organises, as it were, a 'record' of agentive encounters with the world, a record that is related to the past but that is also extrapolated into the future - self with history and with possibility" (Bruner, 1996, p.36). "The management of self-esteem is never simple and never settled, and its state is affected powerfully by the availability of supports provided from outside. These included...above all the chance for discourse that permits one to find out why or how things didn't work out as planned." (Bruner, 1996, p.37) As in the sharing of experience that grows between an infant and a parent, the timing and quality of expression in the communication are important in teaching and learning with

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older children. Erickson (1996) has explored how timing and 'contextualization cues' (such as volume and pitch shifts in the voice and in body motions) function in classroom discussion to help participants to anticipate impending courses of action: "Timing appears to be what holds the whole ecology of interaction together in its performance. The relative temporal location of the various actions of interlocutors is an important aspect of the ordering of the collective activity of conversation in both its reciprocal and its complementary aspects..." (Erickson, 1996, p.34). The interaction is held together by 'cadential patterns' that produce 'points of emphasis in the verbal and nonverbal behaviour stream' (loc. cit., p. 54). The members of the group collectively organise their attention and thus contribute to listening and speaking in a smooth, coherent manner that is cognitively stimulating. It can be hypothesised that, in cases where the teaching is not effective, the smooth running of turn-taking behaviour within an organised temporal framework will break down. Robb and colleagues have undertaken a study in Scotland to explore ways of analysing teacher-talk or 'teacherese' in a small class of young children (Robb et al., 2003). The aim was to identify characteristics of communication that can facilitate or impede learning and retention. Teacher-pupil interactions were recorded on video with sound and analysed in detail, to identify key characteristics of satisfying and effective communication. A target group of 8 teachers, who were selected by their colleagues and consultant Educational Psychologists as particularly skilled communicators in the classroom, were compared with a control group of 7 experienced teachers on a standardised teaching activity with groups of pupils matched for age and ability. All were teachers of Primary 4-7, with equal levels of experience and general competence. Each teacher chose 6-8 pupils from their class to take part in a group discussion. Teachers were asked to introduce the following imaginary task to the pupils and to orchestrate a discussion in their usual way: "You are to spend a week on an uninhabited island with a partner. You have to find the buried treasure. Plan everything that you will take with you for the entire week." Audio and video recordings were made of each group discussing the project. Five minute excerpts were chosen for analysis by the researcher who was blind to the categorisation of teachers. The video tape was analysed for teachers' contact, mood, verbal and non-verbal initiatives and responses to pupils. Discourse analysis was also employed to identify types of comments. The audiotapes were analysed for length and frequency of turns, timing, phrasing, pitch and tone of teacher/pupil vocalisations. Although there was no overall difference between targets and controls in their positive responses to pupils, the target group were more attentive to the pupils and also more lively and humorous. They made more supportive approving responses and higher levels of positive initiations to pupils than the controls. Target teachers also made more accomodating, reflective and metacognitive interventions. Voice spectrograph analysis demonstrated that the target group showed more reciprocal attunement with their pupils in terms of pitch plot contours and phrasing. They were also more sucessful in eliciting pupil participation.


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The study indicates that satisfying and productive communication in a classroom should embody the same principles of reciprocity, mutuality, attunement, regular timing and turntaking behaviour that have been found sustain parents' communication with infants. The same principles of intersubjectivity apply. Young children learn naturally in dynamic relationships of admiration and trust. Thus, the living emotions in the teacher's voice, language and non-verbal behaviour may be as important as the timeless facts and routine exercises of thought and skill he or she may be wanting to transmit. These rules of relating apply for an infant learning at home with family, in preschool, in classroom instruction through primary and secondary school, and in the university. They are at work in informal recreational learning, too. They also promote individual effort and the discovery of achievement through experience of'flow 1 in mastery of difficult tasks.

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Locke, J. L. (1993) The Child's Path to Spoken Language. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard U. Press Malloch, S. (1999) Mother and infants and communicative musicality. In "Rhythms, Musical Narrative, and the Origins of Human Communication". Musicae Scientiae, Special Issue, 19992000, pp. 29-57. Liege: European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music.. Morley, I. (2002) Evolution of the physiological and neurological capacities for music. Cambridge Archeological Journal, 12(2): 195-216. Murray, L. & Trevarthen, C. (1985). Emotional regulation of interactions between two-month-olds and their mothers. In Field, T M & Fox, N A (eds) Social Perception in Infants, (pp. 177-198) Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Murray, L., & Andrews, L. (2000). The Social Baby: Understanding Babies' Communication from Birth. Richmond, Surrey, UK: CP Publishing. Murray, L., & Cooper, P. J. (eds.) (1997). Postpartum Depression and Child Development. New York: Guilford Press. Nadel, J. & Peze, A. (1993). Immediate imitation as a basis for primary communication in toddlers and autistic children. In J. Nadel and L. Camioni (Eds.), New Perspectives in Early Communicative Development, (pp. 139-156). London: Routledge. Nadel, J., Guerini, C., Peze, A., & Rivet, C. (1999). The evolving nature of imitation as a format for communication. In J. Nadel & G. Butterworth (Eds.), Imitation in Infancy, (pp. 209-234). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagy, E. & Molnar, P. (2003) Homo imitans or Homo provocans? Human imprinting model of neonatal imitation. Infant Behavior and Development, (in press). Nelson, K. (1996) Language in cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press. Panksepp , J. & Bernatzky , G. (2002) Emotional sounds and the brain: The neuro-affective foundations of musical appreciation. Behavioural Processes 60: 133-155 Panksepp, J. & Burgdorf, J. (2003) "Laughing" rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy? Physiology & Behavior, 79: 533- 547. Papousek, M. (1996). Intuitive parenting: A hidden source of musical stimulation in infancy. In I. Deliege and J. Sloboda (Eds.), Musical Beginnings: Origins and Development of Musical Competence, (pp. 88-112). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Papousek, M. & Papousek, H. (1981). Musical elements in the infant's vocalization: Their significance for communication, cognition, and creativity. In L. P. Lipsitt and C. K. Rovee-Collier (eds.), Advances in Infancy Research, Vol. 1, pp. 163-224. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Quick, R. H. (1910) Essays on Educational Reformers. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Ratner, N. & Bruner, J. S.(1978) Games, social exchange and the acquisition of language. Journal of Child Language, 5: 391-400.

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Reddy, V. (2000) Coyness in early infancy. Developmental Science, 3(2): 186-192. Reddy, V. (200 Ib) Mind knowledge in infancy: understanding attention and intention in the first year. In, G. J. Bremner and A. Fogel (eds.) Blackwell Handbook of Infancy Research, pp. 241-264, Oxford: Blackwell Reddy, V. (2003) On being the object of attention: implications for self-other consciousness. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 7(9): 397-402 Reddy, V. (200la) Infant clowns: the interpersonal creation of humour in infancy. Enfance 3, 247-256 Rizzolatti, G., & Arbib, M. A. (1998). Language within our grasp. Trends in the Neurosciences, 21: 188-194. Robb, L., Simpson, R., Forsyth, P. & Trevarthen, C. (2003) Satisfying and effective teacher-class communication. (In preparation. Presented to the Early Child Education Research Association Conference, Glasgow, September, 2003). Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press. Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Arauz, R. M., Correa-Chavez, M., & Angelillo, C. (2003) Firsthand learning through intent participation. Annual Review of Psychology, 54: 175-203. Scaife, M. & Bruner, J. S. (1975) The capacity for joint visual attention in the infant. Nature, 253: 265-6. Schore, A. N. (1994) Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Selby, J. M. & Bradley, B. S. (2003). Infants in groups: A paradigm for study of early social experience. Human Development, 46:197-221 Stern, D. N. (2000): The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Development Psychology. (Originally published in 1985. Paperback Second Edition, with new Introduction) Basic Books, New York. Tomasello, M. (2003) Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Trehub, S. E. (1990). The perception of musical patterns by human infants: The provision of similar patterns by their parents. In M. A. Berkley and W. C. Stebbins (eds.), Comparative Perception; Vol. 1, Mechanisms, (pp. 429-459). New York: Wiley. Trevarthen, C. (1977). Descriptive analyses of infant communication behavior. In H. R. Schaffer (Ed.), Studies in Mother-Infant Interaction: The Loch Lomond Symposium, (pp. 227-270). London, Academic Press.


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Trevarthen, C. (1980) The foundations of intersubjectivity: Development of interpersonal and cooperative understanding in infants. In D. Olsen (ed.), The Social Foundations of Language and Thought: Essays in Honor of J. S. Bruner, pp , 316-342. New York: W. W. Norton.. Trevarthen, C. (1988). Universal cooperative motives: How infants begin to know language and skills of culture. In G. Jahoda and I.M. Lewis (Eds.), Acquiring Culture: Ethnographic Perspectives on Cognitive Development, (pp. 37-90). London: Croom Helm. Trevarthen, C. (1990). Signs before speech. In T. A. Sebeok and J. Umiker-Sebeok (Eds.), The Semiotic Web, 1989, (pp. 689-755). Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter. Trevarthen, C. (1993). The self born in intersubjectivity: An infant communicating. In U. Neisser (Ed.), The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-Knowledge, (pp. 121-173). New York: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. (1999). Musicality and the Intrinsic Motive Pulse: Evidence from human psychobiology and infant communication. In "Rhythms, Musical Narrative, and the Origins of Human Communication". Musicae Scientiae, Special Issue, 1999-2000, pp. 157-213. Liege: European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Trevarthen, C. (200la). The neurobiology of early communication: Intersubjective regulations in human brain development. In A. F. Kalverboer and A. Gramsbergen (Eds.), Handbook on Brain and Behavior in Human Development. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, (in press). Trevarthen, C. (2001b): Intrinsic motives for companionship in understanding: Their origin, development and significance for infant mental health. International Journal of Infant Mental Health, 22(1-2): 95-131. Trevarthen, C. (2002) Origins of musical identity: evidence from infancy for musical social awareness. In, MacDonald, R., David J. Hargreaves, D. J. and Dorothy Miell, D. (Eds.) Musical Identities, (pp. 21-38). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trevarthen, C. & Aitken, K. J. (2001) Infant intersubjectivity: Research, theory, and clinical applications. Annual Research Review. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 42(1) 3-48. Trevarthen, C. & Aitken, K. J. (2003) Regulation of brain development and age-related changes in infants' motives: The developmental function of "regressive" periods. In: Regression Periods in Human Infancy, Heimann M, Plooij F, eds. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 107-184 Trevarthen, C. & Hubley, P. 1978. Secondary Intersubjectivity: Confidence, confiding and acts of meaning in the first year. In A. Lock (Ed.), Action, Gesture and Symbol, (pp. 183-229) London: Academic Press. Trevarthen, C. & Logotheti, K. (1987) First symbols and the nature of human knowledge. In J. Montangero, A. Tryphon & S. Dionnet (eds.), Symbolisme et Connaissance/ Symbolism and Knowledge, Cahier No. 8, Jean Piaget Archives Fondation. (pp. 65-92). Geneva: Jean Piaget Archives Fondation.

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Trevarthen, C. & Malloch, S. (2002) Musicality and music before three: Human vitality and invention shared with pride. Zero to Three, September 2002, Vol. 23, No, 1: 10-18. Trevarthen, C. (2003) Language development: Mechanisms in the brain. In: G. Adelman and B. H. Smith (eds) Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, 3rd Edition, with CD-ROM. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Trevarthen, C., Kokkinaki, T. & Fiamenghi, G. A. Jr. (1999). What infants' imitations communicate: With mothers, with fathers and with peers. In J. Nadel and G. Butterworth (Eds.), Imitation in Infancy, (pp. 127-185) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tronick, E. Z. and Weinberg, M. K. (1997) Depressed mothers and infants: Failure to form dyadic states of consciousness. In L. Murray, P.J. Cooper (eds.) Postpartum Depression and Child Development, (pp. 54-81) Guilford Press, New York. Tronick, E. Z., Als H., Adamson L., Wise S., and Brazelton T. B. (1978) The infant's response to entrapment between contradictory messages in face-to face interaction. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 17: 1-13 Turner, F. (1991). Beauty: The Value of Values. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Turner, M. (1996). The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tzourio-Mazoyer N, De Schonen S, Crivello F, Reutter B, et al. (2002) Neural correlates of woman face processing by 2-month-old infants. Neuroimage 15:454-461 Uzgiris, I. (1984). Imitation in infancy: Its interpersonal aspects. In M. Perlmutter (ed.), The Minnesota Symposia on Child psychology: Vol. 17. Parent-Child Interactions and Parent-Child Relations in Child development, (pp. 1-32). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Edited by M. Cole, V. Steiner, S. Scribner and E. Souberman. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Wood, D. and Bruner, J. (1976) The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89-100.


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COLWYN TREVARTHEN is Professor Emeritus of the University of Edinburgh. He has developed interest in a wide range of subjects in earlier research, including the relationship between brain mechanisms of perception and those for action, and the origins of intersubjectivity ~ awareness between persons. His current research focuses on the foundations of 'communicative musicality' in the companionship between infants and adults. Evidenced in the rhythms and melodies of reciprocal communication, his work demonstrates the intrinsic nature of mutual musical expression and response, and their effects on emotional and cognitive growth. Through his unique perspective which honors the pervasive power of embodied moving and its relationship to physical and mental processes, Trevarthen has shown how shared participation in vocal and action games contributes to cultural understanding, meaning making, and a sense of belonging.


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"How can good ideas survive in a market society and a post-disciplinary order? We want to learn and not to be taught... We want to meet without being touched... Still we should develop our personality through learning together... We have individual systems, knowledge buffets and general truth factories. Education is high on the political agenda, yet the first item to be transferred to the transit zone whenever possible. So let's envision education and learning embedded in a humanist and ecological society. And move it into a zone of urgency. In the labyrinth of reality. Routing the paths of knowledge and information. Jumping from the learning express to the red zone of fun and switching from the shopping malls of knowledge to the pains of focus and concentration." Marleen Wynants

A Learning Zone of One's Own M. Tokoro andL. Steels (Eds.) 1OS Press, 2004

'3

4

Pretend Play as Learning: Case Studies from the Home Marleen Wynants

Pretend play by children can give us important clues to how the human mind works. Since most of the pretend play occurs at home, parents can be privileged observers and interviewers even if their main role lies in providing the necessary context to enable imaginative games. As one of these privileged observers, for about eleven years now, the continuing pretend play of my daughters reveals that it is a crucial medium in the process of learning, language, memory and psychosocial behaviour. There's emotional grounding involved and it seems intrinsically motivated but that doesn't explain yet where it comes from. Thus evoking the following questions: Why do children engage in pretend play? What is the role of pretend play in social learning and personality development? In what ways can it be an optimal learning context and a wonderful learning tool? In the following pages we will try to answer these questions by zooming in on diverse examples, techniques, core elements and functions of pretend play.

And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, "Nurse! Do let's pretend that I'm a hungry hyena, and you 're a bone!" - The Annotated Alice, Lewis Carroll (1998) Was Alice conscious of the effect her exclamation would have on her nurse? Probably!.. Lewis Carroll's favourite character is the queen of play and pretending. Not one single reader has doubts about the imagined world that Alice explores and most readers will jump happily into the rabbit hole with her or peek through the looking glass to zoom in on the odd behaviours of the characters of the explored world. Just like millions of young and older readers embarked happily on the Hogwarth Express on platform 9 3/4 in Harry Potter's London. Just like we all love to set our minds free and follow the stream of thoughts expressed by a character in an opera, a theatre play, a novel or a poem. And even if the

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4. Pretend Play as Learning

characters or their actions are not real, the emotions always are. With the same ease, we launch ourselves into interior narratives or become completely absorbed by or embedded in something we do. For children this happens all the time and without effort whereas adults require some exercise in focus and concentration before they can step into the flow.

Ezra (9 months) filling the empty bottle with sand and drinking it. Roses, Catalunya 1992. What makes children engage in pretend play? What are the deep aspirations that motivate people to make believe, to start pretending? Young children don't pretend that they will do something. Instead, they believe something and they act accordingly.

1. Baby Let's Play House Pretend play is different from a state of mind like belief. Beliefs can lock us into a way of perceiving that filters reality and hence they can condition our actual experience of life, of reality. Pretend play should rather be seen as the acting out of temporary beliefs. Precisely because of this, pretend play is an often-used tactic in therapy since it offers a context without shame or guilt. The pretending mind is a Utopia for outraging acts and everyday rebellions. But long before we consciously engage in make believe to act out our emotions and beliefs, we use pretend play as a way to make sense of our body, our mind and the world we live in. Pretending is more than just a mere distracting characterisation of the mind. When a baby is pushing some colourful Duplo bricks around while saying "bbbrrrr..." the baby is not merely « playing car » but exploring the world and learning to represent it. The same happens when children run around in the supermarket, pausing to wait on an invisible friend or galloping happily towards their favourite displays. Children engaging in pretend playing do not merely set up a simulation of the real world because as we will see in the coming examples, the dynamic properties of their play are very different from the ones manifested in the world they represent. The nature and purpose of pretend play to train skills and to acquire and organise knowledge has long been studied by theorists, such as Darwin (1877), Piaget (1962), Vygotsky (1967), and Bruner (1976). Still it is only recently that pretend play has become a study object in cognitive science by researchers like Alan M. Leslie (1987), R.D. Kavanaugh (1998) and Lillard (2001).


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Infants develop their first representations of reality in a such way that the characteristics of objects and people mix with their own emotional projections on them. When they engage in pretend play, they create a place for the introspective and the expressive self. In this nonthreatening setting they nourish the motivation and involvement necessary for learning about ways of dealing with reality, with their peers, with their parents, with teachers, with emotions, with cognition. As I observe my children playing, the thing that always strikes me, is the concentration and the joy that accompanies their playing. The Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) studied the fulfilling experience of 'flow' that comes to children playing games, to scientific researchers engaged in experiments, to people in conversation, when walking the mountains or making love. These experiences all entail the same sense of happiness and joy through the loss of self-consciousness.

Ezra (4) and Dylan (5) playing chic in Paris, 1996.

The third issue addressed in this article is the role of pretend play as an optimal learning context and learning tool. When observing the various kinds of pretend play that my children engage in at home, it struck me that a major part of their play is about experimenting, about creating representations and organisation, about unlearning and breaking rules. Through pretend play my children nurse their curiosity and try things out. In that way, pretend play is a pretty pure scientific inquiry. But what do they learn ? Through the safe context of pretend play, children work on their motoric, perceptual, emotional, social and conceptual organisation. They also engage in problem solving, developing memory, language and communication skills like attention, expression and negotiation. They explore old and new experiences through mingling facts with fiction, through looking at reality from different perspectives. Last but not least, it looks like an optimal experience since there are a lot of physical, biological and evolutionary games involved at all levels. The inevitable question that rises while observing pretend play in the home environment is: What is the role of the parents? Especially at a time when more and more people start getting convinced that we will need creative minds to solve the problems of the world, developing the children's imagination might be the first step into that direction. As a mother or a father, one can be an observer, a planner and a model. Nurturing diversity is about the most important thing we can do and accepting the child's invitations to play and to leam

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with them is part of that. A home can be a private school, a library, a communications centre, a restaurant, a world kitchen, a laundry, a window on nature, with hotel facilities, a hospital, infirmary, meditation and relaxation centre, transport service, sports activities, music conservatory, repair shop, creative workshop... Parents can provide their children with different windows on the world, and teaching them everything you know yourself, is a good start. Next to the home base, the interaction with other children, learning through peers, interacting with real and imagined friends will prove to be of major importance in the development of the child's personality.

2. Pre-Pretend Play Very early on in life, babies 'notion of cause and effect is own action based. They touch a mobile, and something happens. They engage in the exchange of facial expressions with their mother, father or caretakers and they quickly starts making different sounds and eliciting different reactions from their environment. What follows, as early at one years of age, is a period characterised by the sheer pleasure of pointing, naming and categorising things. Later, when pretend play appears, the child learns to shift the meanings of things and to "do as if. A chair can become a horse or a train and happy or sad emotions will be expressed according to the imaginative game the children want to play. The ability to pretend depends on the capacity to represent absent objects and situations, a capacity said to emerge during the second year of life. But already long before that, other playful activities prepare the way: joint story-telling rituals, singing rhymes, taking turns in babbling, mothers and fathers acting silly and pretending, and one of the first collaborative games: Playing rough & tumble. Through playing rough & tumble, children learn to anticipate and develop motor skills. They also explore their emotions and those of the people they are most intimate with. They learn about communication skills like giving / sharing attention, turn-taking and guessing the reactions and intentions of others. Yet other functions of rough & tumble play are the construction of games, the development of narratives and the imaginative creativity involved. Last but not least, in playing rough & tumble, infants express their attachment to their beloved ones just like lovers do when they engage in the very particular rough & tumble play called making love. Most infants, like most of the baby animals, like to play rough & tumble. My children took up the role of an animal, like a dog or cat or lion to explore their immediate environment horizontally and vertically, and try out the affective reactions of their parents and family members they are most intimate with. They change roles according to the flux of the expressed emotions and the animal behaviours they associate with it. From pre-school until the age of 10 my daughters could be seen crawling under tables, stroking their heads against each other, crawling up next to me or their favourite uncle and purring their heads off until I asked them to become real again and snap out of their game. Most of the times the rough & tumble game is just a playful way for getting attention, physical comfort, or love At other times it was a rather provocative game or just another way of retreating into a world that was a lot more exciting than witnessing adults talk after dinner. Sometimes, while either Ezra or Dylan were again barking their beautiful heads off somewhere near me, I had to think of Bertha, the eldest daughter of farming neighbours of my grandparents. The story goes that before they went out in the fields, they would tie Bertha to the table next to the


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family dog. After a few weeks, the child barked as loud and convincingly as the dog and not the postman, nor my own grandmother could make the distinction between the girl and the dog's barking. Was the girl pretending? I doubt it very much. Bertha did start talking around the age of 6 when started going to school. Peek-a-Boo Peek-a-boo is a less formal, early form of hide-and-seek. It involves a whole gamma of emotions amongst which surprise, fear, mock-fear and joy, that are shared by the players and the bystanders. A comparable game is "playing sandwich", where parents roll their kids into a blanket and pretend they are making their favourite sandwich. Sometimes the parents act in silence, sometimes they talk aloud and explain what they are doing. Of course, the real fun part comes when the mother or father actually pretends to start eating the sandwich. With the predictable squeaks, laughter and comforting hugs afterwards. Again in this game the children and parents can explore their mutual attachment and a whole range of imaginative ideas and creative expressions to manifest this.

Dylan (I) ignoring my grandfather hiding himself. When he pops out, she will act surprised. Geel, 1992

In playing these games, parents never have to explicitly teach their children how to do it, but by doing it themselves and involving their children, children pick it up spontaneously. Imitating the behaviour of other people is one of the child's most powerful tools for learning the whole range of expressions, body language and verbal language. And humour. Yes! The cognitive phenomenon of understanding and producing humour comes in quite early. The earliest forms of humour emerge, when a certain behaviour doesn't fit the context, and when the children realise that this is done on purpose. One of the first things that made my baby daughters really laugh - and that was before they were one year old was when I put their sootier backwards in my mouth or one of their hats on my head. At these moments they couldn't refrain themselves from bursting out laughing. This was definitely the funniest thing they had ever seen.

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Babies and infants watch and hear you do something and later, some minutes, some hours, some days, some months later, when you are not around, they do the same. And not only the same, but also much more.

3. Imaginary roles for Animated things One of the strongest characteristics of young children, is maybe their spontaneous capacity to animate things. Some of the objects that surround us, are there to make us mobile, to protect us, to communicate, to prepare food and to eat it. But there are even much more objects that help us relax, sleep, dream, love and feel loved. Some of them are souvenirs or witnesses of particular moments in the past and just by looking at them or touching them, or smelling them, we set our memories going and create moods and inner visions. That's how we get attached to objects in an emotional way. In order to avoid getting upset and emotionally off-balanced by objects that get thrown out, stolen or lost, Sarat Maharaj, art historian and co-director of Documenta XI, told me: "To me things never get lost or stolen, they are simply not there anymore". It's a nice way of trying to cope with it, but if this will work for a child that has lost its favourite blanket or cherished stuffed animal, I don't know. The difference with young children injecting objects with emotional characteristics is that these objects originally are completely free of emotional memories, because the memory is still in full development. It's really a pure form of animating the inanimate and only later on, when they have been around quite a while, the objects get emotional connotations associated with memory.

TUMBLE AND DRY One day I picked up Dylan's birthday pet and by the look-and-feel of it, I decided it needed a bath. So I took the little stuffed tiger called Boo to the kitchen and was on the verge of putting him into the washing machine when Dylan (3) came near. Dylan: What are you doing with Boo? Me: He needs a bath! (Whereupon I put him in the machine) Dylan (almost crying): Don't! Please! He 'II die! Take him out! Me: Don't worry, he 'II come out fine and....clean! Dylan (still frightened): I don't care! I want Boo back! You 're gonna drown him! Me: Do you want to lick him clean? Dylan: (laughs) Um... No, but we could give him a bath. There was no escape. I took him out of the machine, we filled up a washing basin and gave Boo a nice bath with real shampoo, carefully avoiding to put soap in his eyes...

Because there are so many emotions projected into these objects, they have become far more than what they seem to represent at first sight. Stuffed animals are for a lot of children


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the main characters in their assimilation of the world, although most of the time they are transitional. The first detachment babies experience is from their mother. So they attach themselves to one or to some objects - real and imaginary -, to finally detach themselves from these objects too when they come more socially involved in close friendships. The animation of objects by children was closely studied at the psychosocial background of attachment figures and behaviours like "agoraphobia" (Antony Storr, 1987). Studies of the early emotional development of children show that when attachment figures are unreliable or absent, instead of developing increasing confidence, the child will start regarding the world as a frightening and unpredictable place into which it is not safe to venture alone without a supporting arm. Of course, there will always be people like Linus from Charles Schulz's Peanuts whose life seems to depend on a worn out blanket. To Linus his blanket is his proteases, his dance and play partner in rough-and-tumble plays, his protector, his trustful audience and a handy tool when drooling and crying is involved. No wonder it's hard to detach from an object like that because finding all these characteristics in one real person, will always turn out to be a disappointing experience no matter how hard we may try to fool ourselves into it. Children are not alone in this symbolic game. Adults too "fall in love" with objects that evoke strong or positive emotions or embody emotional memories. The fact that Coco Chanel (Tisseron 1999) started sewing copper buttons on a lot of her designs, was due to a former relationship she had with an officer. The skirts of Jean-Paul Gaulthier got their shape not from the design table but were transferred from his memory of the woman who took care of him during his childhood to his working table. What could have turned out into a personal fetishism got transferred into creativity, whereas on the other hand, clothes by Chanel and Gaulthier can become fetishist objects for their buyers. Some people talk about particular objects in their house as if they were family. For others, trees, a park, a house or a monument can have the same affective value as the one they attribute to people. A striking example of this was right after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in September 2001. People in Manhattan were reacting emotionally and in shock. "They are gone!" a friend of mine working in Hell's Kitchen exclaimed on the phone. "Marleen! What are we going to do without them?" Thus we keep injecting objects with affective and symbolic characteristics throughout our lives. It all starts when children of about two or three years old set out to explore the fact that other people have independent minds. The "Other" comes in, a crucial step in the development of the "Self. Animating objects is a way of tuning in [or attuning to] with others, with life, with nature. Children engaging in pretend play will transpose habits and objects to other places, times and psychological states and the lived experience is disconnected from its usual context. Moreover they can pretend about the identity of an object, of oneself, of another person, of a place, an event, a situation. (Flavell, Miller and Miller (1993) Objects playing a part in children's pretend plays, do change in function and in characteristics. "Let's pretend this is our house, okay?" The house referred to may be a line drawn in the sand, a wooden bench in the garden or a specific part of the carpet in the living room. A few minutes later, the game may change. One of the children may suggest something like: "The house now becomes a shop and the garage will be the bedroom of the shopkeeper, okay?" The other children are free to agree with this or not. If so, the game goes on, if not, parallel plays will probably develop. Most of the dolls and stuffed animals but also stones, bags and books gathered in our house

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throughout the sometimes got didn't like but shooting at the

years, sooner or later had a soul—some for a few minutes, others for years. I quite rude to some of the stuffed animals that I, for one or another reason, there was this particular case that changed my attitude and made me stop imagined world of my daughters with arrows poisoned with realism.

DON'T BE CRUEL There was this awful stuffed cat called Tinny, with little blue misshapen eyes and a realistic kinky imitative fur and a ragged tail that I thought was the most ugly thing I had ever seen. Ezra (7) saved it from drowning in a pool of other animals at her cousin's attic, the place where a lot of stuffed animals go when they die. Countless times I/irmly picked her up, threw her in the furthest corner or close to the nearest dustbin. Dylan and Ezra didn 't understand why I didn 't like her and came up with a successful strategy. One day I was in the bathroom ranging clothes and overheard a conversation that I was meant to hear: Ezra: Look, Tinny is sad. Dylan: Well Tinny what's the matter? Did some of the animals say ugly things to you again? Ezra (with a high pitched voice): No, I'm used to that. But I'm really afraid your mum is going to throw me away. Dylan: Why? Ezra (with a high pitched voice): Dylan: It's because she doesn 't know you.

Because

she

doesn't

like

me.

Ezra (with a high pitched voice): I know, but she doesn't want to get to know me. Every time I get close to her, she throws me with the Duplo 's or in the bag with stuff for the basement. Dylan: But you take care of the little animals! And remember the day that you made Ezra happy again after she had fallen down and hurt her knee? Ezra (with a high pitched voice): Well, maybe she doesn't know these things. Somebody should tell her. She sees my ragged fur and she wants to get rid of me. Dylan (serious): There is nothing we can do about that Ezra (serious): No. But we would all be very sad if you were gone Tinny. Ezra (with a high pitched voice): Thank you, but please protect me because I'm really afraid. Dylan: Don't worry Tinny, we will have a serious talk with her. Ezra: Can we play now?

\ lowered my head and silently crept down the stairs. Tinny is still around, and I still pick her up with two fingers from the ground. t now I put her down more carefully and I don't throw her around anymore because she's getting really old, her fur has become even


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looser and she looks more ragged than before, but she earned her respect and I learned my lesson. As parents we can provide the necessary context to make pretend play possible, and to enhance it. Whereas I did my share in the building of camps and tents and providing props, I rarely took part in the games that were played in the camps and tents. My children could do very well without me although sometimes they did invite me to come in and have something to eat - realising very quickly that imaginative food wasn't as attractive to me than real cookies were. Or to have me around for a while, just being there, and when they got what they wanted, they would tell me explicitly that I could leave the premises, so that they could go on with their "real play". As children grow older, their pretend play becomes like staged performances, in which the children act like directors, scene builders, providers of delicate and carefully created props and always multiple roles. BOA TSMAN 'S BIRTHDA Y Scene: Birthday party thrown for Ezra's stuffed bear, called Boatsman. Participants: Ezra, Dylan, their father- Jan, a huge brown bear called Boatsman, some twenty other stuffed animals and me. During the years Boatsman, being huge and flexible, has served as Ezra's pillow, her best pall in sad times, as an authority, comparable to the owl in stories like Winnie the Pooh or Bambi. And Boatsman also has a silly streak and likes being dressed as a girl, at least that's what he pretends... We gathered in Dylan's room where all the animals were sitting in a circle, Boatsman next to Ezra with a paper crown on his head. Jan: How old is Boatsman getting? Ezra: Ask him. He's old enough to tell you. Jan: How old are you Boatsman? Boatsman (through Ezra): 56years old! Me: I hadn 't thought you were already that old! Boatsman (through Ezra): You should know! It was you who brought me here, wasn 't it? Me: Right, I'm sorry Boatsman. Boatsman (through Ezra): Tell me the story again, will you? Me: Well, I went to the Ikea woods when Ezra was a few weeks old and there I saw you and asked you to come with me. There were a lot of brothers and sisters of you out there. Boatsman (through Ezra): I know, my family is really big. We keep in touch by letters. Well, where are the presents? Dylan (speaking for all the stuffed animals and doing different Here! Here! Mine first! Jan: I forgot to bring a present.

voices alternately):

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Piglet (a little pig talking through Dylan): That's OK! You can help unwrap mine! Jan: Thank you. Ezra had wrapped up tens of little toys into presents and we had to sit through the whole unwrapping scene with all the stuffed animals giving comments on what the others offered. Some of the more impatient guests were really offended that other guests would offer things like a broken little windmill or a long time neglected and unfinished drawing. At some point Dylan got angry because Ezra had wrapped up one of her favourite Playmobil characters as a present, thinking that way that it would get transferred to Ezra's room, which Ezra denied of course. For some of the animals, the major characters let's say, Ezra had even provided various handmade birthday cards and drawings. To everybody's surprise I came up with an oven warm home made birthday cake, which raised the fun factor and turned everything into a party. We sang, Ezra blew Boatsman's candles, we all had a piece of cake and we still talk about that party as we talk about some of our own birthday parties. The alternation between the real and the imaginative proved to be no problem although the adults involved did have to make an extra effort not to ruin the party with too much realistic small talk...

4. Building Physical and Mental Representations

Ezra (9) arranging the set for a bunch of miniature animals. Provence, 2002.

LET'S SKIP THE PREPARING OF FOOD, IT'S NO FUN Scene: Ezra (9) & Dylan (10) playing with Playmobil miniature dolls, tools and furniture. Ezra: My animals are home. They are eating. Dylan (through a little man called Herman): What did you prepare for them?


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Ezra (through a little nameless woman): Oh, there was some stuff in their stable. Shall we go to the disco? Dylan (through Herman): Not yet, don't you want to eat something first yourself? Ezra (through the woman): Great! (Moves the doll into Dylan' s dollhouse) I like your house. Dylan (through Herman): Thank you. I'll make some pasta with tomato sauce! Ezra (through the woman who is sitting at a little table): Mmmm, this tastes so good! Dylan: You haven't got anything yet! I have to cook the pasta and make the sauce. Ezra: No, let's skip preparing the food, it's boring. Let's eat and get to the disco, that is more fun. Dylan: But I want to prepare food. Ezra (through the woman): Good! I'll be back soon. I'll go and check my horses. Maybe I'll eat a pizza and go to the disco on my own. Dylan: That's not fair!

Fair to whom? To the little man wanting to prepare food? Or to herself wanting to play on in her little kitchen? I asked them about it.

What is it that you like in playing with these miniature dolls and environments? Dylan (10): "You can represent real life very easy through them. I love miniature representations of existing things. Like my doll's house. The kitchen in there is the kitchen I would love to have when I grow up. It's this old wooden like kitchen. It really existed and they reproduced it in small size ". Ezra (9): "Playmobil is really worked out in detail. That's so great about it. The dolls get names yes. Like Herman and Petunia. I called my horses Hermione and Ron. Predictable huh? But after all the names I had to come up with after all these years, I was a bit lazy, I didn 'tfeel like thinking about it for too long. " Dylan: "Ezra never plays according to the real world; she always has these crazy characters who cannot act normally. I play with them as if they 're part of the real world. Ezra will never cook with these dolls, she thinks it's a waste of time. Also the fact that these dolls eat, she thinks it's a waste of time really. I love doing these things. I spend minutes in making mashed potatoes, while she sends her dolls into these unbelievable adventures. I have this old ladylike doll and I give her an old fashioned mixer and then she makes this mashed potato stuff. " Ezra: The problem is it takes the time it would take to make real mashed potatoes. That's boring. Who decides what is going to be done next? Ezra: Most of the time the dolls talk to each other and develop the story. But of course we are always talking about the scenario out loud too. "Later on they will go into the woods... "

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Pink and pretty predictable?

Barbie and props. Provence, 2002

Barbie is another queen of pretend although her Wonderland is pink and pretty predictable. Children know that from the beginning but: Hey, girls do want to have fun and like to play around in a world that is easy, smiling and forever! In the beginning, the girls play with Barbie dolls as if they were hand puppets, getting them in a good grasp around the knees and using them to engage in dialogues about the pink props that come with them. But pretty soon they will start directing scenes out of the pink and although it's hard to do, most girls try to get Barbie out of the mindless trap she was born in. The picture above shows a Barbie kitchen made out of props and assembled things during our summer stay in Provence. Dylan and Ezra spend hours looking for small pebbles and stones, in discussing the functions they were going to have and the colours they would paint them in. I had provided them with three natural coloured ochre powders, one bright blue and one parrot green thus adding exotic flavours to the pink Mattel equipment. Asked for solid arguments for wanting to play with Barbies, here's what Dylan and Ezra came up with: Dylan: With Barbie you need more props because you use less imagination. Ezra: Barbie's diapers don't need to be changed. They come in handier than other dolls cause you don't have to feed or care for them all the time. Through them, you can talk normally. No babytalking, which can be fun, but after a while you want a normal conversation and with Barbies you can. Me: Do you give them different names? Dylan: Yes, they all have a different name. The names do change too. My favourite Barbie is named Kathleen. Ezra: Sometimes they keep the names that they have been given in the factory, like Esmeralda or Pocahontas. Sometimes we do forget these names and we come up


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with new ones. Me: What kind of scenes do you play with them? Kitchen? Living room? Beauty parlour? Dylan: Bed scenes. (Spills of laughter). I love the bed scenes! Also bar- and disco scenes. But I love the bed scenes although my male doll has always this kind of plastic drawn boxer shorts on, which is a bummer... The nice thing about them is that you can imagine a kind of life for them. Partly your own life or what we would like to do. Like with the Playmobil stuff. Our games alternate between fantasy and things that can happen in real life. But with the Barbies, it's mostly entertainment. It's always fun! Ezra: Yeah! Although they also go to the university. They didn't study something in particular, they just hung around and did some tests. One of Dylan's Barbies was super dumb! Dylan: That's not fair! She hadn 't practised for her tests, that's all! Ezra: It's so easy to be Barbie. You never have to proof or do anything. You just are. And you get away with it. Dylan: Playing with them will not last long anymore. Until we're in secondary school? Maybe not even that far. We move to the real world more and more, into music and stuff like that. Instead of "Have you seen the last outfit of my Barbie?" it will become: "Didyou hear the new CD ofManu Chau? "

During their role playing with dolls - - Dylan as Ezra both suggest possible evolutions and changes in the scenario. And if one does not agree with a certain move, the other most of the times does not adapt herself, but continues playing in parallel for a while until they get together again. Needless to say that the world of Harry Potter has influenced the ways they try to come up with eccentric skills, imagined languages and lots of surprising events in their pretend playing. The latest skill my daughters developed, is that they started documenting and photographing some of the set ups and scenes themselves. And building an archive and different stories.

Hermione and Harry posing for Ezra taking their picture. Brussels 2002.

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The soul of violins and bikes Even at the age of 11, my eldest daughter Dylan sometimes patted her bike whenever her one-year younger sister Ezra puts it away with too much clinging and banging. So instead of saying to Ezra "Hush, be careful" she talks to her bike as if she has to calm it down in order to prevent that it will attack Ezra, saying: "Don't worry, easy now, don't bite her, she's okay but a bit rough sometimes". It's a very diplomatic way of dealing with a problem, an indirect way of saying to her sister "Be careful with my bike, will you!" but without provoking a direct fight. Although it's a restricted socio-dramatic pretend play, the social and communications skills involved are pretty sophisticated. Another example is the way Dylan treats her violin. She considered it a literal playmate in the sense that she addressed it directly by asking "Ready?" just before she actually started playing. She also used to pat it each time before putting it back into its case. At a certain moment, the patting stopped and a few weeks later, I knew why when she asked for an electric guitar for her eleventh birthday. There was immediately some new patting involved, but I predict that from now on, the patting will decrease, as the decibels will increase... In the examples and observations above, we distinguish some common characteristics of pretend play. A first characteristic is the uses of the symbolic function. Pretend play is symbolic or representational in that it detaches behavioural routines and objects from their habitual, real-life situational and motivational contexts and using them in a displaced, makebelieve stage. Piaget has long established that young children animate things that move, like clouds or waves or water. Also humans relate differently to objects that they animate in their imagination - the result of personification - than to objects that they treat as merely reactive - objectification. So, personification could be an important stepping-stone for human cognitive and emotional growth. It starts with children endowing things with life, they blur the boundaries between animate and inanimate things. But also adults interact with imaginary characters through the fictional characters in books, operas, theatre plays, movies ...(Ackermann, 2000) Media that always need a listener to become alive. We project our convictions and emotions onto them and hence render life to the perceived letters, molecules and pixels. We insert words, characters, music, pictures and even people we meet and observe with our own personality. In that way, children, as well as adults, get a grip on or try to frame reality. A second characteristic is the socio-dramatic quality of pretend play Children are masters in directing and improvising and in setting up games free from externally applied rules. A third characteristic is that children are very actively engaged, there's no daydreaming or idling involved. And last but not least: Watching your children engage in pretend play, makes one thing clear: there's much attention and concentration involved [not true]. The mind is at work. And what is more, and what makes all the difference: the mind is at play! We should keep this in mind when we create learning environments for children. De Luca (1991) cites the scientist and storyteller Gianni Rodari saying: "by using stories and those fantastic methods that produce them, we help children to enter reality through the window instead of through the door. It's more fun. Therefore, it is more useful."


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5. Imaginary roles for animate things

Dylan (4) galloping happily on a beach -or maybe she was writing a songline? Mallorca, 1995.

Just like children - and adults - project emotional characteristics on the behaviour of the animals they interact with, children often engage in animal-like behaviours that they already injected with emotional interpretations. It is not uncommon to see children trot or gallop in a supermarket, as if they were horses. While they pretend and make believe, children get completely absorbed in their fantasy world,. What is important to note, here, is that for young children, there's usually no confusion about where reality stops and imagination begins. Dylan's favourite animal when she was younger, was a horse. She loved watching pictures of horses, touching and talking to real horses, sitting on her father's back and kicking her invisible spurs into his sides and whenever she could, she would start trotting or galloping. Until galloping became her way of running and she hesitated for two years before taking part in a sports event at school, being afraid she would start galloping during the 600 meters run. An error that would make her really ashamed of a specific behaviour she once liked so much. But Erzra and I convinced her and she took part in the competition. Without winning, but without galloping ! Let me zoom into another common form of pretend playing in which children engage spontaneously, namely personal role-playing. Not all types of pretend play facilitate the understanding of other people's mental states, but role-playing does. Hence it is a crucial element in the psychosocial development of children. Through it children become able to experiment with their own emotions and with those of others, without risk.

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I'M ONLY PLAYING Dylan: Lore, have you finished your sums? Ezra (with a slightly higher voice): Not yet, teach. Can I do them later? Dylan: No Lore, you will have to finish them first and then we are going to paint. Ezra (with a slightly higher voice): Yes! I love painting. Dylan: Yes, but your sums first. Ezra (still with a high voice): Sums are stupid. (Starts tapping with her pencil on the desk) Dylan (Getting annoyed): Stop that Lore or I'll have to punish you like I did with Tom. Ezra (in her own voice): Can we please start painting? Dylan: Not yet, until I say so. Ezra (repeats mockingly): Not yet, until I say so... Dylan (still a bit playful): Stop that! When you've finished your sums, you can copy them twice for me. Ezra (in her own voice): We haven't had these kinds of sums yet in school, I can't make them. Dylan (trying to keep up a nice voice): I will learn you. Ezra: I don't want to learn, I want to play. Dylan (in her own voice and angry now): Stop acting so silly! Ezra: I'm only playing! Dylan: ... Well, then I don't like your way of playing anymore. Sometimes it looks like it is great fun to play the angry teacher and the disobedient pupil, sometimes reality takes over the imaginative world and the pupil won't want to play the pupil anymore. Although Dylan would never give up her teaching role, she always affirmed that Ezra (Lore) is a great pupil, sometimes a bit stubborn, but a nice and eager learner altogether. Playing school at home requires a lot of patience from both the teacher and the pupil. And some intense pretend playing, since they are not alone with the two of them... The rest of the pupils are invisible although they all have desks and chairs, documents with their names on and their own range of sums. While Ezra keeps on filling in everything, from different viewpoints and characters, Dylan corrects all the assignments and invents new ones. Sometimes they take a break and work on subjects together or parallel. Sometimes it seemed that they were rehearsing things they had learned in school, but most of the times, the socio-dramatic aspect of role playing was much more important and their game looked like a voluntary lesson in discipline and even more, in breaking the rules. Most of the creativity went into they ways they thought up new assignments, new courses and the way they kept on personalising everything for every character - present or imagined. They always played female teachers, although some of the imagined pupils were boys and those were not necessarily troublemakers or noisy pupils. But both Dylan and Ezra confirmed to me that they didn't like playing boys. They did like playing with boys, but did not like


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pretending to be boys because, according to Ezra "They make too much noise and always want to show off, there's nothing funny or attractive about that". Dylan adds: "Boys are so different from girls that it is hard to imitate them without making them ridiculous, so we don't do it". There is one exception: in chat rooms neither of my daughters will hesitate to take up the role of a boy. It's part of the role playing in online games where names, identity and realistic personal data can take the form of anything you want. By doing so, again, they create a safe context for themselves and explore the world in which they move around, a virtual one, this time. Role-playing is fun, it's even more fun to fool others into your game and to get away with it as a perfect chameleon.

Dylan (11) and Ezra (9) chatting on \s_^H\'Jlu^}l

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