The Butterfly's Tongue

Of the following options, which one implies learning to know (learning to learn?

1. Learn the right answers

2. Acquire the relevant knowledge

3. Construct knowledge 

a) Describe your view point of the teacher's role in the previous answer (what should a teacher do?)

In order to construct knowledge, the teacher should promote meaningful and significant activities and cases that children can relate to and understand based on their cognitive abilities and capacities. Also, the teacher must take into account the previous experiences and knowledge of his students to carry out properly the activities so these can be useful for them. Also, the different cognitive styles, learning rhythms, skills and need of students have to be studied before developing the strategies to construct the knowledge.

In order to achieve this aim, teacher should guide student to reflect on the issue worked in class by reviewing it and thinking about how could it had happened, or what are the consequences and why the result of it were the consequences analyzed and not different ones. Therefore, students have to learn from their experience.

The teacher must be conscious about the learning process of the student. He needs to know if his students are achieving the established objectives so he has to ask them questions usually to know if they have learned the contents or not, and has to appreciate the correct answers and lead those student who did not answer correctly to the right question. When a student does not know how to reply to the teacher's demands, the teacher has to be comprehensive with him and show the kid that he has the abilities to understand the concept and answer correctly. He has to motivate students and does not allow them to get down because they have not interiorized contents when his peers have done it easily. 

The acquisition of relevant knowledge is part of its construction. The teacher must teach relevant, important and meaningful contents to the student which are established and detailed in the curriculum of the school. What the teacher should do is find ways to teach it to students so they can notice the relevance of the knowledge by using different means to transmit it as the traditional explanations of the teacher, readings, videos, school trips, conferences, etc. 

Nevertheless, knowledge is no fully learned just by memorizing it. We must construct the knowledge so be can understand it perfectly and can remember it as longer as we want to. To interiorize the new knowledge -construct it- the kid must link the new knowledge to the one that he already has. To success in this construction, the students should have several metacognitivie abilities that allow them to have the control of their own learning in order to organize one's own learning and enrich it. The teacher has to have the certainty that the students are doing this task properly and a way to discover if they are construction their knowledge is, for example, by asking a question in a test that has not been exactly explained in class, a question that goes further so he can observe if a student is able to relate the knowledge that he has to answer correctly the answer. 

The teacher must make sure that the child attributes significance to the knowledge learned in order to integrate it correctly and that can be observable when the kid makes an effort to select only the relevant information that has been taught, organizes it coherently and integrates it with other knowledge that he has. Usually, children who are succeeding in this task are more active and want to demonstrate that they have the knowledge. 

b) Apply this analysis to the teaching situation that is presented in the video of the following slide. 

In this short scene from the film La lengua de las mariposas we can observe how the teacher is trying to construct the knowledge of students by following the strategies stated in the previous question. He wants his students to relate with the contents which they have to learn by making it meaningful so he takes them in a trip so they can see in firsthand the habitat of butterflies and how they extract the nectar from the flowers, and everything they must learn about butterflies in order to integrate the knowledge. While they are observing the butterflies, he explains the theory they have to learn with real examples. That way he is making the knowledge significant and students are going to remember it more and better than if they had studied it inside a closed classroom with just random pictures of butterflies.

Piaget's discussion

We are Clara Girona, Sandra Pérez, Carla Pretel, Judit Serra and Helena Vilella and we have chosen as a name for our group Tangram.

Based on the videos previously seen and our acknowledgement of Piaget’s constructivist theory of learning, we will present our opinion regarding this topic in order for the other groups to understand our point of view and besides, to improve our knowledge in this field thanks to the discussions and exchange of knowledge that will take place with our classmates. 

We will be focusing our attention in two main points which are the acquisition of knowledge as one’s own interpretation or assimilation of the reality and the the sequential process of knowledge construction or, in other words, the developmental stages that all individuals go through their life. 

Knowledge is acquired through the interaction with the different elements that can be found in the mediate context where the individual is immersed. Such elements, usually represented as objects, lead to the stimulation of the different senses and allow the subject to acquire knowledge in a progressive and constant way. It is needed to take into account that all individuals have one’s own way of interpreting and understanding this information. Thus, their interpretation and consequent knowledge will vary depending on their personal experience in this process.

In this way, creativity plays an important role when acquiring knowledge as the wider is the range of opportunities and possible scenarios for each interaction that the individual goes through, the richer will be the learning process that he/she is experiencing. Therefore, in order for children to enrich their learning experience, it is needed to provide them different and varied stimulus that give them the possibility to interact with and acquire knowledge that might be applied in their context.

For this reason, we agree with the Alligators group and their opinion about the knowledge acquisition process, but we believe that a concretion should be made as children do not only learn from objects but from other elements that can be found in their mediate environment too.

In terms of the knowledge construction process, Piaget differentiates four main stages that define the development of the individual. Each of these four stages has its own characteristics in terms of knowledge construction and, as the child goes through them, they become more complex. This four stages are (from simple to complex): sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. This process is universal, meaning by this that, all subjects move through these four stages. Even so, not all individuals reach these stages at the same age, everyone of them follow their own developmental process determined by one’s own specific rhythm. Clear examples of different rhythms regarding the same developmental process are kids with special needs or disabilities that may found difficulties while trying to reach higher stages. Moreover, there are not only developmental differences in those children with special needs but, as the context and its features also determine this process, those children with lacks in their environment might find developmental difficulties too. 

In order to reinforce our opinion, we have found a video that explains clearly why creativity should be worked at school.

Regarding the developmental stages, here there is another video where all different stages that Piaget defined are shown. 

Interpersonal relations among peers at school-age

1. Define “friendship” on the basis of some bibliographic reference. 

Friendship is a relationship between two or more people that share affective bonds. Friends, according to Burbach, C., are people who make you feel good, people with whom you can relate, people who would never see you down and will cheer you when facing a problem. Friends are kind, they do nice things for their peers.

As Ferrer-Chancy, M. and Fugate, A. state, friendship is vital for a healthy development of a children who are in their school-age. It has been proved that children who lack from friends can suffer from emotional and mental difficulties during their following years of life, in their teen ages and adulthood.

Friendship helps children develop emotionally and morally as when interacting with their friends, children learn social skills such as communication, cooperation and the resolution of problems. They also learn how to control their own emotions and how to react to other’s emotions.

Having friends also affect the performance of children in school. Children usually have better attitudes about school and learning when they have friends in their classroom or in the school.

2. Elaborate three questions and their corresponding answers, from the reflexive study of the following article:

García-Bacete, F., Sureda, I., & Monjas, Mª I. (2010). El rechazo entre iguales en la educación primaria: Una panorámica general. Anales de Psicología, 26 (1), 123-126. Disponible en http://revistas.um.es/analesps/article/view/92121 

a) Literal question: Which are, according to the text, the main characteristics of a rejected kid?

Rejected children are easily identified by their peers, teachers and families and is because they act and interact by followed patterns. According to the text (García-Bacete, F., Sureda, I., & Monjas, Mª I., 2010), a rejected student is that child who has an almost nonexistence social activity, less self-esteem; enjoy less than other kids the activities held during the lessons, they feel dissatisfied with the help that the teachers and their peers give to them during those activities.

They believe their teachers do not appreciate them as they should and they see them in a negative way, incapable to perform as their peers. They see their families are less unified than others, with more conflicts, with less positive communication, and with less interest in what their children are doing in class. Those families have usually less educational level, are often unemployed, and do not value positive the learning process and the educational system itself.

b) Inferential / deductive question: The text makes a classification of how children show their rejection to others. This classification includes an example for each aspect. Could you give another example for each classification a part from the ones that already appear in the text?

In order to express their unsatisfactory situation and their feeling of rejection, based on the article (García-Bacete, F., Sureda, I., & Monjas, Mª I., 2010), children show this situation by different strategies. The first that the text states is that those children do not intend to interact with their peers. An example different from the one in the text that I can give about this situation is when a kid has troubles to resolve a mathematic problem that needs to be handed to the teacher the following day, and a peer want to help this kid because he is good at Maths but the rejected kid rejects his offer.

Then, a rejected child tends to not accomplish the desires of their peers. This can be exemplified when this kid denies something that other child has asked, like a toy or the notes from the previous lesson as he was in the doctor and could not write down anything. Also, rejected children are usually aggressive to other peers or to their belongings. He can easily hit another kid for saying or doing something he is not agree with, or he can for example strip the bad of a peer if that child has said something that he considers disrespectful about him.

Very linked to aggressiveness, a rejected child want to feel powerful and dominant, and for that talks to their peers with a loud tone of voice, with rude words and despairs. For example, if a peer says that he does not like the shoes of the rejected kid, this can respond without manners and using a hostile tone. A rejected child remarks the negative thing another kid has done too, such as if a kid says that the toy of Amy is silly, the rejected child will say something bad and negative to him for behaving like that with Amy.

A student who faces rejection is very likely to involve a third person in a discussion, and normally happens when an unpleasant situation is being developed. For example, if the rejected kid, called Patrick, is playing with Charlie with a ball, and Kate makes fun of how Charlie loses the ball constantly, Patrick instead of defend his friend, he will support the opinion of Kate.

c) Extensive / profound question: The text states what a teacher and the educative community must do when they observe a rejection, and what kind of interventions need to be done when this happens, but it does not reflect much about the role of the parents in these kind of intervention. Could you look for in other sources what parents should do when they observe their child is rejected in school?

García-Bacete, Sureda, and Monjas, Mª I., (2010) propose some useful interventions that should be done in classroom to avoid a rejection to be fully developed when identifying a child who is being teased. The teacher has to make that the rejected child interacts with his peers in order to end with this situation. This is one of the precedents that the authors lean in the article, but other aspects are being rapidly stated as other factors that help in this intervention. One of those is the family and the role that they have in this situation.

According to Michael Grose, parenting expert, parents need to encourage their children who suffer from rejection to make new friends so their children no longer feel outcast. They also can explain to them that rejection can happen for many reasons that can be not related to them as individuals, so this situation cannot be a reason to harm the self-esteem of a child.

Parents should be the confidents of their children. They must create a comfortable atmosphere so the child feels secure and able to explain his problems and what is happening during his school life that make him feel less than his peers. Children have to be capable of recognizing their troubles and accepting the feelings and repercussions that those situations have in them.

The opinion that parents have about rejection is a key element for the children. If they observe that for their parents, rejection is considered as a huge problem and a disappointment, then the children will be not able to see rejection from a different point of view. They really believe and make them the opinions that they hear in their homes. When children are in primary education are extremely influenced by what their family feels and believes, they do not have their own opinions, they take what their parents think and make those feeling their own. On the contrary, if a parent considers rejection as challenge possible to be faced and overcome, the child will deal with the situation in a more positive way and with more confidence than other children.

Another article, this time by Collins, S., Covert, K., Falls, S., and DegliObizzi, M., states that a child when being rejected needs to be taught appropriate social skills such as how to control the anger that he is feeling when suffering from this situation. Parents, and in this case also teachers, have the responsibility to help the kid to control his feelings and become calmer when being rejected. Also, other social skills and behaviors need to be taught to this special kid in order to understand the value of sharing and cooperating. The kid has to be aware of the importance and benefits that peers interactions have during this stage of his life.

Rejected children must understand the value of having close friends with whom they can relate and talk peacefully, and people with whom they feel safe, comfortable and capable of having good times together more than being a popular kid. Parents should teach their children that the important is not the number of friends you have but how strong if the bond with the friends that they have.

Although, parents need to be aware that their reactions would have a great impact in their children, so if they observe that their kids are being rejected in school, they should never panic neither overreact. Children need with whom to talk about their current situation, someone who can listen to them, someone that can help them.

Bibliographic references

Burbach, C. What is friendship? About friendship

http://friendship.about.com/od/Types_of_Friendships/a/What-Is-Friendship.htm 

Ferrer-Chancy, M. & Fugate, A. The importance of friendship for school-age children

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/FY/FY54500.pdf

García-Bacete, F., Sureda, I., & Monjas, Mª I. (2010). El rechazo entre iguales en la educación primaria: Una panorámica general. Anales de Psicología, 26 (1), 123-126.

http://revistas.um.es/analesps/article/view/92121 

Grose, M. (parenting expert). Kids need to know how to deal with rejection. Body and soul. http://www.bodyandsoul.com.au/pregnancy+parenting/parenting+tips/kids+need+to+know+how+to+deal+with+rejection,7983 

Collins, S., Covert, K., Falls, S., Simon, S. & DegliObizzi, M. Socially rejected children: recommendations for teachers and parents. Practical Recommendations and Interventions: Socially Rejected Children

http://www.education.udel.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/SociallyRejected.pdf

Questions to debate about gender

1. How does gender influence in emotions development and regulation?

The relationship between the female sex and emotional competences are closely linked since childhood due to a socialization that is in closer touch with feelings and their nuances (people tend to think that woman easily feels emotions and expresses her feelings). It has been affirmed that women tend to be more emotionally expressive than men, they can understand emotions better and they have a greater ability as regards certain interpersonal skills. Women, for instance, recognize other people's emotions better, are more perceptive and have greater empathy. In addition, some evidences exists that certain areas of the brain dedicated to processing emotions could be larger in women than in men, and that there is a difference in cerebra activity based on sex. 

To understand these differences, we must go back to childhood, when those competences are shaped. One example to justify it is that, during childhood, when a book is read to a girl adults tens to use more emotionally charged than with boys. Also, parents usually use an emotional discourse with girls. 

Another fact to prove that childhood is the key to understand the differences is that normal girls develop verbal skills earlier than boys, so they are more skilled when articulating their feelings and have more experience in the use of words. Girls also have more information about the emotional word so they can speak about those aspects. Thus, girls become more skilled in identifying emotional indicators, and expressing and communicating feelings. On the contrary, boys are educated since children to avoid expressing their emotions. Nevertheless, young boys express sadness and anger more often than older boys. 

Although boys and girls are capable of accepting expressions of affliction, girls are more likely to show feelings of sadness and affliction. Boys become less facial expressive throughout primary school. 

Even though men manifest emotions, these are different from the ones expressed by women. Women express more intimate details about their feelings and express emotions. 

When it is time to regulate emotions, it has been proved that girls smile more than boys in front of a disappointing or negative situation and are more sensitive to the social context as they tend to smile within this context and not to smile in a non-social context.

2. How does gender influence on the self-identity construction? 

Nowadays, our society gives more importance to the image of the men and the role they have. 

This difference among women and men is seen inside the house since the children are extremely young, so kids live aware of this situation. This provokes a decrease of self-esteem in women and favours the gender differences among sex, putting in a bad position the role of the women. 

Emotional regulation activity

In the playground, one girl from 4th of primary -9 years old- is separated from the others and is not playing anymore with them. She usually stays in the playground playing with them, they are her closest friends. The teacher goes with the girl and asks her what is wrong and why is not playing with her friends. The girl answers that her foot hurts and does not want to play because it will hurt more.

At first, the teacher believes the story that the girl tells him off, but then the teacher remembered that this same girl was in this same situation the week before. But instead of hurting his foot, she had a headache. At the end of the playground time, all students are called to go to class and the teacher sees the girl running to be the first on the row.

When the teacher sees the girl running, goes and talks to her with the aim of discovery what has truly happened and try to solve the situation. When talking with the girl, she explains her that her best friend has told her that she is no longer her best friend and that another girl of the group is. Once the teacher knows what has actually happened, he tries to make her see that leaving the group without trying to speak with her friends and staying alone will not solve the situation. The teacher tells her that once she feels upset, what she has to do is to try to explain her friends what she is feeling in order for them to know that what they have said has made her feel sad. Besides, the teacher tries to make the girl see the point of view of her friends in order to understand their feelings too.

Finally, the teacher asks the girl to go and talk with her friends and so, solve the problem. 

Phases:

1. anger: the first emotion the girl feels is to get irritated and angry with all her friends

2. jealousy & envy: the child realizes that her best friend has another best friend so she feels excluded and no longer her friend. She wants to get back to the place of being the “best friend”

3. sadness & loneliness: as she is not friend anymore of one girl of the class, the rest of the girls don’t want to be their friend neither. The child feels alone and do not play with anyone in the playground.

4. regret: after talking with the teacher, the girl realizes she understand the situation and what she has felt and try to get on well again with her friends

5. relief: once the situation is fixed, the girl knows that her initial thought were wrong and that he keeps being friend with the other girl. 

Objectives:

• Understand the own emotions
• Understand the emotions of others
• Express the own emotions
• Face the emotions
• Learn how to regulate the emotions

Relation with the age of the students:

At the age of 8-10, kids are able to identify two emotions of the same typology that come from a common situation. Besides, kids at this age are also capable of classify the emotions they feel in positive and negative ones. In the situation raised, the girl feels and distinguishes both jealousy and envy when her friend tells her she is no longer her best friend and she has been replaced by another girl of the group. The girl is also able to identify those emotions as negative because they make them be in a bad mood and sad. 

Kids of 8-10 years old need the help of the teacher in order to calm their emotions and relax. In the situation we have raised, the teacher helps the student not only to appease the sensations the girl is experiencing. In addition, the teacher helps the girl understand her responsibility on this situation (making her see that isolating herself is not the way to solve problems) and also gives her guidance for her to be able to overcome the difficulties and solve her own problems.

Second reading: Emotions

Answer the following questions:

1. What are the emotions? How many types of emotions can you identify in the text?

An emotion is a state of our organism which provokes an answer that will influence the posterior way of acting in front of a situation. It is important to have developed the emotional intelligence in order to be capable of predict, use, comprehend and manage our emotions. Then, the emotional awareness has an impact on the emotional intelligence as has two basic components. The first one is the ability to recognize emotions not only in ourselves but also in the people that surround us so we can understand them better and develop a quicker and more efficiency answer to them. 

Being aware of our emotions is useful not only to understand the emotions of the people but also regulate the unpleasant emotions and to promote the ones that give us more pleasure.

The basic classification of the emotions is by the feeling that they give us while we have them. For example, we can classify them in positive emotions (such as happiness, humor and love), negative (anxiety, shame, anger and fear), ambiguous which mean that an emotion can have both positive and negative repercussion in our mood (surprise, hope and compassion) and aesthetics which are express by different artistic manifestations. 

Another classification can be basic and complex emotions. The basic emotions are the ones that we have in the first years of our live. Since we are babies we suffer from happiness, fear, love and shame. In this moment of our lives, we get satisfaction through the actions of an adult. At the ages from three to six we develop the capacities of memorization, language and a major capacity to identify situations and the emotion that correspond to those actions. Is in that moment that the complex emotions are developed and we start to be aware of them. Between the ages of 8 and 10 we know that an emotion can have at the same time a positive and negative effect in our personality and mood. 

The basic and complex emotions are related among them. For example, pride is a complex emotion which is similar to happiness, shame and anxiety can be sometimes mistaken by fear, when we experience jealousy the effects that this emotion has in our system are quite similar to the ones that we have when we suffer from anger. Surprise is an ambiguous emotion that can be related with either happiness, sadness, fear or anger. 

2. What are the differences between emotions and feelings?

At first sight, emotions and feelings can be understood as concepts with the same meaning so most people tend to use them as synonyms, but this is far from the truth. Emotions and feeling do not apply to the same emotional states. 

Basically, an emotion is what leads our way of acting and have a close relationship with our personality. We are the way we are because of the influence that our emotions have in ourselves. 

On the other hand, a feeling is what we have when we are conscious about an emotion. We know that we have it so we are able to identify it, classify it and also evaluate it. All of this is done through the language. 

3. What should be taken into account to educate emotions at school age?

Firstly, what the child needs to know is to indentify, understand, accept, describe and recognize the emotions in order to regulate them. The teacher is the one that leads to that knowledge so the students can learn first from the educative agent and then by themselves. During this stage, children can classify those emotions that they know as pleasant or unpleasant, or even from similar to opposite.

At the ages from three to six they learn the basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, love, fear and humor, and then at the ages from six to twelve they keep learning from those basic emotions but also from the complex ones. In this phase, they learn the connection that exists between the basic and complex emotions, this means that they are aware, for example, that what complex emotions are related with happiness. 

They also develop the ambiguous emotions and are aware of the fact that the same emotions can be, depending on the situation, beneficent or harmful, or even if both feelings can occur at the same time. 

The students form the upper years can identify and reflect about what influences an emotional answer, if this answer comes from the cognitive, physiological or behavioral part of us. They as well understand that we can hide an emotion and pretend that we are feeling another way in appearance, so they learn more mechanisms to recognize emotions in other people, even when they do not want them to be visible. Being able to be aware of the emotions of the people of our environment helps us to improve the social relationships. 

Another aspect important to teach to students is how to regulate the emotions, tolerating and trying to make disappear the negative ones and promoting the ones that give us satisfaction. To get rid of a prejudicial emotion, students learn that the best thing to do is try to change the situation or the mental processes that are provoking this emotion. 

As I have already stated, in the early years is the adult who works as a mediator and helps the child to regulate his emotions, but from age 10 they can do it by themselves. To be able to moderate their emotions, they first need to learn some strategies that will support and help them. 

The temporal distancing is a good way to make disappear a bad emotion letting time pass from the situation that created this emotion until our answer, so we are capable to think more objectively how to act in order to not make the situation even worse. Another useful strategy to relax and think more properly how we are going to respond it is the behavioral distraction which consists in doing activities that attracts and give us satisfaction. The cognitive restructuring asks us to replace the negative thoughts by positive ones to be able to see things from a different point of view. Very linked with the cognitive restructuring we find the planning of the resolution of a problem which is demanding us to analyze and look for a pleasant solution for our conflict from another perspective. Accepting the responsibility of ones own helps us to reduce the negative charge of an emotion as well as the relaxation in order to be aware of the respiration and to learn how to control it to relax and chill.

First reading: Biological, social and cultural basis of the process of human development

Questions that will guide the reading and discussion:

1. Is it the development a prerequisite for education?

Development is strongly connected with education, even in the first stages of the human life. This relationship is based on the effect that education has in the development, but to make this association development needs to be evolved previously.

Children in their first years learn from their environment, their families and context, and the majority of them if they follow the regular steps of evolution, they mature more or less in the same path and simultaneously due to the genetic code.

The differences that can be observed between babies of the same age are because of the educative influence that the family has during the first stages of development. With this interaction with their parents and siblings, the child starts to develop the first phases of intelligence, language and social competence.

Without this first contact with the context, education would be a very though task to develop in that kid.

2. Is it the development a result of education?

Development is not just one of the main prerequisites so education can perform properly, but also the result of the educational process.

Education has an essential role because it is the main explanation to understand the reason why the individual development and culture are so connected, as well as being the principal way to create development.

Nevertheless, development need to have a base so its creating can be evolved, and the role of education in this process is to lead the human being farther away from what he or she could have arrived from their own means. What education is searching is to get the most of the person starting from what this person has learned on his own.

Also, social interaction within some sort of educational aspect helps the kid to develop and to become active members in the society, and can even also make them participate and learn from the adult activity by observing or by imitation.

With this new maturation, the child is able to move to higher development levels, so here the important point is not the quantity of interaction that the child has but the quality of them as well as the motivation of the kid. If the child does not feel comfortable and confident with himself or with the people or the interaction that surround him, development and education are not acting efficiently.

3. What are the mechanisms of evolutionary change?

Firstly, social interaction is essential to ensure a good development in the kid as well as promoting a proper education for him. This interaction needs to be significant so the child can really learn from it. He needs to analyze, understand and assimilate this new knowledge to achieve the maturation that is looked for in this process.

However, interaction with the adult world is not the only way to get kids learn. Also a good relation and interaction with the objects and materials from their environment are a source of knowledge. But even in theses cases, the role of the adults is extremely important as it is their job to give the children the objects with which they are going to interact and the ones who prepare the activities with those materials.

Taking into consideration everything stated in this document, development follows a more personal line, which is the natural one, based on the genetic code and the biological process and development that characterize the human beings and occurs without any kind of effort, and then there is the social and cultural line marked by the interaction with the environment and the society.