Children teaching children

Abstract

This study describes children’s awareness of what it means to teach a game to a peer where the act of teaching becomes expression of the child’s possible awareness. Awareness is defined as the attention to different aspects of the teaching process shown by the teaching child, sometimes through their own verbal reflection. This implies an interpretation of the child’s spontaneous actions and expressions in a specific situation, which the child chooses to focus on. The interpretation resulted in a qualitative description of four children’s ways of teaching a peer the game of Chinese Checkers. The idea of teaching someone something was observed in all four of the teaching children but it is not a homogeneous process. All four teaching children show a deliberate goal to bring about a change in the learning child. The children have different goals with the task and differ from each other depending on what their goals are.

Keywords:

• Children
• Peer learning
• Phenomenography
• Teaching process

Acknowledgement

This project received financial support from the Swedish Board of Education.

Notes

1. Legitimate peripheral participation is defined by Lave and Wenger as ‘learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community’ (1991, p. 29).

2. ‘Dutt’ is a nonsense word in Swedish.

3. In Swedish the word dag (day) and the word drag (move) rhyme, and John misinterprets Sandra.