See What Children Know
Click on thumbnail to watch inside our video library. Young children often imitate an action that they see. This action could be an early form of representation; that is, making a symbol that “stands for” a referent that happened in the immediate past. By imitating the event, the child in a sense “puts a handle” on the event so that she can mentally “grasp” it. Using two short clips, we have added more granularity to these metaphors. The text first describes what occurred, and then in italics presents our interpretation of what the child and the teacher might have been thinking, not literally as explicit thoughts, but rather as some intuitive level of their intentions.
First segment: Blake imitates the spinning top, 00:00 to 00:37
00:03
The teacher spins a lid like a top. Blake, 14 months, sees the spin, rocks his shoulders back and forth while looking at teacher. [I want to share with you the excitement of this movement. I will move my body back and forth and look at you to see if you too are excited. My movement is my way of letting you know what it is in the world that excites me.]
00:04
The teacher looks at Blake, who is rocking back and forth. She rocks back and forth, while maintaining steady eye contact with Blake [I see you rocking. I know you are trying to share something with me. I will rock just like you are rocking to let you know that I understand you are sharing a referent (the spinning) with me.]
00:08
The teacher spins the lid again. Blake smiles and looks up at the teacher. Almost at the exact same time, Blake and the teacher rock their shoulders as they maintain steady eye contact with each other. The rocking is now the game: look at the spinning lid, look at the teacher (child) immediately, and rock your shoulders back and forth. [Blake: There is the spin. I need to look at the teacher quickly to see if she is looking back at me. I will rock back and forth to see if she will rock back and forth. We are playing a game.] [Teacher: I will rock back and forth when Blake looks at me. Perhaps he will know that I am doing the same thing that he is doing. That will augment the strength of his feeling that we are sharing ].
00:16
Blake moves to catch the spinning lid. He misses. Then he moves his hand back and forth. [Blake: This thing was moving when I tried to grab it. I will move my hand to indicate that the movement of this thing was what I noticed most ]. The teacher makes a circular movement with her finger and says, “Yes it does go round and round and round.” Blake watches her finger intently. [Teacher: Perhaps if I move my hand in a circular way and say round and round, Blake will associate the words with the shape of the movement. My gesture might help him "abstract," from all the many things he sees, the event that I am speaking about. I am not certain that he will think of the lid going round and round, but at the very least he might think that the words are related to the shape of my gesture].
00:20
The teacher spins the lid for a third time, but it does not spin well. When the lid falls, the teacher says, “Oops, silly.” Blake looks up at the teacher when she speaks but does not rock his shoulders back and forth. [Teacher: I want Blake to know that I did not expect the lid to fall, that this time the lid "did not work." It is important for children to classify events as either "done well" or "done poorly." This might help him to think about why ].
00:26
Blake throws the lid to the floor; it does not spin on its vertical axis, but it does rotate rapidly on its circumference. When it stops, he smiles and rocks back and forth while still looking at the lid. He vocalizes an expression of joy. [Blake: I know that movement. It is not exactly the same as before, but it is a movement that continues after I let go of the object. It is a movement that stays mostly in one place. To indicate what I abstract from what is going on around me, I will rock back and forth. I am moving in a way similar to the movement of that thing in front of me. That similarity makes me smile ].
00:31
The teacher spins another lid, smaller and silver. Blake watches this lid spin but does not wait for it to come to a stop. He crawls away from the play space toward another part of the room. [Teacher: It might be useful for Blake to see that the spinning action is not inherent to a particular object, but rather can be created using different objects that have the same basic round and flat shape ]. [Blake: Okay, I have seen this movement before. I would like to go elsewhere and do something new ].
We can offer several interpretations of the rocking movements that Blake makes.
A schema:
A gesture that indicates what Blake is abstracting from the flow of his immediate experience. He is producing what he sees. By producing the event that he sees, the event enters his consciousness more as an object; that is, he is encoding or objectifying his experience. Once a slice of a macro-experience has been represented in gesture, it has boundaries; it is sort of contained. The child can think of it as an intact “thing” that has a name, is linked to memories of fun, can be reproduced across a range of physical objects, and so forth. The spinning action becomes a mental script or schema that can be used in a multitude of ways.
A sharing:
A gesture that mediates a feeling of sharing an experience with an adult. The rocking lets the adult know that it is the spinning that the child finds interesting. The gesture represents the action of the lid. The main motive for the rocking is to communicate a thought to the teacher. In the previous interpretation, the child is transforming a sight into an experience (objectification), but is not as sensitive to communicating to an audience.
A sequence:
A gesture that is part of a game that has no more meaning than “after we do this, we do that.” The teacher spins the lid, the child looks to the teacher, and they both start to rock. This sequence, established in previous rounds, is repeated simply because both players know the sequence. The repetition serves to support the good feeling of being together.
Second segment: Lou imitates the spinning top 00:37 – 01:43
There are many interesting encounters that take place during this second segment, but in regards to our interest in imitation, take particular note of Lou, in brown corduroy overalls, spinning the lid to a cookie tin. Around 01:17, he bends and straightens his upper body while looking at the spinning lid. He does this even more immediately at 01:37. Do you think Lou is creating a schema, sharing his experience, or playing a sequence game? Or perhaps you have even a fourth interpretation of why Lou is moving up and down.
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