Musings

Kevin Crowley

In this issue, Kevin Crowley reflects on the nature of children's learning in informal environments. His discussion of "islands of expertise" builds upon the notion of explanatory engagement in the MLC framework for research in museum learning.

Building Islands of Expertise in Everyday Family Activity:
Musings on Family Learning In and Out of Museums

How do young children first learn about academic disciplines? Long before they encounter science, history, or social studies in grade school, children begin developing a wealth of informal knowledge about each topic. In science, for example, young children are actively developing nascent scientific reasoning skills, naïve theories for scientific domains, knowledge of interesting science factoids, knowledge about famous scientific narratives, and even some early ideas about what different kinds of scientists do in their professional work. As this everyday academic literacy develops, children are simultaneously developing a sense of identity as individuals who are more or less interested and motivated to seek out opportunities to engage in activities that are related to various academic disciplines. As one focus of our museum learning research, we continue to explore how parents mediate children's experiences in and out of museums to help weave multiple moments of learning into broader informal knowledge about academic disciplines.

We have developed the idea of islands of expertise as a framework to guide our empirical and theoretical work. An island of expertise is a topic in which children happen to become interested and in which they develop relatively deep and rich knowledge. A typical island emerges over weeks, months, or years and is woven throughout multiple family activities. Because of this, developing islands of expertise is a fundamentally social process. They are co-constructed through the ongoing negotiation of children and parents' interests, children and parents' choices about family activities, and children and parents' cognitive processes, including memory, inferencing, problem solving, and explanation. As children develop deeper knowledge, islands of expertise support conversations and learning that can be more advanced than would be possible in domains in which the child's knowledge is of a more typically sketchy nature. Thus, islands of expertise become platforms for families to practice learning habits and to develop, often for the first time, conversations about abstract and general ideas, concepts, or mechanisms. Even when a child loses interest and an island of expertise begins to fade, the abstract and general themes that used the island's rich knowledge as a launching pad, will remain connected to children's other knowledge.

To illustrate what we mean, consdier a child who, on his second birthday, is given a Thomas the Tank Engine picture book. It turns out that he likes the book, which is about the adventures of a small steam locomotive on an island railway. In fact, it turns out that he likes the book a lot and asks his parents to read it to him over and over. While waiting for a flight a few weeks later, perhaps the boy's father buys a Thomas the Tank Engine toy at the airport store. Maybe his parents pick up a few Thomas the Tank Engine videos next time they are at the video store. Maybe the mother decides that the boy could be Thomas for Halloween. When planning a Sunday outing, the parents might decide the boy would enjoy visiting a nearby train museum. As the boy's knowledge about trains deepens, the family checks out more advanced train books from the library. The family starts planning side-trips to other train museums when they travel. If they visit Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania, maybe the boy spends a lot of time looking at "Big Boy"-a gargantuan 4-8-8-4 Union Pacific steam locomotive-and maybe, having noticed his interest, the parents stop at the gift shop to buy the boy a T-shirt with a picture of Big Boy on the front and a list of its vital statistics on the back. When he wears the shirt later, it serves as a conversational prompt for the boy, his parents, and others.

If the boy's position on the repeated reading of the same books and the repeated watching of the same videos is anything like that of a typical 2-year old, the boy (and his parents) would have soon memorized lots of domain-specific knowledge. They would have learned labels such as firebox, tender, boiler, drive wheels, sanding gear, and steam dome. They would have acquired at least some general knowledge about mechanisms of locomotion-for example that steam, coal, and water are sometimes involved and that diesel and/or electricity is sometimes involved. They would have learned schemas for a variety of train scenarios, such as firemen shoveling coal, drive wheels slipping on wet tracks, conductors shouting "All Aboard!" passengers eating in the dining car, and (particularly in the case of the Thomas stories) derailments, crashes, and breakdowns of all sorts.

Although the visits to museums have been relatively infrequent, they have provided unique opportunities to attach the well-learned domain-specific knowledge to actual trains. The boy may be able to make some of these connections himself. The parents would probably make many more through explanations, descriptions, and questions intended to help the boy interpret the visit through the lens of their shared prior knowledge about trains. The museum visits may have also opened up aspects of trains that were unavailable from other sources. For example, if the museum has an operating steam locomotive (as many do), the boy may have been surprised to find out that they are much louder, larger, dirtier, and scarier than he might have imagined. Because their previous shared experiences have contributed to a shared knowledge base about trains, family conversations during the museum visit would have been richer and more focused. Similarly, the experience of the visit provides subsequent opportunities to extend and deepen the on-going family conversation about trains as the boy and his parents wait later at a railroad crossing for a freight train to pass, look at snapshots from the museum visit, or read a new book about trains.

By the time the boy turns three years old, he has developed an island of expertise around trains. His vocabulary, declarative knowledge, conceptual knowledge, schemas, and personal memories related to trains are numerous, well-organized, and flexible. Perhaps more importantly, the boy and his parents have developed a relatively sophisticated conversational space for trains. Their shared knowledge and experience allow their talk to move to deeper levels than is typically possible in a domain where the boy is a relative novice. For example, as the mother is making tea one afternoon, the boy notices the steam rushing out of the kettle and says: "That's just like a train!" The mother might laugh and then unpack the similarity to hammer the point home: "Yes it is like a train! When you boil water it turns into steam. That's why they have boilers in locomotives. They heat up the water, turn it into steam, and then use the steam to push the drive wheels. Remember? We saw that at the museum."

In contrast, when the family is watching football-a domain the boy does not yet know much about-he asks "Why did they knock that guy down?" The mother's answer is short, simple, stripped of domain-specific vocabulary, and sketchy with respect to causal mechanisms-"Because that's what you do when you play football." Parents have a fairly good sense of what their children know and, often, they gear their answers to an appropriate level. When talking about one of the child's islands of expertise, parents can draw upon their shared knowledge base to construct a more elaborate, accurate, and meaningful explanations. This is a common characteristic of conversation in general: When we share domain-relevant experience with our audience we can use accurate terminology, construct better analogies, and rely on mutually held domain-appropriate schema as a template through which we can scribe new causal connections.

As this is being written, the boy in this story is now well on his way to four years old. Although he still likes trains and still knows a lot about them, he is developing other islands of expertise as well. As his interests expand, the boy may engage less and less often in activities and conversations centered around trains and some of his current domain-specific knowledge will atrophy and eventually be lost. But as that occurs, the domain-general knowledge that connected the train domain to broader principles, mechanisms, and schemas will probably remain. For example, when responding to the boy's comment about the tea kettle, the mother used the train domain as a platform to talk about the more general phenomenon of steam.

Trains have been platforms for other concepts as well, in science and in other domains. Conversations about mechanisms of locomotion have served as a platform for a more general understanding of mechanical causality. Conversations about the motivation of characters in the Thomas the Tank Engine stories have served as platforms for learning about interpersonal relationships and, for that matter, about the structure of narratives. Conversations about the time when downtown Pittsburgh was threaded with train tracks and heavy-duty railroad bridges have served as a platform for learning about historical time and historical change. These broader themes emerged for the boy for the first time in the context of train conversations with his parents. Even as the boy loses interest in trains and moves on to other things, these broader themes remain and expand outward to connect with other domains he encounters as he moves through his everyday life.

What kind of learning is this? First, it is fundamentally collaborative. Everything the boy knows about trains was learned in social contexts co-constructed with his parents. The book reading has obviously been collaborative: The parents read the text, answer the child's questions, ask questions of their own, and point out interesting parts of the pictures that are not reflected in the text. The museum visits have obviously been collaborative: The family goes together to the museum and talks about trains before, during, and after the visit. Watching train videos and playing with train toys may appear less collaborative on the surface because, although he sometimes engages in these activities with his parents, he often does them more or less by himself. However, even this solitary activity is collaborative in the sense that the videos and toys reflect parent choices about what would be appropriate and interesting for the boy.

Second, although some of the learning may be highly planned and intentional, much of it is probably driven by opportunistic "noticing" on the part of both the parent and the child. Recent efforts to consider parent input into children's categorization decisions, for example, have predominately been directed at developing an account for how parents structure a fixed interpretation for children. Casting parents as simple socializers who provide fixed didactic interpretations for children is unlikely to be the right model. There is nothing more annoying than someone who provides you with pedantic explanations that you do not want or that you could not make use of.

In reality, however, everyday parent-child activity hinges on a dual interpretation problem. The parent needs to decide what is worth noting, based on their own knowledge and interests, their understanding of their child's knowledge and interests, and their current goals for the interaction. Children are making the same calculation, simultaneously. Over time, the family interprets and re-interprets activity, bringing out different facets: Sometimes they highlight the science, sometimes the history, sometimes the emotion, sometimes the beauty, and so on. Thus, the family conversation changes to become more complex and shaded as it traces the learning history of the family and is woven into multiple activities.

 

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