Learning and development - Blog's presentation

Learning about the human development, especially of children, is key for our formation as primary teachers. We must understand for what our pupils are going through, what is normal or not according to biological and psychological aspects, what is the maximum that we can expect from them according to the psychological process where they are or their age and all that this entails.

  

The usefulness of this work is remarkable as it helps to interiorize the concepts done in class, reflect on them, relate them between them or in my personal experiences, and it will be a source in my hopefully teaching life in a few years.

I had some previous knowledge about some concepts worked in class as I studied psychology for a year in my secondary school, so I will be using the worked done during this year as another reference for this learning portofolio.

Before deepen into children’s development and the importance of its understanding in education, in this case especially for primary education, it is significant to contextualize the development in its general field. Psychology. 

According to the Great Illustrated Encyclopedic dictionary, psychology is a science which studies phenomena emphasized in the conscious and the unconscious phenomena in order to have a better view of the human behavior. This science is closed to other sciences such as biology, as with psychology some biological aspects can be explained -for example, connecting psychology and biology we can be aware that, according to our genetics, girls have an early development of the language skills-, physics and social science -behavior is explained through psychology-. A different definition, this time taken from the new dictionary of the Catalan language, states that psychology is about the soul, its genesis, capacities and functions.

There are already some references about psychology in the Ancient Greece. Plato introduces this science in its dialogue Fedro where he considered that a human being is formed by two compounds: soul and body, but he believed the soul had a divine origin. A few years later, Aristotle proved Plato wrong when he considered the soul as a biological element, so he was saying that, unlike his master, the soul is not an independent element of the body.

In the 17th century, Descartes made a distinction between the volunteers and involuntary acts making here reference to the fact that some actions are automatic and reflexive while others are voluntary, coming from our thinking, behavior and way of acting. But it was Freud who made a great revolution in psychology introducing the term psychoanalysis, stating that humans have an unconscious part that has a big impact on us.

Psychology is divided in different branches. According to José Ignacio Alonso García, exists the general psychology, the experimental, the psychobiology, the evolutionary psychology, the social psychology, the psychology of the thinking, psychology of the learning, differential psychology, cultural psychology and psychology of the genre. Up to now, the branches are more related to the subject are the evolutionary and the psychology of the learning as we are studying the behavioral changes during the vital development and the reasons of that, as well as its influences in the learning process, which is what really interest us as future teachers.