Videos

Snippets of children playing, Waldon explaining key concepts,
and the early development of spatial understanding

Early development and learning

Showing typical development at 6 weeks; 35 weeks; 22 months; 29 months; 10 years: a study in movement patterns.
Cut with excerpts from Geoffrey Waldon’s Understanding Understanding video (1980). Dr Waldon speaking 8.10 to 8.43.

SOME NOTES ON SPEECH AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
In Waldon, General Understanding is the key to speech and language development.

As Geoffrey Waldon stated in his preface to Teaching Session Thirteen (Understanding of Speech) – it is important to distinguish between two different, related abilities:
understanding the speech of others understanding one’s own speech (expressing one’s understanding through speech) Read more

SOME NOTES ON SPEECH AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
In Waldon, General Understanding is the key to speech and language development.

Verbs such as Wait, Give and Put give shape and substance to an action; GW called them definers.
Some words that are normally called ‘prepositions’ – in, on, beside, behind, beneath, and so on – GW regarded as, logically, adverbs, since they described different actions, modifying the definer ‘put’ so as to differentiate between related but separate actions: so the child puts in, on, beside, behind, under/beneath – these accidental puttings are, over time, noticed by the child, and then consciously employed.

Outside the lesson

Expose the child to more advanced speech, as long as the child is not expected to understand it or act on it – avoidance of undue anxiety (some anxiety is often present around speech, but it should be momentary, fleeting) is very important.
So you can be talking to yourself, to another child or adult, towards or ‘around’ the child, bathing him/her, occasionally, in a fog of words; the child will tend to respond to any of these speech-actions when their understanding-development allows them to create some meaning from them.Explain things to the child when necessary but only when necessary.
As adults we tend to be hooked on explanations; young children haven’t yet learnt to be … but when they do need them then they need them simple and straightforward.

In the asocial lesson

Generally there is no reason to use speech. But if you decide to strengthen the child’s ability to act upon the speech of others keep it spare and simple – Wait/Go/Stop/Give it to me/Put it in/on, etc. – and make sure the child acts upon the injunction, with physical prompting if necessary.

Interest and Understanding

Geoffrey Waldon on Interest & Understanding

“Interest is a function of understanding; so on the whole it’s not usual for children to deliberately not do something that they understand well. Adults think it is and I’m constantly being told about this, but I find that as soon as I drop the level [of demand] it disappears. Which suggests very strongly to me that what is really happening is that the child in fact isn’t nearly as well established [in that thing] as one might think.

The more the child’s fundamental understanding is very well developed the more rapidly the child can move onwards.”

Understanding; speech and reading

Geoffrey Waldon: Understanding; Speech and Reading

“The understanding of speech, really, is the understanding also of what speech represents. So unless you have got the basic understanding first (then) the speech, which is only a reflection of the basic understanding, can have no meaning.
And reading is speech once removed, so to speak, unless you use the reading as a direct means of communication.

“So there is no need to neglect either speech or reading – it would be very wrong to neglect these. But I think it has to be seen that there are certain things which both have greater priority in their own right, as far as the child is concerned, and [which] also make the reading, the language, much more valuable in the long run.”

Purpose of Education

Geoffrey Waldon on the purpose of education

“Education has one purpose only: that is, the prolongation of childhood.

“Adults – on the whole, especially in, I think probably in any society, but certainly in Western European society – adults and children are diametrically opposed in their attitudes.

“I mentioned in passing a while ago that children need to generate enormous quantities of effort. They need to do this because of – in fact, this is what motivates the child; in the early stages the child has to increase this [effort] simply to overcome the increasing load and the extra drag on that load. Part of that is the child actually engaging in using larger amounts of the child’s own space, which is necessary for the understanding of space.

“So the child making big movements is very effortful, so it’s valuable from that point of view, and it’s also space-invasive. So, the moving things about in space is very important and the longer the child engages in the activities the more effort is expended.”

This is easy...boredom etc

Geoffrey Waldon: ‘This is easy’ … ‘boredom’ … lack of understanding

“The children in fact who put up the greatest amount of opposition to doing things very often are the ones who insist, verbally, on doing things for themselves – which of course is something we hear in our normally developing baby – are really the ones who have great difficulty in understanding what they are doing … rather like the children who sometimes start an activity and you hear the child say, ‘Oh this is easy’ – I hate to hear that phrase, because it’s likely that the child will run into great difficulties in the next few minutes – and whether some children say this as a kind of – like whistling in the dark – as a way of helping themselves … if so then it obviously means that giving the child that activity was a frightening activity. Read more

Geoffrey Waldon: ‘This is easy’ … ‘boredom’ … lack of understanding

But you find that the more advanced the child the more readily they engage in the simple activities, this is one of the interesting things about it. The more able the child – whether the child is ‘backward’ or not – but the more relatively able, the more the child enjoys doing the simpler behaviours. Now on the whole it’s us as parents, as adults – I see everyone who’s interested in the child’s welfare as being a ‘parent’ – our problem on the whole is keeping things down where they belong because we keep wanting to romp ahead.

People often tell me things like I’m sure the child must be bored because he’s doing the same thing over and over again; well, since you’ve only got to look at the average two year old on its own to see that average two year olds love doing things over and over and over again and that they learn from those but they’re not repeating things in a stereotyped way, they’ve got a kind of carrier phase which comes out differently on every occasion, but it generates a great deal of experience of space and of the materials

So when parents – that’s all of us, teachers, and so on – say that the child is likely to be bored then what we really mean is that we’re likely to be bored. And boredom in the adult sense of the word really is a function of lack of understanding because strictly speaking boredom would mean something like you know all there is to know about something: well is there anything we ever know all there is to know about it? I think it’s something that we very often – it’s our own inadequacies which lead us to assume that something isn’t very simple …”

Understanding space

The creation of experience through the construction of spatial reality

Geoffrey Waldon, introducing his theory of child development and learning, writes:

That there is an increase in the amount of spontaneous movement in a young baby over a period of time is apparent to the most casual observer; however when it is recognised that the periods of activity are extending in duration and the child is rapidly gaining in both weight and limb-length the actual increase in activity is found to be prodigious. Read more

The creation of experience through the construction of spatial reality

Geoffrey Waldon, introducing his theory of child development and learning, writes:

What is going on here? Put simply, babies learn to structure and understand space through the early, reflex-driven movements of their arms, head, legs and trunk. The more they turn their head, wave their arms, and reach out to grasp objects, the more thoroughly they explore the surrounding space, and the more familiar it becomes to them. (This near-body space is sometimes referred to by scientists and researchers as ‘peri-personal’ space.)

To quote Dr Waldon again:

The range of movements for any limb; the amplitudes of each movement and the intensity of action as well as its complexity, grow, as the … region of ‘bodily near-space’ extends. Inevitably these regions of structured space overlap to form spatial territories common to more than one limb, and eventually all parts of space are ‘known’ with all parts of the body …
Further development in this … ‘space structuring’ process results in a capacity to pitch the focus [of attention] at an infinite range of depths, to accommodate a wider angle of ‘interest’ and to actively scan the surroundings in an organised way.

So, to say that this space comes to be ‘understood’ by the baby means that he or she can do more in it, using the objects that inhabit it as ‘markers’ to define and shape the actions of stretching towards, grasping, waving, shaking, scraping, banging, and so on.

As Waldon observes:

It is my view that ‘interest’ in the environment is primarily an interest in space – the more explored the space, the greater the interest. Interest in the ‘contents’of space is subsequently induced from the interest associated with the location of the object. It is not difficult to understand why there is an assumption that it is things that engineer interest, for children of six months or less already focus quite obviously on target objects. However if it is recognised that it is the acting on the space (or on the object within the space) that confers reality on it, it can be seen why action – having duration and being the product of a sequence of changes – should be the basis of memory. Extension of the duration of a ‘planned’ action gives rise to an anticipation of future events.

And he adds: Compare Piaget’s ideas on ‘concept of the permanence of an object’.

To summarise what he is saying here: physical acts, through the construction of a spatial frame of reference, give rise to understanding.

This understanding includes what is materially present to the senses and what exists ‘in the mind’, in our imagination – memory, anticipation, and variants on our lived experience, this last being the favoured realm of the fiction writer.