The relevance of narratives for the understanding of the child’s concept of learning how to learn and the development of child competence in learning is becoming widely acknowledged in literature but not in Polish early education. In this article, I distinguish three types of narratives of childhood: narratives about children, narratives of children, narratives for children. I offer some theoretical and practical advice for researchers and educators on how to use narrative inquiry with children as a method of research (narratives about children) and narrative as a method of learning how to learn (narratives of children). I show that children’s narratives create opportunities for the development of how to learn and for practising the meaning making mechanisms that are so essential for their participation in their learning communities. Children make narratives, often with the help of others, in order to express their life experiences or to retell stories that have been read to them.
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The paper addresses the issue of educational policy undertaken by the Ministry of National Education of Poland over the period of the last two decades. Drawing on the assumptions of critical pedagogy, the author analyses education macro-policy, the condition of educational institutions and various socializing environments and tries to reveal forms of violence and power embedded in them. The author claims that the Ministry negates democratization of education and neglects the values of democracy and democratic citizenship. He also reveals many sites and mechanisms of structural and symbolic violence that negatively affect the quality of educational processes. In his concluding remarks, the author argues that a truly public education should be based on the principles of decentralization, self-governance and subsidiarity.
The author tackles the problem of the new quality of pedagogy in postmodern Poland. It is expressed in the absence of “one” theory, one meta-language which is used to describe and explain basic concepts and processes. Moreover, it creates theoretical foundations for the development of detailed pedagogical sciences. Each attempt to set up a universal project or meta-narration becomes an unreasonable interpretation of phenomena or theories and the will to gain power. None of individual interpretations can be superior to any others. There are not any “better” or “worse” theories. I reveal new approaches to pedagogy as: – science of pedagogical sciences (metapedagogy); – comparative pedagogical thoughts; – meta-science, or the science of all sciences about upbringing and education.