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Essential for anyone blending approaches so that what’s offered to the child is seamless & accessible https://t.co/wrSPaeZWtD

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Essential for anyone blending approaches so that what’s offered to the child is seamless & accessible https://t.co/wrSPaeZWtD

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We're still holding our #HybridPedagogy event next month but now it'll be 100% virtual 📹💻

Join @christinepascal @DrTonyBertram & @FiJulie to continue the discussion on Zoom, Thurs 18 June, 16:00 – 18:00 [BST]

REGISTER👉https://t.co/G76GDRSIi2 https://t.co/VdRzbtE5qJ

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Don’t miss what’s happening

People on Twitter are the first to know.

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Essential for anyone blending approaches so that what’s offered to the child is seamless & accessible https://t.co/wrSPaeZWtD
— Liz Clark (@LizClarkDance) May 22, 2020

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Essential for anyone blending approaches so that what’s offered to the child is seamless & accessible https://t.co/wrSPaeZWtD

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We're still holding our #HybridPedagogy event next month but now it'll be 100% virtual 📹💻

Join @christinepascal @DrTonyBertram & @FiJulie to continue the discussion on Zoom, Thurs 18 June, 16:00 – 18:00 [BST]

REGISTER👉https://t.co/G76GDRSIi2 https://t.co/VdRzbtE5qJ

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Essential for anyone blending approaches so that what’s offered to the child is seamless & accessible https://t.co/wrSPaeZWtD

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Essential for anyone blending approaches so that what’s offered to the child is seamless & accessible https://t.co/wrSPaeZWtD

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
We're still holding our #HybridPedagogy event next month but now it'll be 100% virtual 📹💻

Join @christinepascal @DrTonyBertram & @FiJulie to continue the discussion on Zoom, Thurs 18 June, 16:00 – 18:00 [BST]

REGISTER👉https://t.co/G76GDRSIi2 https://t.co/VdRzbtE5qJ

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Authentic Learning, Assessment and Progress; Describing the journey from the EYFS onwards

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Authentic Learning, Assessment and Progress; Describing the journey from the EYFS onwards

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Jan Dubiel - a must watch

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Authentic Learning, Assessment and Progress; Describing the journey from the EYFS onwards

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The introduction of education reforms in early years, primary and secondary education systems by the Government have left education establishments and professionals with many unanswered questions. This is the first in a series lectures exploring issues surrounding educational assessment. Jan Dubiel is a highly regarded national speaker and the National Development Manager of Early Excellence.

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EYFS 2017 and the Early Years Workforce Strategy

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EYFS 2017 and the Early Years Workforce Strategy

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EYFS 2017 and the Early Years Workforce Strategy

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The Department for Education has published amendments to the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) to come into effect on 3rd April 2017. The long-awaited Early Years Workforce Strategy has also been published outlining Government's plans to support the sector to remove barriers to attracting, retaining and developing the workforce.

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Nursery World article on Sustained Shared Thinking

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The most effective early years pedagogues encourage talk with adults and among children by keeping with the child's interest and attention. One of the most common methods of prompting interactions with children is through questions. But how often do we, as pedagogues, think about questioning and how it effects children's language development and their ability to think and reflect?

There is great potential to increase children's capacity to learn from an activity through careful adult-child talk, and questioning is one of many strategies that can either support and encourage children's learning - or limit or stop it in its tracks.

The effectiveness of verbal interactions to promote development of children's language and thinking skills relies heavily on the level and depth of the child's involvement in the activity, and the activity itself.

Planning appropriate and relevant experiences and recognising when to support children's spontaneous learning will increase the opportunity for quality interactions. Further, interactions involving sustained shared thinking (SST) have been identified as some of the most effective in supporting children's learning.

Sustained shared thinking

Sustained shared thinking is defined as the result of two or more individuals (adults and children) working together in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept or evaluate activities. It requires all participants to contribute to the thinking and that the thinking must be extended (see Further reading).

The following is a good example of SST, in which the adult is guiding learning, rather than dominating it. Look at how children can be encouraged and supported by adults in the process of making sense of the world: Grace (aged four): 'How did God make us?'

Adult: 'I don't know. What do you think?'

Grace: 'I don't know.'

Adult: 'Well, how would you make yourself?'

Grace: 'I would make myself happy.'

Tom (aged four): 'I think when God made us, we made God.'

Grace: 'He putted (sic) our bones in first, and then he putted blood on the bones, and then he putted our skin on.'

Tom: 'No - he opened up our bones and put the blood in us.'

Grace: 'No - if he put it in our bones, the blood wouldn't come out.'

Or we can see this example from the same nursery: Abid (aged four): 'What kind of skeleton animal is that?'

Adult: 'They think it's a dinosaur. What do you think?'

Abid: 'A dinosaur.'

Adult: 'Is it really?'

Abid: 'Looks like it.'

Adult: 'Let's look at its head.'

Kylie (aged three-and-a-half): 'It looks like it's dirty. It's very old.'

Adult: 'How can you tell it's old?'

Kylie: 'Cos it is... 'cos all the dirt around it.'

Adult: 'It does look very dirty, I must say.'

Learning and discovery

In the following example we can see how an adult can encourage speculation through questioning.

Adult: 'If I take one side of the shape away, what different shapes can you make?'

Nelson (aged four): 'A circle shape.'

Adult: 'You might be able to make them into a circle. Try.'

Adult: 'If I give you that piece...Can you make a different shape...? What can you make, Nelson?'

Nelson: 'Rectangle...Look I'm making it. (He makes a square). Done it!'

Nadia (aged four, has also made a square): 'And me!'

Adult: 'What shape is it?'

Children (together): 'Square!'

In this example the children are literally and mentally playing with facts.

As they grapple with the task, they are supported by the adult who uses questions that encourage the children to test out their own hypotheses.

These children are motivated by the pursuit of learning and discovery for their own sake, and their excitement, captured here through their language, is proof of this motivation. They are not being told what a square is, nor pushed into identifying it. They are finding it out for themselves and from the 'ers' and 'ums' of not knowing follow the 'ohs' and 'ahs' of learning - the sounds of meaning being made.

Now take the above example and compare it with another experience involving shapes found in a different Foundation Stage setting: Adult: 'This week we're going to carry on talking about shapes. We're going to look at one like this (draws triangle in air). Do you know what that shape is?'

Britney (aged four years and two months): 'Square?'

Adult: 'No, this is a square.' (She draws in the air.) Britney: 'A circle?'

Adult: 'No, this is a circle (draws in air). It is called a triangle.'

In this example, the child's verbal contribution has been reduced to a cautious one-word guess of what the practitioner has in mind.

The fact that her responses are expressed as questions indicates that she is both uncomfortable in this learning experience and aware that there is a 'correct answer' to be found.

Such an exchange, with the adult's negative responses, promotes the view of adult as expert and of learning as remembering rather than investigating.

If children are to be encouraged to reflect en route to becoming lifelong learners, it is important that they are offered a less fixed view of the world, one where curiosity and wonder, rather than correct solutions and consensus building, fuel their investigations.

Unsettling results

The recent Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years project analysed and reviewed a random sample of questions observed in settings (see Further reading). The sample was extracted from more than 400 hours of observations involving 28 Foundation Stage pedagogues in 14 early years settings, identified as moderately good to effective and representing all types of group providers. A total of 1,967 questions were analysed and the results were quite unsettling.

Of the questions analysed, 34.1 per cent were closed - that is they were questions that have one correct response, often known by the person posing the question, such as, 'What colour is this piece of paper?'

While such questions do serve an important purpose, including checking children's knowledge and maintaining their attention, their over-representation in early years settings is a cause for concern.

Such closed questions generally reduce children's communicative role to short, often one-word, responses, and rely only on a child's capacity to recall information, so diminishing their opportunity for thinking, reflecting and/or speculating.

In contrast, open questions - which, evidence shows, encourage speculation and promote SST - made up a mere 5.1 per cent of questions analysed, that is only 101 out of 1,967 adult questions.

Open questions normally have more than one possible answer and can promote speculation, for example, 'I don't know. What do you think?' Studies have found such questions to be associated with better cognitive achievement, as they offer children the opportunity to grapple verbally with ideas and concepts still forming in their minds.

Adult follow-up However, it would be wrong and overly simplistic to assume that open questions are 'good' and closed questions are 'bad', or that quality verbal interactions will naturally follow from a list of perfectly-worded questions. Evidence suggests that at their most successful, good questions rely on good follow-up by the participating adults.

If the adult is interested only in arriving at a 'correct answer', then there is little room for children to wrestle with ideas and misconceptions.

However, if the practitioner is interested in promoting a child's gradual process of discovery, their questioning will be only one part of a larger approach to extending children's meaning making.

So, while open questions offer more opportunity for higher-order thinking, without an adult's encouragement and patience, even the most open-ended questions can be reduced to one-word answers.

Learning how to ask children questions, to sustain shared thinking and to promote reflection and speculation relies on opportunity and good practice (see box). NW Iram Siraj-Blatchford is a professor, and Laura Manni is a researcher, Institute of Education, University of London

Further reading

* Siraj-Blatchford, I, Sylva, K, Taggart, B, Sammons, P and Melhuish, E The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education. (Order online from: http:// k1.ioe.ac.uk/schools/ecpe/eppe/eppe/eppepubs.htm, priced 11).

* Siraj-Blatchford, I, Sylva, K, Muttock, S, Gilden, R and Bell, D Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years, Institute of Education, University of London. http:/k1.ioe.ac.uk/schools/ecpe/eppe/index/htm.

Effective questioning

In early years settings, questions have two overall functions:

* language development

* thought development.

Enquiry questions

Try these questions to encourage children to reflect and to extend and sustain their thinking:

* How could you find out?

* What do you think? And do you think everyone else would think the same?

* What do you think is happening?

* I don't know, what do you think?

* Can you tell me more about that?

* How can you make/build this?

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The most effective early years pedagogues encourage talk with adults and among children by keeping with the child's interest and attention. One of the most common methods of prompting interactions with children is through questions. But how often do we, as pedagogues, think about questioning and how it effects children's language development and their ability to think and reflect?

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Nursery World Awards 14: Individuals - Lifetime Achievement

Tina Bruce was instrumental in developing play pedagogy, an interesting article

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Tina Bruce is a Froebelian who has a sustained interest in play. As a Froebelian educator, she is guided by principles such as working with the whole child. She has written and edited 29 books and many articles.

But she is perhaps best known in academic circles for the 10 principles of early childhood first published in 1987 in her book Early Childhood Education and the 12 features of play, published in her second book, Time to Play in Early Childhood Education 1991, which is my all time favourite. This was the first Tina Bruce book I bought and one I still refer to today.

One of the most important things about Tina is her natural ability to support and empower others. She has supported me, Georgie McCall, Jane Whinnett, Lynn McNair, Julian Grenier, Julia Manning Morton, Penny Holland, and Jenny Spratt, just to mention a few. She has co-authored with nearly all of the people that she has supported.

Tina has become part of the history of play. Her work has been important in influencing current thinking and curriculum development in the Early Years Foundation Stage. She was appointed a member of the working parties in England that developed the 'Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage' (QCA/DfEE, 2000), the 'Birth to Three Matters Framework' (DfES, 2002) and the Foundation Stage Profile (QCA/DfES, 2003). Also, Tina was awarded a CBE in the New Years Honours in December 2008 for 'services to early years education' and in 2010, she contributed to the Tickell Review of The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS).

Many of you may be unaware that Tina is the lead research fellow in a project funded by the Froebel Trust in Soweto, South Africa. For the past eight years, she has worked with teachers in this community, working with up to 300 children and their families affected or infected by HIV or Aids.

Tina has an amazing ability to interweave theory and practice using and promoting practical examples that practitioners recognise. She is deeply Froebelian and has developed Froebel's principles in ways that are culturally appropriate to promote play in her work in Soweto. I am privileged to be a member of her Soweto team. I have learned so much from her, her way of saying things in a caring yet professional way, and how she relates to everyone around her making them feel valued and that their views are always welcomed.

I deeply appreciate Tina's ability to stick to Froebelian principles amid all the years of changing policies and politicians. She has been the one who has put Froebel on the early years educational map. Working with people rather than against them in a non-confrontational way is Tina's modus operandi.

Tina is a serious academic but not a 'serious' person. Her sense of humour knows no bounds. Tina told me that as a student she used to have to climb in through the window after going to the theatre because the main gate closed at 10pm. She is a good little mover on the dance floor and a bit of a choreographer at heart. She has been known on a few occasions to get me involved in helping children to learn Tudor dances. Tina has a way of getting you to do things before you realise what is involved.

Tina always advocates the best experiences, and the best people to work with and for young children, and really deserves to be celebrated.

I'm thrilled that my friend, tutor and mentor, Professor Tina Bruce has been chosen to receive Nursery World's Lifetime Achievement award.

BIOGRAPHY

Professor Tina Bruce is an honorary visiting professor of Early Childhood Studies at Roehampton University.

In 2008, she was awarded a CBE for Services to early years education.

Tina trained as a primary teacher at the Froebel Educational Institute, now part of Roehampton University. She went on to become a Froebelian educator guided by principles that promote a holistic approach to teaching young children.

She is best known for her ability to interweave Froebelian theory and practice, and for developing the 10 Principles of Early Childhood in her first book, published in 1987. She has since written and edited 28 books.

Tina has played an instrumental role in laying the foundations of early education as co-ordinator of the Early Years Advisory Group to successive Government childcare ministers for 10 years.

She is also vice-president of the British Association for Early Childhood Education, vice chair of the Froebel Trust Education Committee and chair of the Archive Advisory Group of the Frobel Trust, of which she is a trustee.
RECENT BOOKS
Early Childhood Education (4th ed), Hodder Education (2011)

Cultivating Creativity: Babies, Toddlers and Young Children, Hodder Education (2011)

Learning through Play: Babies, Toddlers and Young Children, Hodder Education (2011)

Childcare and Education (5th ed), Hodder Education (2010, with Carolyn Meggitt and Julian Grenier)

Observing Young Children, Sage (2014, with Stella Louis and Georgie McCall).
Download the PDF

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Nursery World Awards 14: Individuals - Lifetime Achievement

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Tina Bruce is a Froebelian who has a sustained interest in play. As a Froebelian educator, she is guided by principles such as working with the whole child. She has written and edited 29 books and many articles.

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Pedagogy: The Silent Partner in Early Years Learning
Permalink to the guided reading - this will be discussed in class, please read.

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Abstract:

This paper sets out to look critically at the influences on pedagogy in early years education, at the ways in which it is enacted in practice and the pedagogical perspectives held by practitioners. The aim of the paper is to explore the current state of understanding and suggest areas to be included in an agenda for future research. The factors that influence practitioners' actions are reviewed and the consensus around child-centredness and play is challenged. Findings from two studies of pedagogy in action in the early years are presented and examined in terms of sociocultural theory and its implications for practice. The first of these studies draws attention to the varied nature of pedagogical interactions that support learning while the second looks at the experience of pedagogical innovation. The need for researchers and practitioners to find effective ways of communicating and working together is stressed throughout the paper. (Contains 2 tables.)

Retrieving notes about this item

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Pedagogy: The Silent Partner in Early Years Learning

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Get this from a library! Pedagogy: The Silent Partner in Early Years Learning. [Christine Stephen] -- This paper sets out to look critically at the influences on pedagogy in early years education, at the ways in which it is enacted in practice and the pedagogical perspectives held by practitioners. ...

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Early Education and Children's Outcomes: How Long Do the Impacts Last? (Goodman and Sianesi, 2005)
Good counter article to EPPE

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Early Education and Children's Outcomes: How Long Do the Impacts Last?

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Get this from a library! Early Education and Children's Outcomes: How Long Do the Impacts Last?. [A lissa G oodman; B arbara S ianesi]

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Thinking Through Pedagogy in the Early Years

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Thinking Through Pedagogy in the Early Years

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Permalink

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Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Revealing assumptions about learning and teaching --
2. Exploring the historical, cultural and political context of pedagogy --
3. Making sense of young children's development --
4. Understanding knowledge and intelligence --
5. Identifying the attributes of, and barriers to, successful learning --
6. Creating an inclusive learning environment --
7. Providing breadth and balance --
8. Supporting successful learning --
9. Assessing and planning for learning --
10. Building up your expertise --
11. Facing the challenge of an unknown future.

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pedagogy teaching early childhood education

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Thinking through pedagogy for primary and early years

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Get this from a library! Thinking through pedagogy for primary and early years. [Tony Eaude] -- A practical and accessible text on pedagogy for primary teacher trainees and education studies students, this text features exercises designed to develop specific critical thinking skills.

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EOCP Professional Pedagogy for Early Childhood Education

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Link to the youtube documentary

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The story of Genie
What lessons does this particular case teach us, if any?

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There have been a number of cases of feral children raised in social isolation with little or no human contact. Few have captured public and scientific attention like that of a young girl called Genie. She spent almost her entire childhood locked in a bedroom, isolated and abused for over a decade. Genie's case was one of the first to put the critical period theory to the test.

Could a child reared in utter deprivation and isolation develop language? Could a nurturing environment make up for a horrifying past?

Genie's Background

Genie's story came to light on November 4, 1970, in Los Angeles, California. A social worker discovered the 13-year old girl after her mother sought out services. The social worker soon discovered that the girl had been confined to a small room, and an investigation by authorities quickly revealed that the child had spent most of her life in this room, often tied to a potty chair.

The girl was given the name Genie in her case files to protect her identity and privacy. "The case name is Genie. This is not the person's real name, but when we think about what a genie is, a genie is a creature that comes out of a bottle or whatever but emerges into human society past childhood. We assume that it really isn't a creature that had a human childhood," explained Susan Curtiss in a 1997 Nova documentary titled, "Secrets of the Wild Child."

Both parents were charged with abuse, but Genie's father committed suicide the day before he was due to appear in court, leaving behind a note stating that "the world will never understand."

Genie's life prior to her discovery was one of utter deprivation. She spent most of her days tied naked to her potty chair only able to move her hands and feet.

When she made noise, her father would beat her. Her father, mother, and older brother rarely spoke to her. The rare times her father did interact with her, it was to bark or growl.

The story of her case soon spread, drawing attention from both the public and the scientific community. The case was important, said psycholinguist and author Harlan Lee, because "our morality doesn't allow us to conduct deprivation experiments with human beings; these unfortunate people are all we have to go on."

With so much interest in her case, the question became what should be done with her. A team of psychologists and language experts began the process of rehabilitating Genie.

Teaching Genie

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) provided funding for scientific research on Genie's case.

"I think everybody who came in contact with her was attracted to her. She had a quality of somehow connecting with people, which developed more and more but was present, really, from the start. She had a way of reaching out without saying anything, but just somehow by the kind of look in her eyes, and people wanted to do things for her," said psychologist David Rigler, part of the "Genie team."

Her rehabilitation team also included graduate student Susan Curtiss and psychologist James Kent.

Upon her initial arrival at UCLA, the team was met with a girl who weighed just 59 pounds and moved with a strange "bunny walk." She often spat and was unable to straighten her arms and legs. Silent, incontinent, and unable to chew, she initially seemed only able to recognize her own name and the word "sorry."

After assessing Genie's emotional and cognitive abilities, Kent described her as "the most profoundly damaged child I've ever seen ... Genie's life is a wasteland." Her silence and inability to use language made it difficult to assess her mental abilities, but on tests, she scored at about the level of a 1-year-old.

She soon began to make rapid progression in specific areas, quickly learning how to use the toilet and dress herself. Over the next few months, she began to experience more developmental progress but remained poor in areas such as language. She enjoyed going out on day trips outside of the hospital and explored her new environment with an intensity that amazed her caregivers and strangers alike. Curtiss suggested that Genie had a strong ability to communicate nonverbally, often receiving gifts from total strangers who seemed to understand the young girl's powerful need to explore the world around her.

Critical Period and Language Acquisition

Part of the reason why Genie's case fascinated psychologists and linguists so deeply was that it presented a unique opportunity to study a hotly contested debate about language development. Nativists believe that the capacity for language is innate, while empiricists suggest that it is environmental variables that play a key role. Essentially, it boils down to the age-old nature versus nurture debate. Do genetics or environment play a greater role in developing language?

Nativist Noam Chomsky suggested that acquiring language could not be fully explained by learning alone. Instead, he proposed that children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate ability to understand the principles of language. Once exposed to language, the LAD allows children to learn the language at a remarkable pace.

Linguist Eric Lenneberg suggests that like many other human behaviors, the ability to acquire language is subject to critical periods. A critical period is a limited span of time during which an organism is sensitive to external stimuli and capable of acquiring certain skills. According to Lenneberg, the critical period for language acquisition lasts until around age 12. After the onset of puberty, he argued, the organization of the brain becomes set and no longer able to learn and utilize language in a fully functional manner.

Genie's case presented researchers with a unique opportunity. If given an enriched learning environment, could she overcome her deprived childhood and learn language even though she had missed the critical period? If she could, it would suggest that the critical period hypothesis of language development was wrong. If she could not, it would indicate that Lenneberg's theory was correct.

Genie's Language Progress

Despite scoring at the level of a 1-year-old upon her initial assessment, Genie quickly began adding new words to her vocabulary. She started by learning single words and eventually began putting two words together much the way young children do. Curtiss began to feel that Genie would be fully capable of acquiring language.

After a year of treatment, she even started putting three words together occasionally. In children going through normal language development, this stage is followed by what is known as a language explosion. Children rapidly acquire new words and begin putting them together in novel ways. Unfortunately, this never happened for Genie. Her language abilities remained stuck at this stage and she appeared unable to apply grammatical rules and use language in a meaningful way. At this point, her progress leveled off and her acquisition of new language halted.

While Genie was able to learn some language after puberty, her inability to use grammar (which Chomsky suggests is what separates human language from animal communication) offers evidence for the critical period hypothesis.

Of course, Genie's case is not so simple. Not only did she miss the critical period for learning language, she was also horrifically abused. She was malnourished and deprived of cognitive stimulation for most of her childhood. Researchers were also never able to fully determine if Genie suffered from pre-existing cognitive deficits. As an infant, a pediatrician had identified her as having some type of mental delay. So researchers were left to wonder whether Genie had suffered from cognitive deficits caused by her years of abuse or if she had been born with some degree of mental retardation.

Arguments Over Genie's Care

Psychiatrist Jay Shurley helped assess Genie after she was first discovered, and he noted that since situations like hers were so rare, she quickly became the center of a battle between the researchers involved in her case. Arguments over the research and the course of her treatment soon erupted. Genie occasionally spent the night at the home of Jean Butler, one of her teachers. After an outbreak of measles, Genie was quarantined at her teacher's home. Butler soon became protective and began restricting access to Genie. Other members of the team felt that Butler's goal was to become famous from the case, at one point claiming that Butler had called herself the next Anne Sullivan, the teacher famous for helping Helen Keller learn to communicate.

Eventually, Genie was removed from Butler's care and went to live in the home of psychologist David Rigler, where she remained for the next four years. Despite some difficulties, she appeared to do well in the Rigler household. She enjoyed listening to classical music on the piano and loved to draw, often finding it easier to communicate through drawing than through other methods.

The Beginning of the End

NIMH withdrew funding in 1974, due to the lack of scientific findings. Linguist Susan Curtiss had found that while Genie could use words, she could not produce grammar. She could not arrange these words in a meaningful way, supporting the idea of a critical period in language development. Rigler's research was disorganized and largely anecdotal. Without funds to continue the research and care for Genie, she was moved from the Rigler's care.

In 1975, Genie returned to live with her birth mother. When her mother found the task too difficult, Genie was moved through a series of foster homes, where she was often subjected to further abuse and neglect. Genie's birth mother then sued the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles and the research team, charging them with excessive testing. While the lawsuit was eventually settled, it raised important questions about the treatment and care of Genie. Did the research interfere with the girl's therapeutic treatment?

Genie's situation continued to worsen. After spending a significant amount of time in foster homes, she returned to Children's Hospital. Unfortunately, the progress that had occurred during her first stay had been severely compromised by the subsequent treatment she received in foster care. Genie was afraid to open her mouth and had regressed back into silence.

Where Is Genie Today?

Today, Genie lives in an adult foster care home somewhere in southern California. Little is known about her present condition, although an anonymous individual hired a private investigator to track her down in 2000 and described her as happy. This contrasts with the account of psychiatrist Jay Shurley who visited her on her 27th and 29th birthdays and characterized her as largely silent, depressed, and chronically institutionalized.

"What do we take away from this really sad story?" asked Harlan Lee in the NOVA documentary, "The Secret of the Wild Child." "Look, there's an ethical dilemma in this kind of research. If you want to do rigorous science, then Genie's interests are going to come second some of the time. If you only care about helping Genie, then you wouldn't do a lot of the scientific research. So, what are you going to do? To make matters worse, the two roles, scientist, and therapist, were combined in one person, in her case. So, I think future generations are going to study Genie's case ... not only for what it can teach us about human development but also for what it can teach us about the rewards and the risks of conducting 'the forbidden experiment.'"
Lenneberg, E. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley. Pines, M. (1997). The civilizing of Genie. In Teaching English through the Disciplines: Psychology, Loretta F. Kasper, Ed.. PBS. (1997). The secret of the wild child. NOVA. Rolls, G. (2005). Classic Case Studies in Psychology. London: Hodder Arnold. Rymer, R. (1993). Genie: A scientific tragedy. New York: Harper Collins.

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There have been a number of cases of feral children raised in social isolation with little or no human contact. Few have captured public and scientific attention like that of a young girl called Genie. She spent almost her entire childhood locked in a bedroom, isolated and abused for over a decade.

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Pedagogic approach:  Elizabeth Jarmans' Communication Friendly Spaces

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Elizabeth Jarman are the sole provider of Communication Friendly Spaces™ Training and Development Programmes. Helping partners to create optimum conditions for learning. Sellers of Bags For Families and Bags for Practitioners.