Question

Select one of these:

Observe young children between the ages of 2-8 and the adults with whom they spend their days. Write me a story: describe ways you see the children imitating the adults.

Notice how adults respond when children are hurt or upset. Do you see a difference in response between those who are knowledgeable about child development and those who are not? Do any of the adults deny the children's feelings or try to distract them? What is your own common reaction to children who are upset or hurt?

Observe ways in which teachers encourage or discourage young children to think for themselves. Do you see any relationship between a teacher's own intellectual autonomy and that teacher's encouragement of children's intellectual autonomy? How would you rate yourself for intellectual autonomy and what does this mean for you as a teacher?

Answer 1

Children, between ages 2 and 8, undergo various cognitive and metacognitive processes that enable them to learn about the world and their specific environment, and to develop as learners. One such fundamental cognitive process is ‘Imitation’ which refers to children learning through their observations. Young children become proficient at learning through imitation from a very early age and the ability develops rapidly. It is through this ability that they acquire most of the important social and cognitive skills.

Evidence suggests that infants imitate both facial and manual gestures through complex physical and neural activity, even in simple imitation. This is achieved by the ‘mirror neuron’ system, whereby the same neurons fire both when an individual observes another person performing a particular action as well as when they perform the action themselves. This system underpins imitative behaviours and is also important in explaining how we understand others’ minds and intentions, and how we empathise with others’ emotional states. Further, humans, from such a young age, are able to not only imitate current observed behaviours, but also to defer reproducing the behaviour until a later point in time since we are able to mentally represent objects and events in our memory.

The most important and relevant influencers of imitation, thus, include: parents, teachers and peers.

The development and importance of imitation, as explained above, therefore, offers implications for appropriate modelling of behaviours by the significant others right from the young ages, which may serve as a powerful means of supporting learning in children.

In conclusion, it may be noted that children’s imitative behaviour is highly flexible and the type of learning they engage in may be determined by a host of personal, interpersonal, motivational and situational variables.