Resources

An interview with Edith Ackermann

Kim Thomas

As a psychologist, Edith Ackermann is interested in how children learn through play, through collaborative work and through the use of technology. She worked for a time at the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva under the direction of Jean Piaget, whose ideas about children's development have strongly influenced her thinking. Now Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Aix-Marseille, she is currently on secondment to MIT, where she is a Visiting Professor in the School of Architecture.

So what is a developmental psychologist doing in a school of architecture? "I work a lot on the way in which children think and the way they build their own views of the world, and when I moved to MIT I started working with designers of an environment that allowed a kind of natural learning," she says. She works with colleagues who "are interested in thinking about what it takes to educate a creative mind. We think about the ways in which people live and learn."

Edith follows Piaget in having a constructivist view of how children learn - that is, they actively construct knowledge through their interactions with the world around them. Her work is about trying to understand how the environment in which children spend their time influences the way they learn. For a constructivist, the lifestyles of modern children are particularly interesting because they spend much less time than previous generations in a single location. It's an age, says Edith, of "multiple mobilities", in which children are nomads, moving, for example, between the households of separated parents: "They are in-between in all senses of the term."

This mobility, says Edith, has an impact both on what and on how children learn: "When you are in-between, you have new developmental tasks that maybe children of earlier generations don't have. One of them has to do with recreating social ability beyond territorial and temporal borders, because if your little friend is no longer Johnny around the corner, what you have to do is build friendships with those that you meet in other locations."

New technologies such as iPods, mobile phones and social websites such as MySpace enable children to make and retain these friendships, she says. The devices that children carry around with them also meet another developmental task: they are "self-orienting devices" which allow children to "be in the world" - to find their place and their voice no matter where they are: "It is not easy for a person on the go to build a sense of being and belonging. Routines and rituals - or virtual habitats - may have to replace territory as a holding structure."

Because children are naturally curious and eager to learn, they find it easier than adults to adapt to the new technology and to find ways of using it that help them achieve those developmental tasks. Inevitably, by using the technology, children develop new skills. Texting and instant messaging are examples: "You have new forms of literacy emerging from the uses of new technology. Children use them in a way that is a total hybridisation between oral and written communication, or between writing with words and writing with images."

Constructivist thought says that one way children learn is by testing their imagined view of the world against reality: "What I want to show is that children have always been travelling between different worlds, the virtual world and the physical world," says Edith. "And the way the human imagination works is to travel between virtuality and reality. It's the only way to establish a dialogue between how things are and how they are perceived." The most successful digital devices, she says, are those that are "resonant with the ways in which the human imagination works."

She contrasts this imaginative use of technology with the often limited approach of prepackaged educational software which, in her view, "disempowers everybody". Such software, she says, is often predicated on "making your child smart", rather than in enabling children to construct their own understanding. She is also concerned about the way in which museums are becoming more didactic in their approach, placing constraints on how visitors interact with displays.

Edith suggests that digital technologies, used educationally, can be used to "help people move between worlds": from an educational perspective, she says, we need to blend three ingredients: transitioning, which is about letting one's mind wander, or get into the flow; grounding, which is about being anchored, or "staking one's territory to know where one stands and keeping one's bearing"; and "self-orienting" - knowing where we are.

A useful analogy, she says, is with travelling: "What people like to do when they travel is to be open in the way that they roam about, feeling that you're off the beaten track - fearful because you may get lost but you are open for adventure, and as soon as there is something that captures your attention you would like to capture it." They can then share these photographs with friends and family at home. Teachers accompanying children to a museum can organise quests for their students, in which they use their mobile phones to take pictures, which they can then share with others: "What they love is they have taken a picture to put on a website where other people can see it, and one can imagine different kinds of scenario where they can use these trophies that they bring back from their travels, which are elements for re-enactment and retelling."

Edith is a passionate believer that digital technologies, used properly, can be powerful tools in helping children learn. She cites the work of the influential educationalist, mathematician and computer scientist, Seymour Papert, also based at MIT, who built on Piaget's work further to develop 'constructionism' - the idea that children learn through making things. Papert's work has been important, says Edith, in looking at how to build computer environments that are in tune with the way children learn.

She endorses the 'one laptop per child' scheme developed by Papert, Alan Kay and Nicholas Negroponte, the aim of which is to provide inexpensive laptop computers to children around the world, so they can have access to learning: "The children who grow up today really have to be computer-literate, otherwise it's finished for them. So you had better give them that, and let them use it as they want, the way they want it."