Studying Early Childhood: Part 2 - Reading, writing and producing assignments

By Professor Kay Sambell

Professor of Learning and Teaching, School of Health, Community and Education Studies, Northumbria University, and author of Studying Childhood and Early Childhood: a Guide for Students (2nd edition, Sage, 2010)

When studying early childhood at degree level, it's vital to become fluent in appropriate ways of talking and writing about relevant ideas and concepts. This helps you produce effective assignments during the degree itself but, most importantly, also develops essential skills, qualities and dispositions you'll need in the longer term.

In the first part of this series (Nursery World, 23 September 2010), we saw that 'learning' at university is not simply a matter of acquiring more information. Instead, it's about developing high-order thinking and complex and subtle understandings about the issues and challenges that tend to preoccupy early childhood specialists. From this viewpoint, when we say individuals understand something, what we are really saying is that they are capable of relating to a topic in the way that a specialist in that discipline does (Ramsden, 2003).