Our learning of Developmental Psychology until today

This subject helps us to acquire a basic and initial formation about psicoevolutions process that children experiment in the pass by their lives. This refers to the knowledge of the changes that the children are going to experiment. It's essential for future teachers and they will allow understanding of what happens in the classroom, and so more properly adjusting their pedagogical interventions. In this stage is so important, because is during the age school when the child has to know the basic processes of learning, the acquisition of identity and self-concept, like personality development.

Furthermore, the general knowledge that this subject gives us, we have to develop a big sensibility to know the specific situation about each child and each family, we have to respect the maturation rate and the learning about each one, we must avoid falling into generalizations that might harm their development and progress of children. One way to get to this sensibility is to see this subject like a basic orientation without stiffness, promoting between us the understanding, patience and delivery to give children and provide them all help that they need to train like people and prevent all kinds of alterations and the difficulties in the learning.

             During the first sessions of developmental psychology, the teacher told us to make a single picture of what we understood by development to later compare it to other colleagues. And back to do another group drawing, explain this picture and compare it with other classes.

WHY? we think that the idea of ​​development was implicit in us, but we never stopped to think about it, when we have drawn, we developed the idea that we each one of us have the development and compare it, we realize that the idea of ​​development is somewhat subjective because everyone has his own and all are valid, but also we see that there are different ways to group development, this may be linear or cyclic, dynamic or static, linear with or without a final end, individual or contextual, development can also be forward, backward, forward but with multiple alternatives ... but we understand that many way, alternative or directions we take always achieve development.

Finally comparing it with colleagues and listening the following explanations of the teacher, we realized that the idea of ​​development is not simple as we thought in the first class; the development is very broad and complex.

            The next classes, the teacher ask us to go outside and see the building. When we were seeing the building, we realised that there were a lot of details that we haven’t noticed like that every floors have doors with different colours, then we started thinking that the building had a lot of factors and there were all connected to each other. The same day the teacher ask us to do an activity in pairs, we had to make a drawing line by line, we were seeing that the drawing was taking form and getting more and more complex, then we imagined what the person who was drawing wanted to draw before he finished.

            Next, we drew a line of our own life experience in paper that was an objective experience, then in pairs outside class we make a different one by walking when we were thinking about our life, we realised this development was more subjective. With this exercise we were experienced the different process: transit, transfer and transformation. As the teacher said transit is the whole experience without stops, transfer was the stages of the experience and then transformation is what changes you and make an before and after. We have experienced transformation when this module, now we could understand what development is and we now understand more than before.

            The last days, we started with some theory but our question is why we didn’t start with the theory and then do some practise about it? The answer comes easier to my mind, the teacher has been trying that we get the knowledge by ourselves first, so then when we see the theory we are going to have some previous base, furthermore getting the knowledge by discovering it, It’s going to help us to go understand it better and to go deeper. The first thing that he has tried to explain us is the concept of development, because if we are studying development psychology, first we have to understand development.

Then we have go deeper into some characteristics of the development, it has been like the example of the building, seeing it outside it looked like only one thing but when we get in, we could see that It also has another parts which are also complex and has their own characteristics. Some of these characteristics are the concept of subjectivism, objectivism, change...  Afterwards we saw the fisher model which was like the top of all we have learnt, also we could think development as this theory because development gets more abstract and abstract when you go deeper on it.

            Finally, like a conclusion of what we all have done, we can say that this development which we have learned, it has been from one method of knowledge that we can call “simple” until one that we can consider that is more complicated to understand. But, this does that now we understand better all the process of the development following all its steps and we realize that the knowledge has been correct and we have been conscious about it. We can show one example about this type of development, it reflects in the “process of wedding” that in the begging they are two people that have a friendship and with a long of time they get develop the love until one point in the summit. Like this subject, this subject didn’t start with the first class but this class started when the teacher started to prepare the classes of this year, also this subject won’t finish with the last day, it will keep going when we become teachers.

            But now, what are we going to do in the next classes? We think that in the following classes we may develop various topics to talk of them in class and to discus all the doubts that we will have, the topics we think that are going to appear is:

• The development of the children: related to these topics we think that we can talk about how a child evolves as the time as he grows or how to behave according to the past years.
•   Authors: we think that we have to understand some authors, to understand the children as Piaget, Kolhberg, Vygotsky, Pavlov or Ausubel.
• Children’s awareness of their development: we think that we have to discuss if the children are aware of their change and if they are aware that their future depends on those years.

Gemma García, Alejandro García, Cristina Martinez, Borja de Hevia, Laura Sanchez y Paloma Cendejas