The Scientific Views about Understanding the Child

Abstract

The article considers the scientific-psychological approaches of the concept of «understanding»: psychological hermeneutics, cognitive, logical semantic, psychosemantic, psycholinguistic, subjective, and communicative. It was proved that the interpretation of understanding as a process of reveal the meaning and content of a particular phenomenon was common for the beforementioned approaches. That is accompanied with a person’s confidence in the accuracy of own conclusions and due to the action of a number of factors that affect the adequacy, completeness and depth of the information received. The preschool teacher’s understanding of a child’s personality is considered in three directions: as a goal, as a process, as a result. These directions are interdependent. It is emphasized the complexity of understanding as a process, caused by the influence of a number of objective and subjective factors. The authors of the article consider the types of understanding of the individual characteristics of the child by the preschool teacher. It is proved that the optimal interaction between the educator and the children is the position of the understanding-dialogue, in which the adult not only treats the child as a kind of complex individual characteristics with a rich inner world, but also gives the feedback. This creates trust and support, and facilitates to reveal the capacity of the child. It was described a lot of subjective factors influencing the understanding of the child’s personality by the preschool teacher. Some of the subjective factors are established to influence the process of understanding both positively and negatively. The results having been received in this research proved that the subjectsubject type of understanding is the best for pedagogical activity. This type of understanding provides that the preschool teacher seeks to reveal adequately the individual characteristics of the child, admits her or his uniqueness, supports in every possible way the efforts aimed at her or his self-affirmation, self-realization, self-expression and self-development.

Keywords

• understanding
• stages of understanding
• types of understanding of the child’s personality by preschool teacher
• subjective factors of understanding.