I published an article in the September, 2002, issue of Chicago Parent called, "Islands of expertise: Why do children become such specialists?"
Here's a quote from the article:
"Islands of expertise" is a term coined by Kevin Crowley, Ph.D., an educational researcher at University of Pittsburgh who studies the ways that children and parents learn together in museums
( http://www.kevincrowley.com ). It refers to the areas of relatively deep and rich knowledge children develop when they are passionately interested in something like dinosaurs, Pokémon, rocks, turtles and other things. These islands emerge over weeks or months as children talk, read and learn about their passions.
You can read the complete article here:
< http://saltthesandbox.org/ChicagoParentArticle2.htm
>
The next section didn't make it into the
published version of my article, but I think it's still important.
This spring I volunteered at a
dinosaur festival sponsored by Wonder Works, a new children’s museum
starting up in Oak Park < http://www.wonder-works.org/
>. They gave me a white
t-shirt with the Wonder Works logo on the front and a quote on the
back—“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” attributed to
Albert Einstein.
Here’s a more complete version of
the quote: "I am
enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Knowledge is limited. Imagination
encircles the world."
Was Einstein right? Is
imagination really more important than knowledge? Einstein was a
physicist—maybe there was less he had to know about energy and matter
than a paleontologist needs to know about the past.
To imagine the past, you need a thousand bits of knowledge.
But what paleontologists know about the past is as much a product
of their imaginations as it is dusty fossils extracted from rocks.
Paleontologists—and dinosaur lovers of all ages—need both knowledge
and imagination, and one can't function without the other.
Regardless
of the relative importance of knowledge and imagination, I’m glad that
Ethan has both. And I enjoy
watching how his knowledge and imagination feed off one another.
I love listening to his stories about real dinosaurs at imaginary
Golpher Lake as much as love helping him build his island of expertise
by playing T. rex attacked by small dinosaurs with killer claws.
Here's an article that provides a few
answers to this question. (This site has pop-up ads.)
< http://www.familyeducation.com/article/0,1120,22-7720,00.html
>
In his foreword to the Encyclopedia of
Dinosaurs, Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park) discusses his thoughts about why kids are interested in dinosaurs. (At the end, he admits he doesn't know.)
< http://darwin.apnet.com/dinosaur/dinofore.htm
>
When my younger son, Aaron, turned his attention to
dinosaurs, it was because he needed to act out family issues. His
big daddy T. rex had an ever growing, multi-species family of
tiny plastic babies to watch over and protect. Aaron said,
"He's a good Daddy. He doesn't eat his babies," and I was left
to wonder what was really on his mind. The following long,
scholarly article develops Michael Crichton's
themes in a way that sheds some light on why kids sometimes think about dinosaurs as parents of human
children:
< http://freenet.msp.mn.us/org/mythos/mythos.www/REX.HTML
>
This site has results of a poll of
students on a related topic, "Why should people bother to study
about animals that are already extinct?"
< http://www.cdlponline.org/education/edarchives/trex/showandtell.html
>
