Building Islands of Expertise in Everyday Family Activity

How do young children first learn about academic disciplines? Long before they encounter science, history, or social studies in grade school, children begin developing a wealth of informal knowledge about each topic. In science, for example, young children are actively developing nascent scientific reasoning skills, naive theories for scientific domains, knowledge of interesting science factoids, knowledge about famous scientific narratives, and even some early ideas about what different kinds of scientists do in their professional work. As this everyday academic literacy develops, children are simultaneously developing a sense of identity as individuals who are more or less interested and motivated to seek out opportunities to engage in activities that are related to various academic disciplines. As one focus of our museum learning research, we continue to explore how parents mediate children's experiences in and out of museums to help weave multiple moments of learning into broader informal knowledge about aca~_emic disciplines. In this chapter we introduce the notion of islands of expertise, explore links between related socio-cultural and information processing theory, and overview a study of family conversations while parents and children look at authentic and replica fossils in a museum.