SUMMARY
This paper proposes using learners' conceptions to create an interactive book for children aged between 5 and 9 about human procreation and the baby's life inside the mother's womb. The topic is approached simultaneously from both an emotional and a scientific angle. This dual perspective offers the child different ways to assimilate this complex knowledge. This presentation is conceived on the model of an interactive CD-ROM, offering different levels of information, corresponding to the reader's own level of knowledge, questions and interest in the subject.


KEY WORDS
Conception, allosteric learning model, interactive book, creation

Introduction

Sexual education at school is becoming more and more popular, especially as a preventive against the problems of AIDS. This education is generally given to young teenagers and presented by external persons who arrive in the classroom with specific material. We are not against this practice. It is necessary and a very good way to open the pupil's mind to the sexual world and the indispensable methods for protection and contraception.

But sexual curiosity doesn't awaken with the puberty. The child, and especially the young child, asks himself a lot of fundamental questions about his existence. Still, this subject often remains taboo. Parents and even teachers don't know how to handle it. The children's book market abounds in publications on the subject, but unfortunately, while most of them "explain" things, more often than not, they don't dare to go right to the end of the children's curiosity. For example, the sexual act is generally not shown. Knowing that a father's sex is not the same as a mother's says little about "how it works," neither from the physiological nor from an emotional point of view.
Indeed, children's questions are not limited to the "scientific" aspect only, even if they often begin with "how." They are often really a search of identity. While talking about physiological phenomena, we have to keep in view that if the child is not able to cope with his affective feelings, this may block his acquisition of new knowledge. To address to these problems, we have created a book for children between 5 and 9 years old. It tells about human procreation and the baby's life inside the mother's womb without avoiding the emotional part of the story. The most common questions about procreation asked by children are presented as in a fairy tale.

Book's presentation

This book is conceived on the model of an interactive CD-ROM. It offers dual options for entry; the reader can utilise the front or the back of the book, without either being indispensable to the other. One of the entries proposes a fairy tale in the manner of Hänsel and Gretel by the Grimm Brothers. The two heroes, a little boy and a girl are confronted with the approaching birth of a baby. Jealousy incites them to leave their family, and they have to face a lot of trials before coming back home. Throughout this fairy tale, the most common questions which children ask about procreation are presented in visual images. Each question has a different coloured point, sending the reader to the other side of the book, where a scientific approach to the physiological phenomena is proposed. The colour of the point shows the reader in which chapter he can find the information about this specific question. Thus, the child can always choose between the imaginary part and the scientific information. This latter section offers the reader different levels corresponding to his own level of knowledge, questions and interest in the subject.

Creation of the book

The importance of using a learner's conceptions to create didactic tools no longer needs any proof. The amount of research on this practice shows the interest in this method. Yet every time, we must define exactly which are these conceptions and choose an appropriate method to go beyond them. First of all, we have to define what "create" a baby means for young children and how they imagine the baby's life inside the mother's womb. At the same time, we consider the relationship between what Bettelheim and fairy tale psychoanalysis say about the emotional part of this very important moment in life and observations deriving from professional practice.

Using conception for creating the "Questions Book"

In the special fairy tale part, the reader is confronted with a lot of questions to which he never gets direct answers, because he has to go and find them himself in the scientific information part. This part is used in particular to illustrate some conceptions we can often observe among young children. To begin with, the story brings up a conception that almost all the 5 years old children recognise as an error.

Dog's babies are being put inside the mother's womb by the doctor.

The function of this picture is to give the child self-confidence in his own knowledge. He can laugh heartily, like the heroine of the story, because he knows that what he is looking at is not true. But the function of this picture is also to warn the child that this kind of picture (they are always inside a bubble) is not the reality. So, when the story proposes a similar situation to him, with the hero who is imagining answers, the reader knows that this is not correct, even if it corresponds to what he was imagining himself.

 

Drawings illustrating children's conceptions about a baby's breathing and nutrition, juxtaposed with drawing proposed by the Questions Book about these subjects.

The aim of this kind of visual presentation is to destabilise the child. For most children, this explanation is the same they might give themselves. But, without any help from the adult, the whole context gives rise to doubts about this explicative model. Even if they dare not admit their ignorance, this confrontation with their own conception pushes the children to find an explanation in the other part of the book. At this point, it's very important that the adult doesn't himself answer the child. On the contrary, he must encourage the child to find the information he needs by himself.

Conception's utilisation for creating the Info-book

The information part of the book never answers the questions of the fairy tale directly. The answer is essentially included within the pictures, since this book is designed especially for children who don't read yet. To create these pictures, it is important to define the principal obstacles to comprehending physiological phenomena. These emerged in the course of interviews with and drawings made by children.

Several unchanging conceptions can be ascertained. First, the sexual act is generally misunderstood, or unknown. Even if the children have received information about this subject, it is usual very short and often misinterpreted. For example, the children who use the expression "making love" tend to associate these words with actions like kissing on the mouth or just sleeping in the same bed.

For the older, 8 or 9 year-olds, some very rude words like "fucking" show not only a misunderstanding but a real fear, like the child who said: "the father fucks the mother and the mother suffers, endures." This example shows us the importance for the child to be able to understand exactly what the sexual act means, making him realise that it should be something where feelings are involved and during which both man and woman should discover pleasure.
In direct relation with the sexual act, we noticed confusion between the excretory and reproductive system. The vagina and the uterus are usually completely unknown to the children. When the baby is in the womb, this could be the stomach or intestine, without any distinction. When the children know that the baby goes out of the womb through a "hole between the legs of the mother," this is generally mistaken for the urethra or more rarely for the anus. The book presents a model where the children can easily find the difference between these different organs.

Different steps presenting the baby inside the mother's womb.

This model is also corresponds to the conception about the way the baby feeds and breathes inside the mother's womb, as you can see on the last illustration. This picture presents no direct connection between the mother and the baby. It shows, very simply, the passage of the food through the digestive tube, the isolation of the bladder and the specific place of the baby. Of course, everything is very schematic; the aim is not to give the child a lesson in anatomy but a way to understand the basic body functions. Playing with the superposition of transparent sheets, the interaction between the different systems, and especially between the mother's body and the baby's, appears when we put on the blood system.

A lot of time during the interviews, children use some "scientific" words, but in a wrong way. This fact usually hides a poor understanding of the processes. The language used in the book avoids using scientific words inside the basic text accompanying the pictures. The urethra is just the "hole for the wee-wee," the anus, "the hole for the poo" and the vagina, "the special baby's hole." So the child can refer to his own life experience and know exactly what the book is talking about. The utilisation of plain language makes it easier to overcome the embarrassment about this subject. If the child sees that the adult is using his own vocabulary to speak about these physical orifices, he feels freer to talk about them. Of course, should children want to know more about a subject, each text has a second and even a third level of information, where the specific scientific words are provided.

Conclusion

This presentation is just to give an idea of the incredible richness of using the children's conceptions when creating didactic tools. If we really want to help children to go beyond their own conceptions, it is absolutely necessary to address and use them - even if, as in the case of a book, we must accept that we won't be able to know all the conceptions of each child and that we have to limit ourselves to a chosen selection. The originality of this book resides also in the direct confrontation between the child and his own conceptions. It would be interesting to go further with this experiment, to see if such confrontation really helps to improve the understanding of new scientific knowledge. Even if we couldn't clearly establish where the impetus was coming from, we could see a real evolution or transformation of the conceptions for the majority of the children.

The experiments we made in different classrooms showed the children's great interest in this book. We also received a lot of requests from parents and teachers who wanted to buy it for themselves. It seems that children love to have a look at it, on their own or with friends, even without the adult being present.

As is shown through the evolution or the transformation of those children's conceptions to whom this book had been presented, it is not merely a didactic tool; it is also useful in the evaluation of the impact of conceptions as well as in the evaluation of the pupils themselves. Children's conceptions give us the opportunity actually to visualise where remedial work should be done.

Creation, evaluation, and remediation: three complementary ways to use learners' conceptions without conceiving "a priori" help or didactic sequences.