Framing Young Children’s Humour and Practitioner Responses to it Using a Bakhtinian Carnivalesque Lens

Embracing the Carnivalesque: Young Children’s Humour as Performance and Communication

“…Humour and laughter, as seen within the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC), appear to be subsumed by rhetoric that intimates their importance and value but, in reality, sits on top of contrasting ingrained authoritative discourses (Tallant, 2015). Ingrained ECEC discourses appear to frame humour and laughter as a challenge to seriousness, rationality and innocence-qualities that seem to be highly sought after within the early childhood field (Taylor, 2015).…”

“…This paper adopts a Bakhtinian carnivalesque lens to frame children's humour and laughter outside of, but complementary to, the popular paradigm of developmental psychology, using a dialogical methodological framework which operationalizes a range of Bakhtinian concepts (Sullivan, 2012) that are explained later in this section. The study (Tallant, 2015) explored children's humour in an urban, private nursery setting and this paper discusses data generated by eight 3 and 4 year olds of British and Eurasian extraction (3 girls and 4 boys) and me (as researcher) in Key Moment 1; as well as two 4 year old girls of British extraction and one early years practitioner, in Key Moment 2. All of the children (whose names within this paper are pseudonyms) attend the same nursery and have known each other for at least a year.…”

“…These constructions are characterised by Rousseauian and Frobelian notions of innocence and Piagetian natural development (Taylor, 2015) and, as long as children's behaviour is in line with these images of innocence and order, equilibrium in maintained for the practitioners. Contrarily, children's utterances and actions that do not fit with these held constructions instigate disequilibrium between practitioners' view of the innocent and naturally developing child, and the behaviour they witness children engaging in which cannot easily be categorized as innocent, and does not necessarily reflect the predicted stages of development (Tallant, 2015). These behaviours appear, for the most part, to fall into the challenging realm depicted in the diagram.…”

“…However, it has become apparent throughout the study that although many aspects of children's carnivalesque humour do fall into the challenging realm, this is not exclusive. Some aspects of the children's humour, although not necessarily embodying the notion of routine behaviour, appeared not to be wholly subversive or challenging, such as episodes of clowning and 'topsy-turvy' language play (Tallant, 2015). As such, this paper focuses on the performance and communicative elements of young children's carnivalesque humour that fall into both the routine and challenging realms described.…”

“…The key moments presented here are comprised of utterances that relate to the research question. In line with another example of dialogical analysis from this project (Tallant, 2015) I drew on the concepts of 'genre and discourse,' 'emotional register,' 'chronotope'-or Bakhtin's idea that 'different social genres (each with their own social memory, values and traditions) offer different sets of potential to experience and give value to time and space' (Sullivan, 2012, p. 89). The data is presented both within summary tables and in direct quotations, which affords the opportunity to demonstrate an 'engagement with different voices' (Sullivan, 2012, p. 89) in the data.…”