The culture of childhood in (and) spaces of resistance

Abstract

Providing spaces for children’s culture becomes an issue when it conflicts with or threatens to reverse the notion of ‘legitimate’ culture. Here, legitimate culture refers to the dominant values of the official curriculum and teachers’ cultural values. This article, which stems from an ethnographically oriented pilot study, explores the experience of children’s and adults’ diverse beliefs, ideologies and cultures in an art classroom that is situated in a university facility. It demonstrates how children seek spaces for their culture. Only high official culture, the school culture, and parents’ and teachers’ culture are deemed appropriate, true and good. In the world of adults, children’s culture is often seen as immature, as something to be fixed and refined. Kline suggests that humour and play might be an independent form of children’s culture. What children find funny and humorous may not be funny, or even appropriate, to adults. Bakhtin’s carnival theory demonstrates how a medieval culture used dangerous jokes at the expense of authority. Although the carnival was a temporary festival, it was the means through which the peasants’ marketplace culture was communicated to the officials, and by which they were able to demonstrate resistance – following their own rules, methods and culture. The author employs Bakhtin’s theory to help see the carnival in an art classroom, as children resist the presence of a legitimized culture by continuing to create spaces for their own cultures of pleasure, parody and even the grotesque.

Implementasi Pengenalan Budaya Lokal di Sentra Seni pada Anak Usia 4-6 Tahun

“…Hasil penelitian tersebut sesuai dengan visi dan misi TK Islam Hidayatullah, tidak hanya berfokus pada agama karena berbasis keagamaan tetapi juga memasukkan tema budaya lokal dalam kurikulum yang digunakan. Kebudayan mengacu pada kurikulum yang digunakan dan nilai-nilai budaya guru, dengan memberikan ruang yang lebih luas kepada anak-anak (Shayan, 2022).…”

‘I will grab a rifle and I will kill that bug!’: The role of children's humour in navigating painful treatments in a paediatric hospital in Argentina

“…Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), I consider humour in this therapeutic context of invasive paediatric treatments as having a double function: it can unite and collectivize the painful experience of intrusive treatment, as we saw with Danny, providing some mediated mechanism for (imaginative) action, but it can also provide a venue for social critique (and rupture) targeted at the powerful, as in the case of Héctor. Children often use humour tactically to oppose and resist a legitimized (and, often, hegemonic) biomedical institutionalized culture and to satirize and mock health professionals (Shayan, 2020). In this particular setting, laughter can be a form of social critical action 2 .…”