Children's Word Play: Resisting and Accommodating Confucian Values in a Taiwanese Kindergarten Classroom

Abstract

Taiwanese kindergarten teachers draw on traditional Chinese Confucian values when socializing children to be good students and good peers. Current depictions of Chinese childhood socialization suggest that these children are passive recipients of cultural information whereas Western views of childhood socialization argue that children actively use cultural information for their own purposes. Using Corsaro's interpretive reproduction theory to analyze excerpts from the field notes of an ethnographic study of public kindergarten peer culture in Taipei City, the author found that Taiwanese children use a particular language practice, word play, to demonstrate their social agency as they both resist and accommodate teachers' socialization efforts.