From Representation to Participation: Rethinking the Intercultural Educational Approach to Folktales

Annette De Bruijn

doi:10.1007/s10583-017-9330-x

Abstract

In multi- or intercultural educational contexts, folktales from around the world are often approached as representative of diverse cultures and used to transmit knowledge and understanding of the literary, social and cultural heritage of those cultures to children. In this article, I present contemporary critical literary, folklore and cultural studies’ perspectives to argue that this approach is conceptually problematic, risks reifying reductive notions of cultural difference, and does not take into account children’s active role in meaning-making processes. As an alternative, I suggest an understanding of the potential intercultural educational benefits of folktales from diverse cultural traditions in terms of children’s intercultural participation. Drawing on qualitative empirical data from a large-scale reading intervention program in Dutch kindergarten and second grade groups, this article illustrates how children from diverse cultural backgrounds use their diversity of knowledge and experience to interpret folktales from diverse cultural traditions. Based on these preliminary findings, I identify several possible intercultural benefits to be gained from valuing children’s culturally diverse contributions in today’s culturally diverse classrooms. While several limitations need to be taken into account, I argue that further research into the potential intercultural benefits of folktales should not only focus on issues of textual representation, but also on children’s active intercultural participation.

Highlights

Folktales are often approached as multi- or intercultural educational tools to introduce pupils to the literary, social and cultural heritage of diverse cultures (Young and Ferguson, 1995)
Critical studies tend to focus on issues of representation in multicultural children’s literature, stipulating that ‘‘[if] multicultural literature is to ... help readers gain insight into and appreciation for the social groups reflected in the literature, the literature ought to reflect accurately those groups and their cultures’’ (Bishop, 1997, p. 16; Fang et al, 2003; IsekeBarnes, 2009; Kurtz, 1996; Mo and Shen, 1997; Smith and Wiese, 2006; Yokota, 1993)
The findings presented here suggest that it enables young children to build experience in active intercultural participation at a rudimentary level

Summary

Introduction

Folktales are often approached as multi- or intercultural educational tools to introduce pupils to the literary, social and cultural heritage of diverse cultures (Young and Ferguson, 1995). Intended as a celebration of diversity, this approach risks ‘othering’ children by emphasizing national or ethnic difference, and reducing the complexities and dynamics of processes of identification and belonging It suggests to (minority) pupils that what ‘their people’ have contributed to literature is limited to traditional folktales. I will present selected empirical examples from kindergarten and second grade classrooms to illustrate how children from a variety of cultural backgrounds actively engage in meaningmaking processes with folktales, both individually and collaboratively To contextualize these findings, I will first briefly sketch the societal, political and educational context of the Netherlands, and introduce the set-up of the research project that generated the empirical data. This genre is especially relevant to the Dutch context where Nasreddin Hodja is seen as belonging to the Turkish-Dutch community (Meder, 2002), and Anansi as a particular expression of the cultural identity of the Dutch Creole community (Meder and Illes, 2010)

Moving Beyond Monolithic Representations of Cultural Identities in Kindergarten

From Cultural Representation to Intercultural Participation

Findings

Compliance with Ethical Standards