Priming Events and Italian Children's Transition from Preschool to Elementary School: Representations and Action

Abstract

We report on the Italian component of an ethnographic study of children's transition from preschool to elementary school in Italy and the United States. In line with our interpretive approach to socialization, we introduce the notion of priming events. Priming events involve activities in which children, by their very participation, attend prospectively to ongoing or anticipated changes in their lives. We identify different types of priming events in the preschool and show how collective activities in these events affected children's representations of their coming transition to the first grade. We also present interview data on parents' representations before and after their children's transitions to the first grade, and compare these representations with the children's. We found that the children's earlier experiences in priming events in the preschool were important in their adjustment to new rules, schedules, and participant structures of instruction in the first grade. We discuss the significance of our findings for comparative research on early childhood education and for theory development on life transitions and status passage.