Children's Culture Research Articles

“Quem canta seus males espanta”: a linguagem sonoro-musical na educação infantil

This article portrays the internship experience in early childhood education of a student and a student of Pedagogy of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), which was held at Brother Celso daycare with a group of children aged 3 to 4 years (G4) in the first half of 2013. We report the experience of being teacher of young children, along with the proposal to work with sound and musical language. This experience confirmed children as subjects producers of children's cultures, in that besides meaning they resignify objects, actions and situations giving them new functions, new meanings.

Children's Media-referenced Games: The Lived Culture of Consumer Texts on a School Playground

This article analyses empirical data including observations, videos and interviews from an ethnographic study of a multilingual, multiethnic school playground in London, UK. The analysis examines social uses of media references in playground games, drawing on literature in the field of consumer culture. The main argument is that children's consumer culture is constituted on the playground within media-referenced play through a combination of creating distinctions and building affiliations. The article addresses a gap in the literature in the fields of sociology and anthropology of consumer culture which largely construct children's consumer culture as exceptional to or derived from adult consumer culture.

Join the Club: Food Advertising, 1930s Children's Popular Culture, and Brand Socialization

Relying upon archival research, this article examines children's food advertising during the 1930s. More specifically, I highlight advertiser-created “clubs.” As a complement to 1930s radio and comic strip sponsorships, dozens of national food brands introduced “clubs” for children. Through a series of case studies, I argue that by creating these clubs, national food advertisers embedded themselves in children's popular culture with the outcome of brand socialization—not simply immediate sales. These clubs offered access to exclusive branded communities, encouraging children to be brand-conscious and brand-loyal consumers. Unlike toy advertisers, who did not enter children's popular culture until the television era, food advertisers sold products meant to be consumed daily; as such, brand loyalty was highly sought after.

Using Photography to Visualize Children's Culture of Play: A Socio‐Spatial Perspective

Visual methodologies have great potential to offer insight into children's culture and how it shapes childhood. We explore children's culture of play in an urban, low‐income neighborhood using photographs as a means of encouraging participatory research with elementary school students. Focus group interviews were conducted to validate children's perspectives on play, and all data were analyzed inductively using open coding to develop categories and emergent themes. Findings suggest that adults often define the physical boundaries of play, but children were largely able to determine the nature of their activities. Children's culture of play in this study highlighted issues of power and privilege, while concurrently emphasizing the socio‐spatial nature of childhood.

Detinjstvo i društvo odraslih - nova međugeneracijska transmisija kulture i nova strategija učenja

The paper promotes the idea that childhood is relevant and significant both as a social institution and as a social and cultural construct. The author holds the view that mainstream society comprises children as well as adults, and that consequently children should be given priority over the rest of the human race, and childhood should be given priority within society. In order to emphasize the need for recognition of childhood, the author in several ways brings attention to the problem of children's identity and draws distinction between it and adult identity. Special emphasis is placed on the problem of childhood and school system. School systems recognize only their own, school culture, but not children's culture. Recognition of childhood would bring about a profound change - just the type of change so badly needed by postmodern education. The deepest change would concern the change in intergenerational transmission of culture. Without new intergenerational transmission of culture all other linking strategies would remain simply technical projections of the possible 'disappearance of childhood'. Electronic media, especially the internet, level out the difference between the adult world and the children's world, so much so that it seems that children develop far more quickly intellectually than morally and psychically. The fact that school distances itself from children's culture results in misrecognition of childhood and creates a limiting, humiliating and disparaging image of it. School that would correct this is sorely needed.

Language maintenance and loss in a population study of young Australian children

Information about children's cultural and linguistic diversity and language acquisition patterns is important for the development of sustainable educational practices. While there is some knowledge about language maintenance and loss in adults and older children, there is limited information about young children. The first three waves of data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), involving 4252 young children, were considered longitudinally over the first five years of life to identify patterns of language maintenance and loss among those who speak languages other than English. The most common languages other than English spoken by the children were Arabic, Vietnamese, Italian, Spanish, and Greek and 9.1% of all children were reported to use a language other than English at wave 1, 15.7% at wave 2, and 15.2% at wave 3. Overall, 91.5% of children maintained speaking a language other than English between wave 1 and wave 2, and 86.6% did so between wave 1 and wave 3. Children's patterns of language acquisition and loss over the first five years of life varied within and between language groups. For example, Arabic-speaking children tended to maintain Arabic throughout early childhood, whereas Italian-speaking children's use of Italian decreased over the first five years of life while use of English steadily increased. Environmental and personal factors such as parental language use, presence of a grandparent in the home, type of early childhood care, first- and second-generation immigrant status, and parental perception of support from the educational environment were related to language maintenance among non-English speaking children.

Protecting the Rights of Indigenous and Multicultural Children and Preserving their Cultures in Fostering and Adoption

This article examines transracial/cultural placement of children for fostering and adoption as discussed within the context of expert evidence in applications for permanent placement. Transracial/cultural placement raises the issues of attachment and identity. The undesirability of the child being raised apart from the natural biological family's culture and ethnicity, the undesirability of disrupting secure attachments, and the significance of birth parents' parenting capacity are placed in stark contrast. The benefits of contact in reducing sense of abandonment and loss of parental care and culture of origin are also examined. The best practice for transracial placements depends upon the cultural prominence determined to be in the child's best interests. Placements favored are those where attachment is secure and parenting capacity is judged superior. The child's best interests may generally be considered by the courts in the short to medium term to be enhanced by placement with the person(s) with whom the child has the strongest attachments. The longer term issue is more problematic and not determined with confidence.Keypoints Cultural preservation of children's birth culture in out‐of‐home placements for fostering and adoption Placement of children—issues for attachment and identity Best practice and cultural dominance in placement where ethnically and racially diverse environments of origin of placement and child Best interests principle Considerations for secure attachment and parenting capacity

From playground to patient: reflections on a traditional games project in a pædiatric hospital

This article describes an innovative, but little-known Australian project, which took place in 1990. Tops, Tales and Granny's False Teeth was an initiative to introduce children's own play culture into the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, in the form of an interactive exhibition of children's traditional playground games. While play was valued in the hospital for its therapeutic role, children's own play culture, with its child-initiated rituals and rules, was somewhat different. Throughout the project, the exhibition staff witnessed connections being made between children and their own play culture and the unexpected benefits this had for the patients' well-being. The day-to-day happenings in the exhibition were documented, and this detailed documentation reveals, so many years later, the effect of this pioneering project on those involved and prompts reflection on its relevance to children in hospital today. Is there a place for children's own play culture in today's paediatric hospitals?

Objects for a “healthy lifestyle”: children's material culture and physical activities

Purpose – The aim of the research is to emphasise the role of material culture, and especially the role of objects related to physical activities, in children's socialization. It involves children's bodies but also symbolic meanings and values which introduce children to the universe of sport's consumption. Design/methodology/approach – The research is grounded on the construction of a system of objects related to children's physical activities in France. The production of a corpus of objects involves a methodological circle where the choice of the objects goes together with a reflexive analysis about the operations of categorization of objects. The analysis of objects require both technological and semiotical approaches. Findings – In the context of globalization and commodification of childhood, but also of the globalization and mediatization of sports, the research shows that objects for children's physical activities are inscribed in a double transformation: sportification of children's games and childification of sports. Research limitations/implications – The research focuses on material culture and does not investigate children's uses of the objects for physical activity and does not determine the process of their conception and design. Practical implications – The paper emphasises the difference between two faces of children's physical activities: spending calories and the development of motor skills and interpretative competences linked to sports' culture and children's mass culture. Originality Value – In contrast to the work done on food and digital culture, the field of children's physical activities and sports is not as well researched. This is especially the case for the objects designed for children and this research is one of the first in the field in international literature. It constitutes also the first attempt for including this topic in the worlds of children's consumption.

Family Contact for Children in Kinship Care: A Literature Review

Kinship care has been growing rapidly across the English-speaking world over the last decade. While family contact is an identified right of children removed from their families and maintains important relationships, contact with parents where there has been child abuse and neglect remains contentious. The evidence base in relation to family contact in kinship care is limited. Therefore, this article presents the current state of knowledge in the form of a narrative review of qualitative and quantitative research. Contradictory theoretical orientations are outlined together with the limits they impose on the development and application of knowledge. While the complexity of parental contact is confirmed, a consistent finding is that kinship care provides children with strong family networks including sustained relationships with parents, siblings, and extended family, and maintenance of children's culture and identity. Suggestions for the development of the research agenda are made, together with implications for policy and practice.

The Oxford handbook of children's musical cultures

The Oxford handbook of children's musical cultures

Golliwogs and Teddy Bears: Embodied Racism in Children's Popular Culture

Golliwogs and Teddy Bears: Embodied Racism in Children's Popular Culture

Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890-1915 by Marilynn Strasser Olson (review)

Reviewed by: Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890-1915 by Marilynn Strasser Olson Gwen Athene Tarbox (bio) Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde: Painting in Paris, 1890-1915, by Marilynn Strasser Olson. New York: Routledge, 2013. Contemporary art instruction, production, and criticism take place in a global context, enabling artists to learn from each other and to share techniques, philosophies, and materials, often within a digital environment and at a rapid pace. The cultural and technological forces that have combined to bring about such an international, interdependent, and fluid art scene have their origin in Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the hegemony of the major art academies in London and Paris, long the guardians of a highly nationalistic and [End Page 295] technically rigid set of practices, faced challenges from every quarter. Conquest in Africa and the "opening" of Japan led to the importation of artifacts, many of which eschewed the sort of realism current at the time within European art circles. The flood of scientific discovery called into question assumptions regarding the natural world, and exploration into human psychology encouraged artists to turn inward for inspiration. The rise of various artistic schools, grouped under the umbrella term "avant-garde," was propelled by artists, writers, and thinkers who embraced these new influences. Marilynn Strasser Olson's Children's Culture and the Avant-Garde focuses on the literary and visual production of artists whose careers unfolded during or just after La Belle Époque, and whose work is characterized by an interest in childhood. Beginning with the populist and culturally inflected Golliwog picture books produced for a child audience by Florence and Bertha Upton, and concluding with an examination of Marc Chagall's use of his own childhood memories as the foundation for such masterpieces as I and the Village, Olson demonstrates that child culture played a significant role in the aesthetic and intellectual development of artists affiliated with the Parisian avant-garde. Olson's introduction provides an effective history of the avant-garde in Paris, as well as a delineation of prevailing fin-de-siècle attitudes toward childhood and children. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's privileging of childhood innocence as an antidote to the perceived evils of industrialization, John Ruskin's theory that an art movement's finest period "belonged to its childhood," and the widely held belief that primitive art emerged from the supposedly childlike mind of the subaltern subject point to the manner in which European artists apprehended and processed childhood and children's culture into their philosophies and practices (13-14). By featuring the work of both French nationals and artists of other nationalities who studied in Paris, Olson represents "some of the diversity of class, gender, and nationality resident in the city during its fin-de-siècle years of preeminence," underscoring the idea that the "avant-garde had a richness of invention and idiosyncrasy at the turn of the century that, in itself, is worthy of celebration" (15). In the chapters that follow her introduction, Olson considers both the manner in which the avant-garde sensibility entered the realm of children's book illustration via the work of Florence Upton and William Nicholson, and how child culture intersected with the realm of avant-garde paintings produced by Henri Rousseau, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Marc Chagall. Her approach underscores the interrelatedness [End Page 296] of the two categories; however, her choice of chapter arrangement, presented without a specified rationale, compels the reader to decipher many of the connections without overt guidance. The use of an organizational structure grouping the children's illustrators together to demonstrate their collective impact on twentieth-century children's literature, or one grouping artists together through their philosophical commonalities, might have been helpful, but this criticism is a minor one regarding a study that otherwise reflects Olson's extensive knowledge of both art history and child culture. Olson's discussion of Upton highlights a strain of early twentieth-century children's literature illustration that tapped into an avant-garde fascination with the so-called primitive and the grotesque, elements that had appeared before in Carroll and Tenniel's Alice books but were...

Introduction: Children's cultures and media cultures

Introduction: Children's cultures and media cultures

From Alice to Alana: Sexualities and Children's Cultures in the Twenty-First Century

From Alice to Alana:Sexualities and Children's Cultures in the Twenty-First Century Lance Weldy (bio) and Thomas Crisp (bio) Welcome to our ending. As editors, we are referring, on a composition level, to the timing of our writing of this introduction. While it has been the subject of regular conversation between us, for logistical reasons it has been the final piece written for this special issue. This is partly because the content of this introductory essay was dependent upon securing our cover art and selecting the final articles for this issue. More philosophically, by deciding to open this essay with a "welcome to our ending," we hope to refer to the twenty-first-century demise of the sexually-innocent child. Of course, the preceding is a loaded, even clichéd, sentiment that operates under the culturally held assumption that there ever was a beginning to an innocence of the child—a notion challenged by such scholars as Anne Higonnet, James Kincaid, Richard Mohr, Tison Pugh, Jacqueline Rose, and many others. Nevertheless, the following essays invite further conversation about the controversial relationship between children and sexual cultures. It may be difficult to believe that it has been nearly fifteen years since the publication of Kenneth Kidd's special issue of the Quarterly on "lesbian/ gay literature for children and young adults" in 1998. In what has become a seminal introductory essay, Kidd explores the advent of children's and young adult literature with gay/lesbian themes, challenging notions of the genre as a post-1969 phenomenon. By pointing to representations of same-sex friendships and relationships among characters in children's literature, Kidd provides queer readings of canonical children's texts in an effort to "explore the range, intensity, and social resonances of same-sex friendships and relationships that are already central to writing for and about young people" (117). [End Page 367] Granted, in the years that have passed since the publication of Kidd's special issue, representations of queer characters are still limited. Nevertheless, the existence and range of ways in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters are depicted in children's and young adult texts has been the subject of several critical texts and anthologies. Perhaps most prominent among these are Michael Cart and Christine A. Jenkins's categorization (based upon the work of Rudine Sims Bishop) and analysis in The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969-2004 (2006); and Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd's Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature (2011), a collection of new and reprinted essays that queer historical (or "classic") children's texts, explore cultural politics surrounding lesbian/gay issues and families, or advocate for or model queer theories of children's textuality. Such explorations parallel the increasingly complex ways in which gender and sexuality are both played with and exploited in popular culture: take, for instance, Andrej Pejić, a self-identified male who makes his living as a female fashion model. The broadening interest in exploring and problematizing queer and gendered themes in scholarly books, articles, and conference papers testifies to the fact that this genre stands on its own as a body of literature worthy of critical discourse. As books for children and young adults have begun further exploring and complicating the topic of sexual identities, there have also been an increasing number of texts that push the cultural boundaries surrounding children and sexuality more generally. Popular constructions of the child continue to reflect society's simultaneous preoccupation with and repulsion by the notion of a sexualized child. As Stephen Bruhm and Natasha Hurley write, "There is currently a dominant narrative about children: children are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time, however, children are also officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual" (ix). In Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children's Literature (2011), Tison Pugh further explores the paradoxical relationship between proclamations of childhood innocence and the ways in which (primarily heterosexual) sexuality pervades texts written for children and young adults. He argues, The fundamental tension between innocence (the ostensibly normative foundation of children's sexual identity) and heterosexuality...

Immigrant Hungarian families' perceptions of new media technologies in the transmission of heritage language and culture

The goal of this research was to explore thoroughly the perceptions of dispersed immigrant professionals and their bilingual and bicultural children regarding the place of new media technology in their lives. Open-ended interviewing and autoethnography were used to explore families' perceptions of the role of media technology in their children's development and maintenance of heritage language (HL) skills, relationships with relatives in the heritage country, and cultural identity. The voices represented are those of two Hungarian immigrant professionals and their families. The families found media technology beneficial in all three areas explored: the development and maintenance of HL, relationships with relatives, and heritage culture. Adult family members also repeatedly pointed out the significance of their own active involvement in the process, and their responsibility in selecting appropriate resources and in being available to support children in their optimal use of media technology. The study provides important insights for immigrant families and practitioners for nurturing children's heritage language and culture.

Enabling Environments: Collections - Hit home

The home corner should reflect the children's culture and experience. Nicole Weinstein offers suggestions for building up a collection of resources for role play.

Learning Playtimes: A Century of Children’s Games and Rhymes

Learning Playtimes: A Century of Children's Games and Rhymes. http://www.bl.uk/ playtimes (accessed November 11, 2011).Learning Playtimes, the website of the British Library for children's playground games and songs since the 1900s, constitutes one of the most interesting Web resources that present and elaborate children's culture in an innovative and fascinating way. The webpage has an extremely elegant design featuring pictures, films, and audio clips in Britain since the 1900s. The quality of the media uploaded is excellent-a technical feature of the website that makes it valuable for private but especially for public use, as intended- giving a highly aesthetic impression. The site has a very solid construction, easy to navigate through, with clear entry points for the user that help him to go forward and backward without getting lost. This webpage is a part of an exciting project funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC ) grant under the Beyond the Text program, which intends to preserve British national culture, to trace its changes and continuities and explore parts of children's lives that represent their contemporary culture, such as computer games and the Internet. The webpage is one of the media products of the project along with a documentary film.T he site is hosted by the Knowledge Lab (University of Birbeck) and is the result of the collaboration between the Universities of London, Sheffield, and East London with the British Library, a cooperation built upon the Opie Collection. The collections of children's games and songs of the two folklorists Iona and Peter Opie at the British Library introduce only a part of the footage contained. A variety of collections like the ones of Father Damien Webb, the Pitt Rivers Museum, Bodleian Library, Archives of Cultural Traditions at the Sheffield University, The British Film Institute, Kathryn Marsh's collection, Siren Films, and the Scottish Film Archives were used to offer related material. Contemporary performances have also been filmed for two years in two primary schools, the Christopher Hatton School at London and the Monterey School at Sheffield, containing re-enactments of parts of contemporary everyday culture, such as pop songs, theme tunes, and game shows.The home page welcomes you with a flow of children's photos playing and singing. It is divided into two parts, one of browsing games and another called, "Kids' Zone." The first part introduces the viewer to the categories of games presented and includes pretend play, singing and dancing, playing with things, runningaround games, skipping games, counting out rhymes, clapping games, ball games, jokes, and rude rhymes. Every category has subcategories accompanied by a variety of media and a researcher giving an oral presentation of the concept of every section. …

Where Do Our Children Fit In?: White Mothering of Asian Children and the Construction of Racial and Ethnic Identities

This research investigates white adoptive mothers' mothering related to their adopted children's racial and ethnic socialization. Drawing upon in-depth face-to face interviews with thirty-eight women who have adopted children from China, South Korea or the Philippines, this paper first examines why white mothers de cided to adopt an Asian child and then explores mothering strategies for deal ing with their children's racial and ethnic identity formation. The study contrasts "colorblind mothering," which I also call the "assimilative fitting-in strategy," and "color-conscious mothering," also referred to as the "birth-culture fitting-in strategy." This study also found significant variations in color-conscious adoptive mothers' mothering based in part on the level of the family's embracement of the adopted child's birth culture and on the level of social networking with and outreach to not only other adoptive families but also Asian or Asian American communities. Finally this study critically reviews how race matters to white adoptive mothers.

Media Review: Songs in Their Heads: Music and its Meaning in Children's Lives

Campbell, Patricia Shehan. Songs in Their Heads: Music and Its Meaning in Children's Lives. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. xvi + 307 pp. Paperback: ISBN 978-0-195-38252-5, $24.95. Hardback: ISBN: 978-0-195-38251-8, $99.00. One afternoon, a colleague visiting from Australia commented that she would in the books in my office while I did an errand. Fossick! I looked it up. To fossick is rummage or search around, especially for a possible profit, as in prospecting for gold (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/fossick). Figuratively, as my colleague used it, to fossick is to mine the books. I've done the same thing. this new era of iPads, Nooks, Kindles, and e-readers that allow a single human to carry hundreds of books as easily as the daily mail, the shelves of bookstores and libraries and (particularly) colleagues' offices still intrigue me as places to mine for intellectual gold. What are they reading? Who are they reading? Why? Which books connect to which ideas? What new thinking fascinates them? While I may not be able to judge a book by its cover, I can often tell something about it by the condition of the spine. Well-loved books, or at least often-used ones, show wear. A book on my shelf that shows a great deal of wear is the first edition of Patricia Shehan Campbell's Songs in Their Heads: Music and Its Meaning in Children's Lives (1998). The silvery letters on the red-orange cloth cover are no longer shiny. The jacket, if there ever was one, is long gone, and the cloth corners of the hardcover are worn through in places. The binding has small tears at each end of the spine, and the glue is loose. The book falls open and stays open easily. It's seen a bit of use. Some of the wear can be attributed to my own work, and some to the hands of dozens students who have borrowed and returned it time and again, before often ordering their own copy. Songs in Their Heads has had a substantial impact and it continues to have broad reach. Since its publication, the first edition of Songs in Their Heads has been cited hundreds of times in music education journals, texts, and dissertations, as well as in music psychology, ethnomusicology, community music, and even music theory publications. Scholars writing for arts policy journals, folklore publications, general education and early childhood research journals, curriculum studies publications, and even medical journals have cited Campbell's book, and the Google Scholar citation index for Songs in Their Heads includes entries in several different languages. The second edition should be of similar interest to multiple constituencies and has also been cited numerous times. Still, why get the second edition of Songs in Their Heads, and why read it? First, Campbell has updated the book with new information drawn from music education and ethnomusicology, sociology and cultural studies, science and medicine, and education and psychology. Particularly intriguing are the sources related to media and popular culture, which are two of the ways Campbell broadens her introductory chapter argument for serious and focused study of children and their unique and particular cultures. this short chapter, she cites new literature in her review of the multifaceted and multidisciplinary history of child study and weaves new methodological sources into her description of the process behind both the first and second editions. Following the introductory chapter, she introduces the heart of the book, which comprises three parts. The first of the three main parts, titled In Music: Children at Musical Play, includes eight narrative (17) of children doing just that--playing, learning, doing music both consciously and unconsciously as part of the natural unfolding of their lives at home, at school, in a toy store, with their friends, and with their families. After a brief section in which Campbell describes her research process, the eight tales appear as a series of short ethnographies of children's musical cultures. …