Exploring Adolescent Reality: How Fairy Tales Explain Uncomfortable Truths (original) (raw)
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Forever Young: Childhoods, Fairy Tales and Philosophy
Global Studies of Childhood
Fairy tales play a substantial role in the shaping of childhoods. Developed into stories and played out in picture books, films and tales, they are powerful instruments that influence conceptions and treatments of the child and childhoods. This article argues that traditional fairy tales and contemporary stories derived from them use complex means to mould the ways that children live and experience their childhoods. This argument is illustrated through representations of childhoods and children in a selection of stories and an analysis of the ways they act on and produce the child subjects and childhoods they convey. The selected stories are examined through different philosophical lenses, utilizing Foucault, Lyotard and Rousseau. By problematizing these selected stories, the article analyses what lies beneath the surface of the obvious meanings of the text and enticing pictures in stories, as published or performed. Finally, this article argues for a careful recognition of the complexities of stories used in early childhood settings and their powerful and multifaceted influences on children and childhoods.
Beauty and the Beast: The Value of Teaching Fairy Tales to University Students in the 21st Century
2021
In this essay, I suggest that fairy tales have particular value for students studying at the university level. Assigning fairy tales allows students to read familiar stories from their childhood and reconsider them from critical perspectives. When teaching a college course on fairy tales, my students and I utilize three essential frameworks for understanding fairy tales, focusing on the psycho-social development and sexual maturation of the human person, feminist critique and the need for gender equality in a patriarchal world, and audience reception and reader responses leading to emotional progress and even spiritual enlightenment. Students primarily familiar with Disney film versions of fairy tales enlarge their understanding of multiple versions of tales, both early modern and contemporary. They become familiar with classic fairy tale writers and collectors, such as Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Oscar Wilde, Andrew Lang, J.R.R. T...
In my paper I will talk about the reception of fairy tales by the people from different sections of society. How these fairy tales tended to construct the gender identity. But now the responses to these tales have evolved. The response of woman living in a modern world tends to deconstruct the traditional meaning espoused by the text. There are various reconstruction of these fairy tales in modern literature, cinema and cartoons. Every reconstruction provides a new meaning of the text by a new reader. Apart from this I will also focus on the response of the people from working class. The society in fairy tales is portrayed as harmonious. The class tensions are never depicted in these tales. The responses of people from lower strata would bring out the reception of reader from a different section of society.
A week ago I participated in a Huffington Post Internet panel discussion about fairy tales with three people, who began waxing poetic about the wonders of the fairy tale and how it benefited children à la Bettelheim. I, too, was a little guilty of this, not of waxing poetic about Bettelheim, but about the utopian qualities of the fairy tale. And then, at one point, I blurted out something like: "We've been talking too much about the virtues of fairy tales, while they're really terrible! They're sexist and racist! They stem from patriarchal societies, and depict white men as saviors and women as comatose and barbie-doll princesses." Everyone laughed, and then we became serious shifting the topic to discuss some of the negative qualities of fairy tales, but we did not go far enough in our ideological critique. We did not discuss the childist aspects of fairy tales and how the tales reveal prejudices against children and young people, and how they might partially socialize children to accept the abuse they suffer, even today, without realizing it.
Fairy Tales in Chains of Education
Elementary Education in Theory and Practice, 2020
This paper presents the case of introducing children to fairy tale literature. Fairy tales, which initiate children's literary education, tend to be interpreted as typical didactic pieces at school. Their potential connected with influencing the emotional realm and developing aesthetic sensitivity is underestimated. The aim of the current research is to recognize ways of introducing fairy tales and presenting them in selected textbooks used in early education. The subjects of the analysis include My i nasz elementarz [We and Our Primer] and My i nasza szkoła [We and Our School]. The choice of the above-mentioned textbooks resulted from the desire to learn which ways of using fairy tales (or their components) are propagated by the contemporary creators of early childhood education goals. These considerations led me to the description of reception through cognition (intellectual cognition, the fulfilment of didactic goals) and constitute the first part of the article, which I compared with the intuitive reception that grew out of psychoanalytic interpretations. Knowledge, which has its source in a psychoanalytical approach, can provide valuable support in designing activities and creating the conditions for the reception of texts in early literary education.
Diverging from Traditional Paths: Reconstructing Fairy Tales in the EFL Classroom
Framed by transactional and critical literacy theories, this teacher-research introduces practical examples of implementing antisexist pedagogy in an EFL Middle Eastern classroom. After a short preview of the gender-biased educational messages abundant in literature and pop culture, the article focuses on students' transaction with Cinder Edna, an emancipatory picture book that provides students with an alternative way of being and acting. A content analysis of sample reader responses reveals how adolescent female Arab students start to challenge the status quo and take action for changing their gender-biased reality.
Fairy tales: a compass for children's healthy development - a qualitative study in a Greek island
Child: Care, Health and Development, 2011
Background Fairy tales have always been an integrated part of children's everyday life. In our days, they still represent important ways of helping the children share their desires and express their agonies and inner conflicts. The present descriptive qualitative study aims to describe parents' opinions and children's preferences regarding storytelling. Methods Four hundred and seventy parents took part in the study and were interviewed following a semi-structured guide with open-ended trigger questions. Data were processed via content analysis methods. Results Three main themes were constructed. The vast majority of interviewees acknowledged their strong belief in the power of fairy tales and stated that their children listen to stories at least once a week. Most of them use storytelling as an instructive tool, in order to soothe their children's anxieties or set examples for them. Concerning children's preferences, the majority of them choose classic fairy tales over modern ones with Little Red Riding Hood taking precedence over other famous stories. All participants acknowledged the fact that their children are amused and positively affected by storytelling, while young readers share their enthusiasm for fairy tales in many ways, mostly by talking about their favourite character. Finally, in relation to the villains, children seem to be satisfied or relieved when they are punished and only a small number of participants stated that the cruel punishment of bad characters creates feelings of fear to their kids. Conclusions The findings of this study emphasize the crucial role that storytelling plays in children's life and normal development.
Reflections on Childhood, 2014
The macabre and the supernatural are extremely popular in children's fiction these days. Terrifying creatures, evil vampires and ghosts are a common motif, while death and violence constitute the central themes in some of the best-selling children's books worldwide. This unprcedented obsession with horror has expanded to all areas involved in children's entertainment, from the toy and video games industry to the Hollywood film studios. For some analysts, the rich seam of horror running through contemporary children's fiction is a continuation of the fairy-tale tradition, updated to fit the standards of modern societies. In this context, macabre stories serve as a metaphor to express universal fears and desires which are hidden in the darker and deeper parts of the human soul. For others, the macabre fantasy novel is a revolutionary genre, that liberates children's literature from didacticism and compensates for all the stories which had been censored for centuries by adults. Institutions connected with the clergy and formal education see a potential threat in this type of fiction, warning about its negative effects on the psychology of the child-reader. Indeed, some of the most popular, award winning fantasy novels are so explicit and shocking that defy many of the "rules" that traditionally apply to books addressing children. These developments make us wonder about the function of children's literature in the contemporary world. The hereby paper selectively presents some of the most successful fantasy books for children. By drawing a historical connection between the traditional fairy tale and the fantasy novel, we provide a platform for thought on the evolution of children's literature and the actual needs of the contemporary child-reader.