The culture of childhood in (and) spaces of resistance

Abstract

Providing spaces for children’s culture becomes an issue when it conflicts with or threatens to reverse the notion of ‘legitimate’ culture. Here, legitimate culture refers to the dominant values of the official curriculum and teachers’ cultural values. This article, which stems from an ethnographically oriented pilot study, explores the experience of children’s and adults’ diverse beliefs, ideologies and cultures in an art classroom that is situated in a university facility. It demonstrates how children seek spaces for their culture. Only high official culture, the school culture, and parents’ and teachers’ culture are deemed appropriate, true and good. In the world of adults, children’s culture is often seen as immature, as something to be fixed and refined. Kline suggests that humour and play might be an independent form of children’s culture. What children find funny and humorous may not be funny, or even appropriate, to adults. Bakhtin’s carnival theory demonstrates how a medieval culture used dangerous jokes at the expense of authority. Although the carnival was a temporary festival, it was the means through which the peasants’ marketplace culture was communicated to the officials, and by which they were able to demonstrate resistance – following their own rules, methods and culture. The author employs Bakhtin’s theory to help see the carnival in an art classroom, as children resist the presence of a legitimized culture by continuing to create spaces for their own cultures of pleasure, parody and even the grotesque.