“Learnt Time across Fairy Tales – Kindergarteners’ Sense of Temporality, Futures Planning and Time Socialisation”
“Learnt Time across Fairy Tales – Kindergarteners’ Sense of Temporality, Futures Planning and Time Socialisation”

Summary/Abstract: The current study concerns a phenomenological approach based on the meaning-making processes that accompany time socialisation, or how hurry, time pressure and busyness are passed down in early childhood by implicit learning involved in fairy tales. Face-to-face, in-depth interviews were carried out with a total of 61 kindergarten participants from nuclear, dual-earner families of Bucharest suburbs enrolled in state education. The narrative ethno-theoretical approach highlights how time use styles based on busyness, hurriedness, acceleration and time squeeze are constructed subjectively by young children, who reinterpret fairy tale assumptions and time use practices that they observe. Results suggest that time perspectives related to tangible time and polychronicity can be inferred by means of verbal cues and streams of meaning that circulate by means of fairy tales as socio-linguistic vehicles. Time socialisation mechanisms are deciphered using the language (partly shared, partly incongruent) of children’s expectations and fairy tales (more subtle or more evident) time implications. The study opens up to a prospect of plausible landmarks for the emerging conceptual model of time use lifestyle and early time socialisation, by stressing the impact of early childhood settings focused on fairy tales read through a time-oriented paradigm. The study questions latent messages which fairy tales launch, sometimes unintendedly, most often as peripheral cue, yet powerful twist that children resonate to regarding time conceptions. Children’s sensitiveness to pedagogical messages elicited indirectly by fairy tales means that they tend to build discursive time identities based on temporal coordinates configured by storytelling, in a subtle interplay of sensification and lived experiences.

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