A Cultural-Historical Reading of the Emotional Development of Young Children

A Cultural-Historical Reading of the Emotional Development of Young Children

The telling of fairytales has been a longstanding practice within the field of early childhood education in many communities across the Asia Pacific region. But what do we know about how educators use fairytales for the development of emotions for preschool aged children? In drawing upon culturalhistorical theory (Vygotsky, 1971, 1987, 1999), this paper presents the findings of a study into how fairytales were introduced to preschool aged children (n=30; from 3.3 to 5.3 years with mean age 4.2 years) and theorises the value of fairytales for the development of children’s emotions in the context of the pedagogical conditions that are created through the use of fairytales. A pedagogical framework is introduced which captures the unique characteristics of fairy tales in the context of the pedagogical features that were used by the educators in the study presented. The key concept of affective imagination or emotional imagination is used to discuss the fairytale of “Jack and the Beanstalk” from the data set of 74 hours of digital video observations gathered over 16 preschool sessions.