Zena and Carlotta: Transition Narratives and Early Education in the United States and Italy

In: Human development, Volume 45, Issue 5, p. 323-348

Abstract

In line with recent critiques of individualistically based theories of human development, we offer a theoretical approach to childhood socialization that we refer to as interpretive reproduction. This approach stresses both the innovative and creative aspects of children''s participation in society and the fact that children both contribute to and are affected by processes of social reproduction. We apply our theoretical approach to children''s life transitions and introduce the notion of priming events. Priming events involve activities in which children, by their very participation, attend prospectively to ongoing or anticipated changes in their lives. We discuss the similarities and differences of our theoretical position with socio-cultural theories of human development, noting the importance of socio-economic and power relations that are of key importance in interpretive reproduction while they are often neglected in socio-cultural theory and research. We then present a comparative case study of an American and an Italian child''s transition from preschool to elementary school. Based on our rich set of comparative, longitudinal ethnographic data, we present interpretative narratives that situate the changes in these children''s lives by focusing on their participation in a complex web of collective experiences at the individual, interpersonal, and cultural (or societal) planes of analysis. We discuss the significance of our identification of priming events which contribute to both continuities and discontinuities in these children''s transition experiences, and how priming events are influenced by educational policies in the two countries.