Presented here are fragments of my book "The cartography of inner childhood" in the translation from Russian. The main hero of this book is our childhood experience. Or, rather, the book is about our remembrances of our childhood experience. Some people would exclaim, "These remembrances are extremely subjective, utterly personal…

Communications between adults and young children can expose different ideas and opinions. Adults and children have different capacities to speak, these discursive spaces can become filled with assumptions, stereotyping and conventional thinking about power and agency. If communication shifts away from the purely discursive, what might be exposed…

Children are able to distinguish between regular events that can occur in everyday reality and magical events that are ordinarily impossible. How do children respond to a person who brings about magical as compared with ordinary outcomes? In two studies, we tested children's acceptance of informants' claims when the informants had produced either…

Educational television for young children often combines factual content with fantasy. In 2 experiments, we examined 3- to 5-year-olds' reality judgments and the implications for their learning. In the 1st study, 145 children watched 3 clips featuring (respectively) a Hispanic, a Chinese American, and an Anglo character. Responses indicated…

Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were asked to make judgments about the reality status of four different types of machines: real machines that children and adults interact with on a daily basis, real machines that children and adults interact with rarely (if at all), and impossible machines that violated a real-world physical or biological…

Vivian Gussin Paley is a teacher, writer, lecturer, and advocate for the importance of play for young children. Author of a dozen books about children learning through play, she has received numerous honors and awards including an Erickson Institute Award for Service to Children, a MacArthur Foundation Fellows award, and a John Dewey Society's…

Based on the testimony of others, children learn about a variety of figures that they never meet. We ask when and how they are able to differentiate between the historical figures that they learn about (e.g., Abraham Lincoln) and fantasy characters (e.g., Harry Potter). Experiment 1 showed that both younger (3- and 4-year-olds) and older children…

The words "real", "really" and "pretend" are used in developmental research paradigms to reflect both the notions of 'authenticity' (in pretense-reality and appearance-reality research) and 'existence' (in fantasy-reality research). The current study explored whether children also expressed these notions in their everyday uses of "real", "really",…

This paper examines music in the home of a Chinese family in Singapore with specific attention to the children (aged five and seven) of the household: an exploration of what constitutes the lived 'musical' memory of a family enmeshed in the technology and media of a globalised world. The study is part of a larger ethnographic study on the musical…

In 1986, the "Harvard Educational Review" published Vivian Gussin Paley's article "On Listening to What the Children Say," which detailed the beginnings of her career as a teacher and author. The article described Paley's methods of tape-recording and analyzing her students' daily engagement in "the three Fs: fantasy, fairness, and friendship."…

Teacher and author Vivian Paley is highly regarded by parents, educators, and other professionals for her original insights into such seemingly everyday issues as play, story, gender, and how young children think. In "The Classrooms All Young Children Need", Patricia M. Cooper takes a synoptic view of Paley's many books and articles,…

In this study, the author tested whether children with imaginary companions (ICs) have a different fantasy life than do children without ICs. To measure the fantasy life of the 74 children aged 3.2 to 8.7 years, the author modified the Children's Fantasy Interview (E. Rosenfeld, L. R. Huesmann, L. D. Eron, & J. V. Torney-Purta, 1982) to make…

This systematic review of the literature synthesizes research from a number of disciplines and provides a succinct distillation of the methods and measures used to study the impact of creative drama on the language development of young children. An analysis of the merits and limitations of the reviewed studies reveals a number of methodological…

Presents a series of classroom exercises and activities that stimulate children's creativity through the use of visualization. Discusses procedures for guided imagery and offers some examples of "trips" to imaginary places. Proposes visualization as a warm-up exercise before art lessons. (DR)

In four experiments, 4-, 5-, 6- and 9-year-old children and adults were tested on the entrenchment of their magical beliefs and their beliefs in the universal power of physical causality. In Experiment 1, even 4-year-olds showed some understanding of the difference between ordinary and anomalous (magical) causal events, but only 6-year-olds and…