Study Of Children's Culture

Based on ethnological and phenomenological research, this study looked at the history and the nature of children's culture. It also explored the reconstruction of curriculum in China in an elementary school with the understandings of children's culture.As a former teacher, I sought to find another way to understand curriculum through the inspiration of children's culture. Nowadays, most Chinese teachers tend to teach in a traditional way, which means the teachers speak more and listen less while the students in most classes do lots of exercises and homework and do little exploration. Such traditional teaching renders children as objects or containers. Who are children? It is an essential question in education field.This dissertation begins with description and reflection of children's(from 3-12 years old) culture outside school, based on phenomenological methodology which was initiated by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Max Van Manen. The underlying motivation of this research was my belief that core of children's culture is the basis of curriculum and instruction.Through ethnographic research, I documented an analysis of real situation of children in common classrooms and sought to characterize the children's culture in schools and classrooms.In the final part, I presented the field research conducted in experimental classrooms of H elementary school, Shanghai, China, during 2005-2007, which aimed to encourage the wonderful ideas of the children in the classroom, through an integrated curriculum developed by the teachers and the children together with help from my teams in ECNU. The case study was part of the project School Reform and Teacher Improvement in Shang Hai, during Sept, 2005 to May, 2007, leaded by Prof. Zhang Hua.