CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE AS A MANIFESTATION OF THE PEER SUBCULTURE DISCOURSE

Abstract

The starting point of this article is to pointout to the children's folklore as an abandoned area of research issues regarding a world of a child. Too often (also by pedagogues) the kids are perceived only as the recipients of the culture, therefore children's folklore is associated mostly with traditional messages, created by adults. Meanwhile, the main argument of this article is the conclusion that children in peer groups constitute a separate socio-cultural community, which creates a discourse specific to itself, has its own standards and generates its own folklore symbols repertoire. Starting from defining the key concepts, i.e. “folklore”, “children’s folklore”, “intersubjective knowledge”, “subculture discourse”, I try to describe the mechanism of creation and functioning of children’s folklore manifestations. The goal of this descriptionis an attempt to open the pedagogically important research fields, such as e.g. the sources, causes and ways of creationof children’s folklore manifestations, or the social and cultural entanglements/contexts of the peer subculture discourse.