Searching for a happily ever after: using fairy tales in primary classrooms to explore gender, subjectivity and the life-worlds of young people

Abstract

Fairy tales are ubiquitous in Australian primary schools. Drawing on a review of key literature, this paper aims to determine the implications of teaching fairy tales in the twenty-first-century primary classroom. Research points to the benefits of including fairy tales as a tool to improve all subject areas of the curriculum. Fairy tales present opportunities to positively engage students through the teaching of social justice and the development of emotional intelligence. The review of literature found that teachers need to be cautious and critical when teaching traditional fairy tales which often perpetrate an outdated, gender-ignorant representation of society, and allow students an opportunity to confront these ideas. The book form of Disney fairy tales can be problematic, particularly the earlier versions, which are criticised for being domesticated, sentimental and overly simplistic. The review has also found that multicultural fairy tales have enormous potential to increase cultural equity in the contemporary classroom, but unfortunately, they do not appear to be easily accessible in Australia. The fairy tale is constantly being reinvented and reimagined to fit into modern society, which has led to the emergence of the fractured fairy tale genre, where a traditional fairy tale is subverted. This review found that when used in a critical and inclusive manner, fairy tales have the potential to be an effective resource to teach primary school students in the contemporary classroom.

Storytelling as an Educational Tool to Improve Language Acquisition: A Review of the Literature

“…Researchers and educators may better understand if and why the narrative style or format used in the classroom matters by taking into account the substantial effects that different story types and formats have on how L2 learners respond to these changes. Regarding narrative forms, (Saxby, 2022), for example, investigated how fairytale tales, including magic and fairies, were used to investigate how English storytelling aided a group of young EFL learners in developing their speaking skills. Rather, used one fable, one fairytale, and two folktales, a collection of oral stories that are part of a culture or tradition, to study the impact of storytelling on the development of young Spanish language learners' language skills.…”

Exploring Teaching of Fairy Tales Writing Based on Improving Elementary Students' Chinese Literacy

“…Thus, the rules in writing skills must be considered so that the message conveyed by the writer can be received properly. Writing fairy tales is one of the ways to improve students' writing ability, and it is also the embodiment of students' language accumulation and use (Lam, 2022;Saxby, 2022). Especially in the process of writing fairy tales, the theme extraction, plot arrangement, characterization, and word selection and sentence construction all exercise students' writing thinking.…”