INTERPRETIVE REPRODUCTION IN THE SCUOLA-MATERNA

This paper presents an interpretive approach to childhood socializatio n that extends traditional views of human development. The interpretiv e approach stresses the importance of collective processes and argues that children, through participation in cultural routines, creatively appropriate information from the adult world to produce their own uniq ue peer cultures. Building on a model of human development as a spiral of causality from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal the paper of fers the 'spider web' as a metaphor for conceptualizing the process of interpretive reproduction. In this model individual development is se en as embedded in the collective production of a series of local cultu res which in turn contribute to the reproduction of the wider society or culture. The model is illustrated by a brief sociolinguistic analys is of discussion among three children in an Italian 'scuola materna'.