Children Telling Their Lifetimes: Temporality as a Resource for Meaning-Making

Abstract

This chapter explores temporality as a resource for meaning-making by children. Through analysis of children’s talk, the use of linguistic resources to frame and enact their temporal selves is explored. I argue that the temporality of children connects with multiple timescales. While young children’s personal histories measure in months and years, family histories connect them with lives that have gone before and cultural resources of communities are carried across generations and, particularly when immigration is involved, over space. This approach extends the concept of context in ways which challenge ways of thinking about children, and particularly about ‘disadvantaged’ children, as fixed in the here and now. The use of material objects, enactment, drawing, and storytelling are methods described as engaging children in productive talk which enables insight into their sense of being in time.