Singing with Mr. Tortoise South African Children’s Oral Narratives and Value Education

Abstract

This essay explores links between positively psychology, contemporary political history, narratology and education. Its primary objective is to examine the system of values encoded in a genre of South African children’s oral narrative, with a view towards expanding comparable data available to positive psychology and proposing a role for this genre in formal value education. Concern about contemporary anomie not only involves positive psychology, but also public interest in ‘indigenous’ knowledge, particularly ancestral values that ground social checks and balances, and engender harmonious relations. The children’s narrative genre is shown to involve the tacit communal production of ancestral virtues, character strengths and norms. The essay motivates the potential incorporation of the genre into foundational phase education, while its pedagogy and capacity for subject integration are briefly considered.