Search

According to UNESCO, education for sustainable development (ESD) is characterized by the concern for training the skills necessary for a human individual to relate responsibly to the natural, economic and socio-cultural environment in which he lives, minimizing or completely avoiding the negative effects of actions on the quality of his life and that of others. This finality of education for sustainable development requires the prioritization of moral education and shifts the focus to the development of moral consciousness and the formation of a value system agreed and assumed by all members of a community. Because it essentializes human values, the fairy tale constitutes an ideal learning content in relation to the objectives of moral education. The wide and varied symbolism of the heroes who evolve in the fairy tale world, the situations they go through and the key tools in overcoming some crises turn the fairy tale into a source of learning with a safe and deep impact on the student, both cognitively and affective and volitional. Knowing the interdependence between the professional skills of the teacher and the training of the student's skills (Ceobanu et al., 2020, p. 277), a teacher has the duty to know what are the sources and contents of learning that optimally respond to the educational needs and interests of those whom he guides. Therefore, the teachers' conception of the educational potential of the fairy tale is a determining factor in the application or exclusion of this content from the instructive-educational/school activities. The study we are carrying out aims to determine the level of knowledge of the educational potential of the fairy tale by teachers from schools on both banks of the Prut and provides valuable data about their beliefs regarding the effectiveness of the fairy tale in training and educating the younger generations.

In this research, were analysed the visual representations made by high school students as a result of reading a cult fairy tale and creating a project entitled "Harap-Alb's journey seen through the eyes of children" in the 10th grade geography lessons. The projects were carried out by 26 students, who worked in pairs. The geography teacher presented them on the Google Classroom platform the structure of the project (visual and written components), tasks (forming groups, reading fairy tales, making mind maps), instructions and requirements. The aim of this activity was to identify and illustrate ways in which certain cognitive barriers can be removed and through which dynamic and creative thinking can be acquired/encouraged.

The hermeneutics of fairytales, understood as a new way to get their deep significances and therapeutic effects on children by the process of psychic conflicts awareness, represents a frequent topic in the current research, a real source of inspiration for those delivering literature for children or for those using fairytales for therapeutic purposes, either in case the children with special problems, or in individual or group psychotherapy of adults. Based on the experience in teaching fairytales at the specialization Pedagogy of Elementary and Preschool Education, and at two of the activities of the reading group, Books Mirrors, of the Department of Science of Education within the Faculty of Sociology and Psychology of the West University from Timi?oara, this article is a reflection on the therapeutic size of fairytales and of the didactic implications arisen.

The paper begins with some issues related to aesthetics, aesthetic education, art and axiological education. The empirical research has the general assumption that secondary school students and youth have difficulties in selecting values. The objective of the research was three fold: to design, to organize and to carry learning activities from which students shall acquire educational values through the study of art objects. The exploratory research was conducted on a sample of 50 students (25 in experimental group and 25 in control group). The content sample included fairy-tales and short stories ("Beauty and the Beast; The money earned" by Alexandru Mitru) and artistic topics on several well-known art objects (The Endless Column, Table of Silence, The Gate of Kiss, Peles castle, Voronet monastery, and St. Michael's Cathedral from Cluj-Napoca). The tested hypothesis stated that "if secondary school students are involved in learning contexts where they perceive, analyze and explain artistic objects then they develop aesthetic and ethic values." The learning context students were exposed to represents the independent variable and the outputs--the educational values themselves--represent the dependent variable. In order to test for the hypothesis we planned a formative didactic experiment. In order to test the hypothesis the pre-test/post-test design was used.

Macedonian by origin, born in 1901 in the Macedonian city of Ohrida, died in 1982 in Bucharest, with high school and university studies in Romania, he was a novelist, playwright and publisher of historical stories for children and teenagers - very well known in the interwar period. His novels were addressed to the adolescent youth whose age was conducive to soul convulsions, psychic and biological transformations, eroticism, love. He expresses his patriotic feelings in plays with historical content, as well as by retelling Romanian fairy tales and legends in summaries published in pamphlets printed in his own publishing house "Bucur Ciobanul" (1942-1944). Through these literary-historical works, he will seek to spread the general universal and national culture among a generation marked by great national political moments (the Union of 1918), but also by world tragedies (the territorial kidnappings of 1940 and the Second World War). However, literary criticism appreciates his Romanian work as "vulgar", commercial, in the happiest case "popular". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psychological interpretation of the Romanian fairy tales is a research area less explored. Using qualitative research we have analysed the adolescent psychological development of a boy in "Prâslea the brave and the golden apples" and a girl in "The enchanted pig". The parents are playing an important but discreet role, being symbolically present throughout the development process. There are no significant differences related to the hero's gender, only regarding social roles and physical abilities. The Romanian fairy tales can be used in psychological interventions if we select the content and choose the proper methods according to the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to an extensive research I have recently concluded, Barbie is one of the most popular fairy tale heroes among little girls in Romania. The present case study examines the set of values transmitted by the main characters of Barbie-films and the ways in which Barbie becomes part of girls' everyday lives. It also looks at the attitude of boys towards these films. Compared to Western Europe, in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe differences between urban and rural media consumption are considerable and need further exploration. The present paper examines Barbie-interpretations of children and their parents living in a city, respectively a village in the Transylvania historical region of Romania, with the help of in-depth interviews and group activities. I mapped several factors that influence Barbie interpretations: residence (urban versus rural) crucially influences whether Barbie becomes a role model; however, media literacy and parents' education are also significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primordial element, dominated by mythological and mythofolklore connotations, air is a kernel by itself of collective imagination, which has generated story (epic as a species). Being in a limited spatio-temporality (given by the inaccessible nature to anyone and/or anyway), this archetypal element is reserved for a spiritual elite (God, Saints, fairies, astral elements), with a cosm(ogon)ic role, and it can be accessed only temporal and in virtue of some initiations done by someone already initiated. In this study, I tried to capture, from the perspective of hermeneutics, just the need of an upward imaginary of the Romanian traditional community, generating and/or consuming fairy tale, which has tried, through specific imagology means, to access this intangible space otherwise. At the same time, through the examples offered by the collection of fairy tales, I have tried to underline the contributions and the conditionings, which the technical progress has imposed on this field, the mythical (or magic) content of tale, being replaced with technical references (new means of aerial locomotion), which change the symbolic expression of these (imaginary) air travels to concrete, daily, easy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PRESENT PAPER AIMS TO PROVE THAT MIRCEA NEDELCIU'S NOVEL TRATAMENT FABULATORIU HIDES A MESSAGE BEYOND THE FIRST READING COMPREHENSION. THE AUTHOR ACHIEVES THE LAYERS OF THE TEXT THROUGH THE USE OF THEMES, MOTIFS AND SYMBOLS OF THE LITERARY CREATION. THE MAIN CHARACTER OF THE NOVEL, LIKE THE HERO OF THE ROMANIAN FOLKTALES BEGINS AN INITIATING JOURNEY AT THE END OF WHICH HE IS SAVING HIMSELF. FOR MIRCEA NEDELCIU, FINDING REFUGE IN FICTION AND FABULOUS REPRESENTS A MEANS OF AVOIDING CENSORSHIP DURING COMMUNIST ROMANIA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the possibility of coincidence existing in their lives and in some of the works written by Mihai Eminescu and Guy de Maupassant. This coincidence may be thus found in their poetry and also in their interest for legends and fairy tales. But, folklore places Maupassant next to another Romanian, Tudor Pamfile, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethnography, the history of religions, the psychology of the collective unconscious and other studies on the archaic imaginary have underlined the universality of the theriomorph symbols that display in totemism, in the various religious beliefs and in the people's mythology. In our study, we have tried to emphasize the semantic polyvalency at the level of the symbolical object in the Romanian fairy tales and, particularly, the positive and negative developments of the theriomorph imaginary as its ambivalent expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although difficulties in translating adult and child literature are essentially the same, the way they are sorted out differs substantially on grounds of three main factors: asymmetrical voices (adult writer and translator vs. infant reader), indirect reception (children's contact with the story is normally mediated by an adult) and age experiential limitations (entailing the necessity of explicitations or adaptations in order to convey the message to a child audience). The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, a general view on one of the best known Romanian fairy-tales is offered and on the other hand, the translator's decisions and choices in the Spanish version regarding fixed formulae implicit to the genre are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have drawn up an invetory of more than 50 Romanian fairytales in a research study made in 1994. These tales' main character was the leader as a dominant figure. They were collected from all over the country and anthologized in several corpora, edited so far, without claiming to have included all the copies in this category. The leader appeared in two situations: young, as a main character, or fully matured, as a secondary character. There are very few instances when the leader is enacted by a female character. Even in these given situations, the dominant features are distinctively masculine (determination, wisdom, balance, spirit of justice). The leader's generic image, both in folkloric and literary fairytale, is the one of an enlightened despot, whether he is a prince, emperor, king, czar or regnant; he has a strong character, almightiness, yet he is still willing to listen to wise advice or arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Narrations: the Internet Folklore. The present study suggests an anthropological "radiography" of messages that can be named Internet Folklore since they have a theoretically infinite number of addressees, do not convey a personal content for a unique recipient; on the contrary, they imply a largely general character and in the end can contain the indication to be sent to as many recipients as possible. Messages of this type verify a series of folklore defining features, mentioned by the classical textbooks: the anonymous character (the message's initial transmitter is often unknown), the syncretic character (they use text, images and sound at the same time, being multimedia messages), the traditional character (many of them are built on familiar epic structures, typical for the oral narrations). At the same time, they require a redefinition of the folklore because the conveying way is not oral, non-mediated (man to man and mouth to ear) but written, mediated, through a non-traditional channel (Internet) that in its turn involves a series of contextual modifications. The group of messages on which I base my analysis was gathered during two years (2007 - 2008) and contains mostly narrations. From a typological point of view, they can be integrated in four great categories: jokes, urban legends, rumors and chain messages. The addressees and addressers were teenagers and adults, mainly girls and women (it's about messages received by this study's author). Most of the texts are written in Romanian but there are some in other languages, too: English, French. The chosen examples show the vitality of the folklore, contradicting the opinions which supported its disappearance, since the contemporary societies, like the traditional ones are creators and carriers of folklore. The addressee of these messages is a public that has never ceased to tell stories and to trust the power of story to take possession and signify the reality. The comparison of folklore-traditional narrations with those sent through Internet shows only superficial differences: the medieval or rustic settings, the mythical characters and the conflicts that motivated the heroes' actions have disappeared; the texts have neither the complexity nor the amplitude of the old fairy tales. In essence though, they are built on the same logic of symbolic nature and resort to the same narrative elements - action schemes, characters, significance systems - that exist within the cultural register shared with both the recipient public and the old narrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transilvania magazine has represented one of the most important magazines in Romania, having hosted many creations of folk literature. An important moment was represented by the early ages, between 1868-1878, when some of the most illustrative productions of the Romanian people were published under the guidance of George Bariţiu, the editor at that time. Remarkable for that period are not only the poems, the stories or the folk tales, but also a collection of stories and fairy tales, accompanied by appraisals of important representatives of the Romanian culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Romanian folktales, night is not only a segment of time, but can also be endowed with human qualities. The folk authors' ability to materialize the phases of day or night has created characters such as Zorilă (Break-of-Day), Zori-de-zi (Dawn), Miezilă (Midday/Midnight), Murgilă (Setting-Sun), Serilă (Evening), De-cu-seară (By-the-Coming-of-Evening), etc. As incarnations of the flow of time, these characters complement each other, forming a continuum. The characters covering certain phases of the night, i.e. Setting-Sun, Midnight and Break-of-Day, are much more active than those standing for the phases of the day (Midday). Among all these personifications, the most popular one is Break-of-Day who appears in almost all fairy-tales described in this paper, either as a minor or as a major character. One can note the folk authors' preference for ambiguous characters that are placed on the boundary between night and day, darkness and light because they are able to adapt themselves to all types of situations such as bringing the fire/sun, moon and stars (as symbols of light) or descending into the otherworld and thus facing the symbols of darkness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]