Let's Get Our Houses in Order: The Role of Transitional Rituals in Constructing Moral Kindergartners

This article stems from a participant-observation study I conducted in a full-day kindergarten classroom in a central North Carolina public school during the autumn of 1994. In attempting to understand how morality was constructed by the teacher and children there, I saw that the teacher utilized a series of rituals to help the children shed their external (home) roles, make the transition to their school roles, and reaggregate as students (as opposed to children). While she conceptualized these activities as merely organizing the children for the school day, I interpreted them as a manifestation of rites of passage (van Gennep, 1960; Turner, 1969). This paper is the second in a three-part examination of these rites of passage, in which I map out and explore the teacher's use of transitional or liminal rituals to construct the moral identity of the role of student and foster the children's attachment to that role.