The Storied Lives Children Play: Multimodal Approaches Using Storytelling

Abstract

This paper explores a qualitative research project that drew on the work of Vivian Gussin Paley’s (1991) storytelling curriculum, where the following concepts were explored: children’s narratives through stories told, acted, and visually represented; how children construct meaning in their world; and the empowerment of voice. The study focused on the processes and growth that a diverse junior and senior kindergarten class underwent over eight weeks. The study has important implications for pedagogy and offers an innovative approach to a storytelling curriculum that engages multimodal frameworks for early literacy learning. Presenting opportunities for children to voice their storied lives orally, in image and text, and nonverbally through acting out stories enables them to explore and connect their identity texts to self, others, and the world. By engaging in, with, and through story, children reveal the complexity of their meaning-making processes, interconnecting imaginative and real experiences. By opening up learning spaces for socially constructed experiences, children’s storied lives are made visible.

A scoping review of research on play‐based pedagogies in kindergarten education

“…Seven articles focused on the topic of general cognitive development (including meaning making or concept formation) during play (e.g. Binder, ; Fleer, ). Four articles (Gmitrová & Gmitrov, ; Vu, Han & Buell, ) examined both cognitive development and social‐emotional development, 15 articles (e.g.…”

“…Andrews, ; Tal et al ., ), social interactive behaviours (e.g. Bodrova & Leong, ; Liu et al ., ), feelings of capability (Binder, ; Lim, ), social identity construction (Chafel, ; Vollrath, ), positive peer relationships (McNamee, ) and social literacy skills, defined by researchers as the creation and navigation of social rules during play (Ghafouri & Wien, ).…”

Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages of Children's Storytelling

“…Paley's (1986Paley's ( , 1988Paley's ( , 1990 Paley's (1990) original story play curriculum, a combination of storytelling and play, called for children to dictate stories to a teacher who writes them down verbatim and later read aloud to the class, who act the story out as directed by the child author. By offering two modes of expression, storytelling and story acting, children have the opportunity to share their stories in multiple ways, thereby increasing the potential for narrative control (Binder, 2014;Cooper, 2005). Countless storytelling and story sharing practices have emerged from this form, which has since been expanded to include additional modalities such as drawing, and nontextual modalities such as visual arts, music, and gesture (Binder, 2014).…”

“…By offering two modes of expression, storytelling and story acting, children have the opportunity to share their stories in multiple ways, thereby increasing the potential for narrative control (Binder, 2014;Cooper, 2005). Countless storytelling and story sharing practices have emerged from this form, which has since been expanded to include additional modalities such as drawing, and nontextual modalities such as visual arts, music, and gesture (Binder, 2014). Though the storytelling and story sharing practices that are derived from Paley's work have pushed out into multiple modalities (Binder, 2014) and experimental methods (Soto, 2005;Waters, 2014); some even working in direct confrontation to the culture of accountability in Early Childhood Education (Cremin, Flewitt, Swann, Faulkner, & Kucirkova, 2018;Mardell & Swann, 2017); to date, these practices have all retained Paley's original focus on an exclusively human sociocultural experience.…”

Teachers' perspectives and play-based learning in kindergarten classrooms

“…All of the participants felt important socials skills are learned through play such as sharing, using words to communicate needs effectively, and how to selfregulate. The research has provided theoretical and empirical evidence for the use of play-based learning to support the growth of developmental areas such as social competence (Pyle, Poliszczuk & Danniels, 2018;Binder, 2014). As a way to assist teachers with implementing play in their classrooms, they were provided with some furniture to create play centers.…”