Portland State University PDXScholar Social Work Faculty Publications and School of Social Work Presentations 2018 Ideas in Dialogue: Leveraging the Power of Child-Led Storytelling in the Multicultural Preschool Classroom Erin E. Flynn Portland State University, flynn2@pdx.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.edu/socwork_fac Part of the Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, and the Early Childhood Education Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits you. Citation Details Flynn, Erin E., "Ideas in Dialogue: Leveraging the Power of Child-Led Storytelling in the Multicultural Preschool Classroom" (2018). Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations.edu/socwork_fac/244 This Post-Print is brought to you for free and open access.
It has been accepted for inclusion in Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: pdxscholar@pdx. IDEAS IN DIALOGUE !1 Ideas in Dialogue: Leveraging the Power of Child-Led Storytelling in the Multicultural Preschool Classroom Erin Elizabeth Flynn Assistant Professor of Child, Youth, & Family Studies Portland State University PO Box 751 Mailcode: SSW SSW Portland, OR 97207 flynn2@pdx.edu The article has been accepted for publication and will appear in a revised form, subsequent to editorial input by Cambridge University Press, in Language in Society published by Cambridge University Press. COPYRIGHT: © Cambridge University Press 2018 Flynn, E.
Ideas in dialogue: Leveraging the power of child-led storytelling in the multicultural preschool classroom. Language in Society, 47(4), 601-633.1017/ S0047404518000593 IDEAS IN DIALOGUE !2 ABSTRACT An investigation into the interactive features of small group, child-led storytelling in preschool classrooms serving lower socioeconomic status (SES), multilingual children shows both the affordances and constraints of positioning children to author their own experiences in the classroom. In story circles, children told stories which included canonical instantiations of story and culturally-shaped features. Through their stories, the children advanced ideas, built connections, and evaluated ways of telling stories as they continued ideas like threads from story to story.
Child-led storytelling did not disrupt the dynamics of power through which some ways of using language are privileged while others are marginalized. Instead, story circles simply shifted children’ relationship to the process of being and becoming literate such that children did the evaluating, valuing, and promoting of ways of using language, developing literate identities, but potentially forestalling some ways of participating even as shared interactional norms were developed. Key words: storytelling, multicultural, early childhood education IDEAS IN DIALOGUE !3 Ideas in Dialogue: Leveraging the Power of Child-Led Storytelling in the Multicultural Preschool Classroom INTRODUCTION Early childhood classrooms have long been envisioned as critical sites for building the facility with language necessary for later high level literacy practices like the capacity to compose and comprehend texts (Dickinson 2011; Dickinson & Porche 2011). To build this facility, children need opportunities to use language that extends a topic, allowing children to build on an idea (Hoff-Ginsberg 1991; Weizman & Snow 2001; Snow & Beals 2006; Dickinson 2011; Dickinson & Porche 2011).
Extending a topic encourages the use of more complex grammatical structures, creating the kind of syntactic complexity associated with language learning (Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, Cymerman, & Levine 2002; Justice, McGinty, Zucker, Cabell, & Piasta 2013). Extending a topic to build on an idea invites children to practice the patterned ways that language unfolds in academic genres like reports and different forms of story (Martin & Rose 2008; Christie 2012). Sustaining ideas also allows young children to practice achieving thematic continuity and relevance, both of which are needed to maintain and extend discussions (Küntay & Şenay 2003). Creating the space for children to extend ideas, constructing meaning through language, is not a neutral activity because language is not ‘some neutral commodity which carries ‘content’’ (Christie 2013:18).
Instead, language is always used to fulfill some social purpose with power being exercised in largely invisible and taken for granted ways. This can be especially true in classrooms, where ways of using language by the dominant cultural group are treated as universal or ideal ways of using language. IDEAS IN DIALOGUE !4 Centering primarily White, middle class discourse patterns as normal and ideal ways of construing experience marginalizes the ways of saying, doing, and being that many lower socioeconomic status (SES), multilingual children bring to early schooling (Souto-Manning, Dernikos, & Yu 2016). The aim of this study is to make visible the sophistication of young children’s engagement in an ongoing storytelling activity, overturning deficit conceptions of lower SES, multilingual children by showing how children’s complex contributions navigate the tension between expectation and invention when children are given the space to story their experiences.
Storytelling offers unique potential as a vehicle for agentic language learning that encourages a repertoire of ways of making meaning (see Schick & Melzi 2010 for review of the development of oral narratives). Children as young as two years old have demonstrated the capacity to marshal the foundations of storytelling in their everyday interactions (Engel 1997) and even in their private talk (Nelson 2006). Further, much of the familial talk that children engage in, like talk that occurs during daily meals, occurs in the form of story (Snow & Beals 2006), exposing children to a large number of stories in the home, community, and school (Rogoff 2003). In this respect, storytelling offers a known form that lower SES, multilingual children can rely on as an entry point to participating in extended classroom discussions that continue ideas.
Young children’s storytelling has been analyzed as a primarily monologic event with children’s stories considered in relation to idealized story structures (Stein & Glenn 1979; Peterson & McCabe 1983, 1991; McCabe & Peterson 1991; Stein & Albro 1994, 1997) and culturally shaped meaning-making patterns (Michaels 1981, 2006; Minami & McCabe 1991; Au IDEAS IN DIALOGUE !5 1993; Hyon & Sulzby 1994; Jimenez-Silva & McCabe 1996; McCabe 1997; Champion, Katz, Muldrow, & Dail, 1999; Cazden 2001; Minami 2002; Champion 2003; Bliss & McCabe 2008; Cheatham & Jimenez-Silva 2011). Linguists working in the tradition of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) investigate story from a genre-focused perspective, envisioning expert storytelling as varied in form, dependent on purpose, and responsive to context (Martin 1984; Rothery & Stenglin 1997; Plum 2004; Martin & Rose 2008). Other research has shown the community building potential of storytelling in the classroom, showing the valuable connection between story and play (Paley 1984, 1986, 1990; McNamee 1990, 1992; Nicolopoulou, McDowell, & Brockmeyer 2006). Such studies show the way that children express identity, build and maintain social relationships, and entertain one another through classroom storytelling opportunities (Champion et al.
This study investigates the interactive affordances of small group storytelling, envisioning storytelling as purposeful social activity which unfolds in waves of information. Children construe experience in distinct patterns or genres of story (see Martin & Rose 2008 for discussion), using language in ways informed by the priorities and expectations of cultural communities (See McCabe 1997 for overview), while dialogically responding to stories told in the course of ongoing interaction (Küntay & Şenay 2003). To show the way that even young children’s stories are carefully constructed, patterned ways of using language, culturally informed, and dialogically related, this study examines stories in terms of genre, culturally- shaped features, ideational threads, and comments. Story genres IDEAS IN DIALOGUE !6 Stories recapitulate a past event, conveying both what happened and the significance of its occurrence (Labov & Waletzky 1967).
Evidence from the stories of children (Martin 1984; Martin & Rose 2008) and adults (Rothery & Stenglin 1997; Plum 2004; Eggins & Slade 2005) shows that there are multiple genres of story, that story is an umbrella term for a number of distinct types of ways to recapitulate past experience (Martin & Rose 2008). Three common genres of story are the narrative, recount, and observation (Rothery & Stenglin 1997; Martin 1984; Plum 2004; Martin & Rose 2008). Young children have been documented telling these types of stories in ways that reflect a budding sophistication with valued patterns of meaning- making (Flynn In press). In SFL, genres are understood as staged, goal oriented activity through which social processes occur (Martin 2009).
Genres consist of types of texts which reflect the shared ways of getting things done that emerge in a culture. From this view, learning to construct, reproduce, and vary genres is a central task of schooling since it reflects a child’s ability to share meanings in ways that can be readily understood by others. Though any one genre has many possible realizations, each genre of story has what is recognized as a prototypical instantiation evident in its underlying structure. The middle stages of each genre of story are thought to be elemental or defining.
One of the most enduring conceptions of story - the narrative as articulated by Labov and Waletzky (1967) - describes stories that unfold as a temporal sequence of events. Labov and Waletzky define narrative stories as unfolding through the basic underlying structure of orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, and an optional coda. Orientations establish experiential context for events by indicating the people, places, times, and behavioral IDEAS IN DIALOGUE !7 situation for what is about to unfold. Complicating actions consist of a series of events which unfold in the order in which they occurred.
Evaluation reveals the attitude of the storyteller toward the events. Evaluation can occur throughout the narrative, but structurally follows the complicating action in a complete narrative to temporarily suspend the action and emphasize the extent of the complicating action. Resolutions indicate the result of the complicating action. Codas return events to the present moment.
SFL both draws on and departs from Labov and Waletzky’s classic articulation of narrative structure, drawing a distinction between stories that unfold as a series of events (recount stories) and stories that consist of a problem or challenge and its resolution (narrative stories). For instance, in SFL, complications in narrative stories consist of events which introduce challenges, problems, or moments that counter our expectations (Rothery & Stenglin 1997). Just as in Labov and Waletzky’s formulation, in narratives suspense is sustained by an evaluation stage which forestalls addressing the complication by providing an interpersonal perspective or appraisal of the event. In SFL, the resolution brings the complication to a satisfactory settlement.
If complications counter our expectations, then resolutions bring events back in line with our expectations. Thus, in SFL, narrative stories deal with and evaluate problematic events and their outcome (Rothery & Stenglin 1997). In contrast, recount stories unfold through a temporal succession of events, giving the events significance (Rothery & Stenglin 1997). The recount genre of story structurally unfolds as an orientation, series of events, and reorientation which brings the audience back to the experiential starting point.
Recounts stories have also been shown to end with a naturally IDEAS IN DIALOGUE !8 concluding event like returning home or evening falling. Such events are understood by members of shared culture to bring closure to what has been relayed. As a genre, observation stories describe a scene or situation, offering a highly personal response. Observations are stories that structurally unfold through an orientation stage, a descriptive stage, and a concluding comment or evaluation which makes the interpersonal significance of events explicit.
Observation stories use descriptive power to share a slice of life, deeply describing an instance and its significance rather than construing experience as unfolding through events. A significant insight offered by genre-focused approaches to story is that these distinct patterns of deploying language demonstrate equally valid variations in construing experience (Flynn In press). Rather than elevating a single meaning-making pattern as an idealized, or preeminent form of story, a genre-focused approach uncovers the choices at storytellers’ disposal, and the way, that these choices are informed by context and purpose. Culturally-shaped features of language Children are enculturated into diverse ways of storying experience, internalizing expectations and values about how and what to talk about in story situations (Heath 1983; Peterson & McCabe 1991; Minami 2002; McCabe, Bailey, & Melzi 2008; Miller, Koven, & Lin 2011; Khimji & Maunder 2012; Miller, Chen, & Olivarez 2014).
