Narrating in early childhood education as a responsive, re-creative, and remembering practice

Abstract

The interest of the present thesis concerns how children orally retell stories they have been told. This research is carried out in dialogue with two classic research traditions in developmental psychology: one regarding whether children understand, and take into account when communicating, that others have different experience and understanding than themselves, and one regarding remembering conceptualized as a creative and sense-making practice. The thesis consists of two empirical studies conducted in a preschool setting with children 4 to 5 years old. The analytical focus of study I is on whether, and if so how, the children consider the understanding of the listener(s) when retelling stories. The analytical focus of study II is on how the children remember, and perhaps reshape, stories in retelling activities. The theoretical framework informing these studies is a sociocultural perspective, conceptualizing learning and remembering as contingent on cultural tools and practices. The empirical data consist of 19 video recordings of storytelling activities. Analytical work was guided by the principles of Interaction Analysis. Analyzing the meta-markers children use in their storytelling reveals that the children do take into account the understanding of their listener(s) when retelling stories, if not consistently so (Study I). Analyzing how one focus child retells the same story in different constellations show how she remembers details from the story told by the teacher and the very manner of how the story was told, as well as transforms the story to what more readily makes sense (Study II). The thesis has significance for our understanding of children, their storytelling and remembering. More specifically, the findings contribute to a more general reconceptualization of children’s capacities to understand. An important implication for early childhood education is that when supporting children’s storytelling and remembering, teachers also support children’s sense making and vice versa.