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Ideas in dialogue: Leveraging the power of child-led storytelling in the multicultural preschool classroom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2018

Erin Elizabeth Flynn
Erin Elizabeth Flynn*
Affiliation:
Portland State University, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Erin Elizabeth Flynn, Child, Youth, & Family Studies, Portland State University, PO Box 751, Mailcode: SSW SSW, Portland, OR 97207, USA[email protected]
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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 that 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. (Storytelling, multicultural, early childhood education)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , September 2018 , pp. 601 - 633
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Mary Schleppegrell for the insight and feedback that informed this work. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the manuscript. Special thanks go to the children and teachers who shared their classroom and their stories.

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