Nurturing Young Children's Narrative Skills With Educational Drama

• In Event: Advances in Drama-Based Research: Student and Teacher Experiences to a Meta-Analysis of Drama-Based Pedagogy

Abstract

This presentation identifies a taxonomy of four general types of drama interventions designed to promote young children’s narrative development: play-training interventions, writing-improvement interventions, Paley-paradigm interventions, and readers-theatre interventions. These diverse interdisciplinary interventions were designed to foster a variety of narrative outcomes, such as the production, comprehension, and/or recall of either oral or written narratives. The merits and challenges of the research on drama-based narrative interventions, and the potential these interventions hold for supporting young children’s acquisition of narrative skills and influencing early childhood education curricula, are discussed.

Author

• Wendy K. Mages, Mercy College