Storytelling and Story-Acting in a Toddler Classroom: Language, Literacy, and the Right to Play

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Researching Play, Language, and Literacy Practices to Interrupt Injustice and Unburden Early Education (Table 24)

Abstract

Early childhood education advocates support play-based, emergent curriculum as a guiding principle that builds on children’s needs, interests, experiences, and wide range of social, cultural, and linguistic resources (Genishi & Dyson, 2014; Souto-Manning & Martell, 2017; Wohlwend, 2018). Despite its importance, after decades of accountability mandates, standardization, and the push-down of academics, play has lost much of its footing in contemporary early childhood classrooms. This narrowing of the curriculum and loss of play is especially evident for children of color and those living in poverty (Wohlwend, 2018). Thus, the loss of play is an issue of equity disproportionately impacting the early educational experiences of students already marginalized in schools and society (Souto-Manning, 2017; Wohlwend, 2018). As early childhood educators and researchers, it is our obligation to continue to explore, advocate for, and implement more innovative, play-based approaches to language and literacy learning that position play as a right for all children (Souto-Manning, 2017).

This study examines the implementation of an oral storytelling and story-acting curriculum based on the work of Vivian Paley (1990) in a toddler classroom to illuminate the ways a group of young culturally and linguistically diverse children played their way into language and literacy.

This study draws on a sociocultural framework (Holland et al., 1998) to situate the social nature of learning and the importance of the interactions participants engaged in through storytelling, story-acting, and play. This study is also informed by translanguaging, a “practical theory of language” (Wei, 2018) that challenges langage hierarchies and centers and celebrates children’s full communicative repertoires (Souto-Manning, et al., 2021).

This qualitative case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005) draws on data from a seven-month practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) conducted in a culturally and linguistically diverse, urban preschool. Data include audio-recordings of children’s storytelling and story-acting (Paley, 2007), documents (Merriam, 1998) including the children’s original stories and drawings, and descriptive and reflective field notes documenting the children’s storytelling, story-acting, and play (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007).

Initial findings reveal that this storytelling and story-acting curriculum fostered a group culture in the classroom connected through shared narrative practice and the children’s play. This play-based curriculum supported the children’s language and emergent literacy development in multiple ways. Through storytelling and story-acting the children developed their oral language and literacy skills within the context of their interests, experiences, and linguistic practices, both individually and through collaborative authoring practices. This curriculum further supported children’s full linguistic repertoires as storytelling and story-acting became a space for translanguaging for both children and teachers. Storytelling and story-acting supported expanded modes of meaning making and communication as the children spoke, drew, and embodied their stories through story-acting and play throughout the classroom.

In a time when even preschool teachers are feeling the pressure of academic pushdown, including the teaching of specific literacy sub-skills, this study highlights the importance and possibilities of a language and literacy curriculum for young children that incorporates oral storytelling, story-acting, and play. Implications for classroom practice and teacher education will be discussed.

Author

• Tara Lencl, New York Early Childhood Professional Development Institute