The Agency of Things in Children's Storytelling: New Questions for Early-Years Teachers' Pedagogical Practice

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 76
  In Roundtable Session: Children's Agency and Story

Abstract

The utility and purposes of storytelling in early years educational settings tends to privilege children’s language, social and cultural development as well as their literacy learning as chief justification for storytelling activity. However relational materialist interpretations of children’s storytelling in early childhood settings show stories in another light – as also contingent with the agency of things at play there. Three examples of the agency of things drawn from a three-year study of storytelling in New Zealand are discussed in this paper. The data illustrate how objects play into the development of children’s stories raising new questions of the New Zealand curriculum Te Whāriki’s claim of learning as situated in the relationship between people, places and things.

Author

• Alexandra Gunn, University of Otago