ABSTRACT
The chapter reviews the 10 principles of early childhood from Tina Bruce in 1986. The Froebelian principles incorporated themselves into the pedagogical theory–practice trajectory. The chapter focuses on the power of story for young children's literacy learning in multilingual African settings. Like profound stories meander through the world, enriching minds with shared understandings of what it means to be human, these early childhood education principles with their various origins and expressions seamlessly traverse the boundaries of space and time to help structure our work. The principles support a view that the fulcrum to transformation is reviving the uses of stories in South Africa, with its great storytelling tradition still etched into so many memories: Imagination, creativity and all kinds of symbolic behaviour develop and emerge when conditions are favourable. Mother-tongue based bilingual education has been a pillar of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa's involvement in education.
