ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on sociocultural theories to explore young children’s collective meaning making when they tell, listen to and act out each other’s stories. The data for this study were collected from six research sites taking part in a London-based evaluation of Helicopter Stories, an eight-week in-service training programme for early years practitioners (Cremin et al., 2013). As described in Chapter 2, this programme was based on Vivian Gussin Paley’s account of her storytelling/storyacting pedagogy in her book, The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter (Paley, 1990). As I have a keen interest in young children’s collective meaning making and the narratives they develop during play, it seemed to me that Helicopter Stories might provide an equally rich context for children’s narrative co-creation. The copies of the storybooks, containing all the stories told during Helicopter Stories sessions, were available for analysis, as were videos of individual children telling their stories in each of the research sites. Over the eight-week period, multiple storytelling sessions were captured on video (comprising 17 hours of recording), and over 350 stories from 147 children were collected. These provided a rich source of data that could be used to test this prediction.
