ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to reflect on ‘textuality’ in the classroom. It draws on the film footage of a picture book being read with children in a South African classroom to analyse how textuality allows us to think of the early childhood classroom as a space in which the act of storytelling, conducted in visual and oral forms, can generate productive frameworks for thinking about various connections – connections between imagination, orality, the body and the dispersal of cognition across the materiality of the classroom. In other words, the realm of imagination in the context of ‘storyworlding’ invokes, on the part of the learners, a dynamic of dis/identification with illustrated animate and inanimate objects (starting with the picture book) and with their own bodies, while eventually allowing them to de-centre the body in the production of their own imagination – one that emerges as part of the ecosystem of materiality in the classroom. The chapter arrives at this argument by considering the larger debates on the readership and audiences of children’s literature, in relation to authorial voicing and authorial power. This is in the context of the pedagogic space of a classroom, as provided by the footage that is the basis of the analysis in this chapter.
