ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses narrative in early childhood education as a field of study. Mutual engagement in a task or sense-making process has increasingly been emphasized in educational theorising. The ensuing move towards more 'naturalistic' modes of studying children's understanding can thus also be considered in the light of, among other things, narrative approaches to early childhood education research. The chapter focuses on this but also introduces some important features of children learning to narrate and what this implies for their development more generally. Narrative as a mode of making sense of the world entered into the research debate on children's developing abilities and had implications for questioning laboratory experiments as modes of 'accessing' children's capabilities. In educational practice, it is worth thinking about how to engage children in developmental processes and make them participants with agency in shared activities.
