ABSTRACT
Educators have long known that stories are an effective cognitive tool to extend the imagination (Egan, 2005). This paper discusses ‘Kamishibai’ (paper drama performance), a form of dramatic story-telling popular among young children in Japan. A Kamishibai story is composed of a series of picture cards, which teachers read aloud and use to involve children in the world of the story. Our team of researchers set up a play-based workshop called ‘Playshop’ (Ishiguro, 2017) in order to study the significance of play for children. Children who participated were expected to extend their zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) through rich bodily play experiences. We adopted ‘the formative experimental method’ (Vygotsky, 1960–1979) in which children are free agents in a roughly preset environment. This paper details two forms of Kamishibai we observed during Playshop: adult-initiated collaborative story-making and child-initiated storytelling. In the first, adult facilitators helped children assemble separate images (their own drawings) into a cohesive, shared story. The process of making a story shows children that the meaning of a story can change according to the author’s way of composing it. The children experience this first-hand 90as they assume authorship in the making of their own story. The second, child-initiated Kamishibai, takes this a step further as individual children begin to internalise the collaborative process and make it their own. Both adult- and child-initiated Kamishibai proved effective ways to foster imagination and aid children’s self-expression. The observations here thus have significant implications for the pedagogical application of Kamishibai.
