Abstract
This current study shows the range of culturally-shaped, storytelling patterns present in three multicultural, multilingual preschool classrooms serving children from families with lower socioeconomic status in the U.S. Stories were collected in the context of a small group, child-led storytelling activity called story circles. Results show that story circles encourage diverse story forms and topics that reflect interdependent conceptions of self in young learners. In their stories, young children demonstrate the early emerging potential for cultivating linguistic and cultural dexterity in early childhood by surfacing and centering multiple meaning-making patterns in the classroom, rather than solely topic-centered, linear, temporal stories that predominate in U.S. schools.
This paper reports an investigation of the learning affordances of preschool classrooms at cultural crossroads: classrooms that are racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically mixed. Aiming to surface often overlooked language learning potential, this study presents illustrative examples of different, culturally-shaped ways of telling stories evident in the storytelling of children in three classrooms over the course of one school year.
The current investigation is part of a larger study of story circles in preschool classrooms. Previous publications include a representative example of changes in length and complexity of storytelling that occured over the course of a school year as children engage in a transcultural, translanguaging exchange of stories (Flynn, 2021) and investigations into the interactive, dynamic, dialogic exchanges that occured as children told stories in the circle (Flynn, 2018a, 2022).
The current study shows the multiple, patterned ways of making meaning evident in the preschool classrooms with a focus on the way that children construe interdependent, relational meanings common to cohesion-oriented cultural communities, which constitute the global majority (Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol, 2018) and an increasingly important part of U.S. classrooms (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2022).
The need to support multiple ways to make meaning with language
Every day in classrooms the tantalizing potential of recognizing and supporting multiple ways to make meaning meets an often rigid adherence to a singular set of norms and expectations aligned with middle class, White, European American cultural priorities in U.S. schools (Delpit, 1988; Genishi and Dyson, 2015; Souto-Manning, 2013). Even as Black, Indigenous, and other children of color make up the majority of children in schools in the U.S. (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2022) and bilingual learners account for a quarter of all learners in early childhood classrooms (Figueras-Daniel and Li, 2021), too few resources have been dedicated to helping teachers recognize, appreciate, and instructionally support language diversities in the early years. Teachers who wish to support the language and culture of children in their classrooms are often left to pursue such study on their own or adapt what they have learned about “typical” language development (Commins and Miramontes, 2006; Delpit, 2006), making it challenging for teachers to build on, rather than replace ways of using language developed in the home and community.
It has long been recognized that all children have larger linguistic repertoires that include multiple languages, dialects, registers, and genres (Gumperz, 1964; Otheguy et al., 2015). Successful participation in home and community life requires even young children to begin to thoughtfully select from this range of language resources dependent on the people involved, the place in which communication occurs, and the meaning-making goals of the activity (Genishi and Dyson, 2015).
In schools in the U.S., the communicative cultural preferences of the dominant group are often prioritized to the exclusion of other meaning-making resources (García, 2011; Genishi and Dyson, 2015; Heath, 1983; Michaels, 2006; Souto-Manning, 2013). Despite longstanding language standards calling for the development of children’s understanding of “diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects” (NCTE/IRA, 2012), Black, Indigenous, children of color, children from immigrant families, dialect speakers, bilingual learners, and others miss out on the opportunity to further develop their larger repertoire of meaning-making resources. Rapid development of English speaking ability is the emphasis (Commins and Miramontes, 2006). Dialect features are often mistaken for grammatical errors (Adger et al., 2007). Many culturally-shaped ways of using language are unknown to teachers and not explicitly taught in the classroom. Children who participate in communities with cultural priorities that differ from middle class, White, European American standards find their contributions in the classroom mischaracterized, minimized, or overlooked (Delpit, 2006; Gardner-Neblett et al., 2023; Genishi and Dyson, 2015; Heath, 1983; McMillon and Edwards, 2000; Michaels, 2006; Souto-Manning, 2013; Vazquez, 2014; Yates and Marcelo, 2014).
Without relevant instruction in early emerging language diversities like those found in oral storytelling, teachers are often ill-positioned to appraise and support multiple ways to make meaning with language (Gardner-Neblett et al., 2023). Teachers in the U.S. often expect children to relay experience in topic centered, linear, temporal accounts using standard American English (Bliss and McCabe, 2008; Genishi and Dyson, 2015; Michaels, 2006) with little recognition that this expectation is based in deeply rooted, interconnected, routinely made meanings commonly construed by members of a shared culture. From a sociolinguistic perspective, culture is a constantly co-constructed social process that unfolds through the “uncountable series of situations, as our lives unfold through these situations as learners, speakers, and actors, producing texts that unfold as sequences of meanings” (Martin and Rose, 2008: 2).
Culture is co-constructed through the experiences we deem worth sharing, the significance we assign to those experiences, and the patterned ways that we echo one another as we story experience (Dyson and Genishi, 1994). In this respect, storytelling becomes a vital practice for surfacing and centering the meaning-making priorities of the children and families that make up any one classroom community. The meanings that children interpretively construct in everyday encounters in the classroom reflect longstanding family and community commitments like the centrality of relationship as an organizing principle of individual and familial life for many cultural communities (Ochs and Izquierdo, 2009; Rogoff, 2003).
Infusing classrooms with instructional practices organized with interdependence in mind creates culturally sustaining contexts for language development. Culturally sustaining pedagogy aims to foster and sustain “linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation” (Alim and Paris, 2017: 1). With an emphasis on dynamic and fluid conceptualizations of culture and attentive to children and youth’s hybrid practices to meet their own real world ends, culturally sustaining pedagogy centers the development of “dynamic cultural dexterity” as the desired instructional outcome of schooling (Alim and Paris, 2017). The present study seeks to illuminate the potential for early childhood classrooms to nurture the development of early developing dexterity by using young children’s own culturally-shaped construals of experience and relationship.
Culturally sustaining instructional practices benefit the language development of all children, but are especially important for Black, Indigenous, and other children of color (Ladson-Billings, 2014) who often draw from a wealth of unrecognized and under-appreciated meaning-making resources developed in family and community life. Though they participate in highly varied cultural communities, Black, Indigenous, and other children of color are most often socialized to emphasize relationality, an emphasis that is reflected in the way that children tell stories. Further, children in all cultures must manage separateness and connectedness (Raeff, 2006), learning to be self-reliant, agentic, co-agentic, and cooperative dependent on the context of situation (Ochs and Izquierdo, 2009).
Stories as a resource for culturally sustaining pedagogy
An important resource for culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012), stories are ubiquitous across cultures, varied according to the meaning-making priorities of communities, and pervasive in the lives of young children (Schick and Melzi, 2010). All of which places storytelling at the heart of an animating tension in school; story is at once a manifestation of what people share and how we differ. For young children, storytelling may be a particularly powerful tool for supporting language diversities because children have already encountered and internalized elemental meaning-making patterns of story by preschool (Bliss and McCabe, 2008; Cheatham and Jimenez-Silva, 2011; Flynn, 2016; Flynn, 2018b). In this way, story serves as a resource for children to talk in more extended turns (Flynn, 2016) while using language in patterned ways that reflect meanings shared by the diverse cultural communities in which children participate.
Prior research on storytelling provides evidence that teachers should expect children in their classrooms to use more than one underlying pattern when storying experience. Genre-based approaches to storytelling show that school-age children and adults construe experience using a range of patterns (Christie and Derwianka, 2010; Martin and Rose, 2008; Rothery and Stenglin, 1997), including narratives, recounts, observations, exemplums, and anecdotes (Martin and Rose, 2008). The pattern itself, constructs the underlying meaning of the story. For example, narrative stories unfold through a series of stages punctuated in the middle of the story by a complication stage which poses a problem, obstacle, or break from the usuality of events. In narrative stories, complications are dealt with through a resolution stage as the problem is solved, obstacle overcome, or normalcy restored. Though narrative stories are remarkably diverse, the shared, underlying pattern of narrative stories cast experience as a process of the individual overcoming obstacles and resolving problems. Varied, patterned ways of making meaning emerge earlier than previously realized with the ontogenesis of genre evident in the storytelling of 3 and 4 year old children (Flynn, 2018b).
Research into culturally-shaped patterns in storytelling have uncovered additional underlying patterns not often included in genre-based research including topic associating stories (Bliss and McCabe, 2008; Champion, 2014; Michaels, 2006) and other episodic (Minami, 2002) and relational reasoning centered story structures (Cheatham and Jimenez-Silva 2011; Jimenez-Silva and McCabe, 1996). Further, research into the storytelling telling of Black preschool and school-age storytellers shows that most children know and tell more than one kind of story (Champion, 2014; Katz and Champion, 2009); finding evident in the storytelling of preschool children in multilingual, multicultural preschool classrooms (Flynn, 2018a, 2021).
This paper brings together the two literature bases that highlight the multiple, patterned ways of making meaning through story, centering both structural patterns revealed in studies of culturally-shaped styles and genre-based approaches to storytelling. In doing so, a wider range of underlying patterned ways of making meaning can be considered.
Below, we describe the instructional practice of story circles, highlighting language diversities occasioned by the activity, when carried out in preschool classrooms serving children in lower socioeconomic circumstances, learning together in multicultural, multilingual preschool classrooms. Story circles have the potential to be a culturally sustaining teaching practice, especially when teachers have an awareness of multiple meaning-making patterns and tune their attention to understanding the way language diversities allow children to construct relational and experiential meaning as they draw on the resources of home and community for classroom learning.
Story circles in the classroom
Story circles are a small group storytelling activity that have been used in educational contexts primarily with older learners (Michna, 2009) as well as in a previous study of preschool storytelling (Flynn, 2016, 2018a, 2018b). Story circles echo other culturally-shaped practices which have been used educationally such as yarning circles, a speaking and listening practice adapted from Australian and North American indigenous peoples (Mills et al., 2014). Yarning circles like story circles have been used to help learners reflect on their experiences and rehearse ideas for drawing, writing, and dramatic activities. As an instructional activity that both surfaces expressions of interdependence and draws on the kind of cooperative, group-focused learning often preferred by learners from cohesion-oriented, interdependence focused families, story circles create a space for children to share, juxtapose, and compare a range of culturally-shaped meaning-making patterns (Flynn, 2021).
Story circles are a teacher-facilitated, but child-led language learning activity that leverages children’s ability to learn from and with peers. The teacher’s primary role is to convene the circle, support turn-taking, and encourage listening and mutual appreciation amongst the children. Teachers can use a talking stick to help signal whose storytelling turn it is. Acknowledging listening and understanding as an important part of participating in the circle reinforces and supports active listening amongst children when it is not their turn to share a story.
Though monologic talk in which only one person at a time holds speaking rights is common in educational settings in the U.S., in story circles children often engage in a more dialogic, collaborative exchange with children including one another in their stories, suggesting story elements, and appraising stories through evaluative comments as the story circle unfolds (Flynn, 2022). A previous study demonstrated that young children can use stories in the circle as an instrument of power to contest what is worthy of telling and how (Flynn, 2018a). However, in the study reported in this paper over 700 stories were exchanged across the school year, showing that overwhelmingly children’s interactions during the story circle are collaborative, inclusive, and support improved individual storytelling (Flynn, 2022). In this respect, it is important for teachers to not too tightly control the circle, instead allowing children to more organically and spontaneously respond to one another and the ongoing meanings constructed in the circle.
This study demonstrates that children’s stories get longer, more syntactically complex, and reflect better fulfillment of expectations of mature storytelling as practiced by older children and adults over time through repeated engagement in the circle (Flynn, 2021). Teachers often use direct scaffolding to improve children’s storytelling performance in classroom settings. However, such scaffolding can lead to inadvertent reinforcement of linear, temporal accounts to the exclusion of other meaning-making patterns (Michaels, 2006). When teachers listen for meaning, rather than intervening, they can more readily appreciate the experiences, ideas, and relationships that children are developing over time, offering fertile ground for further study in the classroom. Maintaining a learner’s mindset helps teachers shift their energy and attention to listening for understanding, rather than knowingly instructing.
It is not necessary for teachers to recognize storytelling patterns in-the-moment so much as maintain an awareness of, appreciation for, and openness to multiple ways of making meaning through story. When teachers audio record story circles, they can strategically transcribe story exemplars for each child across timepoints in the year, providing concrete evidence of language development to include in assessment portfolios, to share with parents, and to identify different patterns in children’s ongoing meaning-making repertoire.
To support bilingualism, it is best to pair children who share the same home language when possible. Children are more likely to story their experiences in home and heritage languages when teachers model and support bilingualism throughout the classroom day, in the story circle, and when children who speak the same language are in the same group (Flynn et al., 2021).
Children may choose not to tell a story each week, listening instead. It is important to honor listening as a valuable contribution to the group, and for many children, an expression of cultural preferences. Many children, by virtue of temperament, culture, or a combination of the two, prefer listening to speaking and have been supported in the home to speak only when they have something significant to say, or after they feel competent to carry out the task (Rogoff, 2003). Showing wise restraint and fitting into the fabric of the group are equally important markers of intelligence and mature participation as speaking up and standing out. Verbally acknowledging children for their careful listening to others recognizes the value of their contribution to classroom community life, while calling all children’s attention to the equal importance of listening well, not just speaking well. Even when children only tell a story roughly half the time, their ongoing participation in the circle still leads to longer, more complex stories over time (Flynn, 2021). This suggests that the learning value of listening may be more difficult to observe, but still occurs.
Theoretical approach
The current study of story circles draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 2006), a theory of language that conceptualizes language as simultaneously realizing three social functions: to enact social relationships, to represent experience, and to organize meanings into larger textual wholes (Martin and Rose, 2008).
Most teachers working with children are familiar with the notion of genre, especially when it comes to written texts. For instance, a teacher working with young readers might think of genres like historical fiction, fairy tales, or mysteries as distinct types of texts that learners encounter. From an SFL perspective, the notion of genre encompasses a wider conception of text, recognizing that patterned ways of making meaning occur in a broad range of social contexts including gossiping, arguing, instructing, lecturing, and storying experience. Genres are staged, goal-oriented social processes that reflect relatively consistent patterns of meaning depending on the social situation. Even very young children have begun to recognize the patterned ways of making meaning common to the cultural communities they participate in (Flynn, 2018a, 2018b, 2021).
Making a wider range of patterned ways of construing experience known to teachers remains important. The pattern, itself, construes the meaning. Because patterned ways of making meaning are consistent in reoccurring social situations, teachers can be supported to recognize and respond to a wider range of culturally-shaped meaning-making patterns, extending practices in the home and community in the service of learning in the classroom. With this end in mind, we ask: What culturally-shaped meaning-making patterns are evident in the storytelling of children in multicultural, multilingual preschool classrooms?
Methods
Context
Preschool-age children in three classrooms in an urban, economically mixed neighborhood in the U.S. participated in a study of story circles over the course of one school year. A racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically mixed group of approximately 15 children per classroom attended the publicly-provided preschool for children with families of lower socioeconomic status, including members of recent immigrant families. Multicultural, multilingual classrooms like these are the classroom of the present and future in the U.S. with growing numbers of Black, Indigenous, children of color, immigrant, and multilingual learners making up the population of young children in schools (Alanís et al., 2021; Goodwin et al., 2012).
Participants
Research team
The research team comprised a racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically mixed group with varied disciplinary expertise in early childhood education and social work. A team of three spent the school year participating in classroom life, visiting the classrooms on what the children came to call “story day” and one other day a week to assist teachers, carry out observations, and document children’s ongoing story and play themes. The research team embodied many forms of diversity—queer, disabled, language learner, bicultural, bilingual—but did not necessarily match the identities of teachers or children in the classrooms.
Teaching teams
Each classroom teaching team consisted of a lead teacher, assistant teacher, and an aide. The teaching teams in the classrooms were racially, culturally, and linguistically mixed. Each classroom had a bilingual assistant teacher, fluent in a language used by children in the classroom: Spanish in two of the classrooms and Arabic in the third classroom.
Children
In total, 44 children participated in the story circle activity with seven of the children participating for only part of the year. The children were divided into groups of four to six participants. A little over half of the participants were male. The classrooms were mixed in terms of age with children aged from 3:3 to 5:2 years, with the average age at the outset of the school year being 4:5 years (SD = 5.90 months).
The children reflected a number of parent-reported ethnic backgrounds: European American, Arab American, African American, and Latino/a/x descent being the most common. Over half of the children in the classroom spoke English as their primary language. English was the primary language of instruction and play in all three classrooms. Home languages spoken by the children included Arabic, Spanish, Somali, Creole, and Russian. A small number of children used dialect features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), sometimes referred to as Black English.
With attention to ethical considerations inherent in research with young children, all parents of participating children provided consent for children’s participation in accordance with IRB review. Children were able to provide assent each week, choosing whether or not to tell a story in the circle.
Story collection
The story circles were led by a Spanish-speaking assistant teacher and English-speaking teacher aide in two of the classrooms. In the third classroom, an English-speaking lead teacher carried out the story circle. While the teachers carried out the story circle, other children in the classroom were engaged in teacher-led, small group activities related to the classroom’s ongoing thematic studies.
Over the course of the school year, the children participated in 20 story circles, meeting once a week with the same group of children each week. The teachers intentionally grouped children to create heterogeneous groups in terms of teacher-perceived language ability of the children to take advantage of the opportunity for children to model storytelling for other children. To encourage bilingual storytelling, children were placed in groups with children with shared home languages whenever possible. In two of the classrooms, a participating teacher often prompted a child’s storytelling turn blending English and Spanish. Translanguaging was more common in story circles with a bilingual teacher modeling the kind of “dynamic cultural dexterity” called for by culturally sustaining pedagogies. However, features of AAVE were evident in children’s storytelling even though the dialect was not modeled or shared by adults in the classroom.
All the story circles were audio recorded and transcribed with transcription double checked by a second member of the research team. The children tended to tell their stories in short clausal bursts as they paused to think. We used a period to signal when children had a pronounced break, longer than pausing to take a breath. As a result, the transcription shows the shorter phrasal parts through which children’s stories unfolded, which did not always conform to a grammatically expected written sentence.
Analysis
All the stories were analyzed using SFL to determine clause level ideas, story stages, and story genre patterns. A “family resemblance approach” (Pappas, 2006) was used in which children’s stories were considered flexibly in relationship to a prototypical exemplar of each story genre pattern. Bringing together the literature on story genres (Flynn, 2018b; Martin and Rose, 2008; Rothery and Stenglin, 1997) and culturally-shaped storytelling styles (Bliss and McCabe, 2008; Champion, 2014; Cheatham and Jimenez-Silva, 2011; Jimenez-Silva and McCabe, 1996; Michaels, 2006), we analyzed children’s stories in relationship to the following five genres and their prototypical patterns:
The genre of each story was determined by the presence of a defining feature of each pattern: experience construed as a series of events (Recount), a complicating event (Narrative), description of an event (Observation), a series of associated episodes (Topic Associating), and orienting affiliative ties (Affiliative).
The analytic process involved parsing stories into their constituent parts of participants, processes, and circumstances used to construe, or interpretively construct, experience. Participants are the noun phrases—the actors, sayers, and sensors—in a clause. Processes consist of the verbs in a clause. Functionally, there are different types of processes such as doing, saying, sensing, being, and existing. Circumstances are the prepositional phrases and adverbial groups that construct the time, place, manner, accompaniment, and other circumstances in which a process occurs.
A three step process was used with stories parsed into their constituent parts, stages of story identified, and story genre determined by a defining stage. As an illustrative example, consider a story told by Abia, a four and a half year old, Arabic speaker: There was a little fish. He was lonely. He tried to be friendly. Well. He couldn’t. Because he was so so embarrassed. The end.
The first step involved labeling the participants, processes, and circumstances of each clause. For instance, the first clause, “There was a little fish,” used an existing process to introduce the presence of the little fish. In the subsequent clause, Abia used a being process to assign the attribute of loneliness to the little fish. Next, Abia used a sensing process, communicating an internal state as the little fish “tried to be friendly.”
In the second step, stages of story were determined by both the grammatical realization and functional purpose of clauses. “There was a little fish,” functions to orient the listener to the experiential context (functional purpose) and used language in prototypical ways for an Orientation stage which often introduce the time, place, and participants in a story through existing processes (grammatical realization).
Finally, the story genre was determined by the presence of a defining stage of story. In Abia’s story, the defining stage of Observation stories is evident in the descriptive clauses with being processes that make up the middle of the story. Being processes construct relational meanings—relationships with others, with place, with characteristic qualities. Abia’s story is a descriptive account of what experience was like for the little fish. A similar process was undertaken for each story told in the story circle.
Findings
Children in the participating classrooms construed experience using a range of known story genres, reflecting varied meaning-making priorities practiced in home and community life. In the following sections, we present an example of each culturally-shaped storytelling pattern, highlighting how the pattern, itself, helps interpretively construct the story’s meaning.
Affiliative stories
An emphasis on interdependence in family and community life is evident in children’s language in the classroom, both in what children tell about and how they tell it. Affiliative stories center and foreground social ties through an extended, affiliative orientation that places the speaker in their larger familial context. For instance, consider a story told by Jamilah (all names are pseudonyms) a 4.5 year old girl who was a member of an immigrant family from Somalia: Okay. My mommy got married to daddy. And um. Okay. My mommy got married to daddy. And um. And somebody was. And then my mom’s wedding. And that was my uncle’s. My auntie was in there. And Eeda was sitting. And my grandpapa was in there. And my dad. And my mom. And my uncles named Ahmed, Yasir. And Yasir’s babu was there. And then. And Sahra was in there. Yasmin. Yasmin was in there. And mommy um. And the doctor took me out of mommy’s tummy. And then. And I was sleeping in mommy’s bed with mommy and daddy. Because I can’t sleep all by myself. And they put me in my own little bed. I mean there was no bed for me. So um. I. I was sleeping next to my mom and dad. But I sleep and wake up in the morning. And when I was. I wake up in the morning. Go to daddy’s room. When I’m a. When I’m a big girl. I sleep in there. And when it’s. And I go downstairs and watch something. And I put on the TV. And so. And every time I wake up in the morning. And I always wake up in the morning. And I go to my daddy’s room.
The story began by describing the social and situational ties that undergird Jamilah’s experience of transitioning from birth to co-sleeping to being a “big girl” and presumably sleeping on her own, but going to her “daddy’s room” first thing in the morning. The tendency to begin stories by describing the people and places that foreground the experience is a documented pattern in ways of using language amongst members of cohesion oriented cultures that emphasize interdependence. Previous examples of this tendency to highlight extended family relationships as a way to foreground a story are evident in Latino/a/x children’s stories (Cheatham and Jimenez-Silva, 2011; Jimenez-Silva and McCabe, 1996).
The orientation stage of story typically describes the experiential context, the time, place, and participants involved. In the affiliative orientations, the experiential context includes extended family, in this case, the familial relationships central to Jamilah’s parents’ marriage and her subsequent birth. The frequent use of what SFL calls being processes help a teacher to recognize that Jamilah has begun the story with extended description, because being processes construe relational meanings like relationships with others, with place, and with characteristic qualities. For example, “And Yasir’s babu was there.”
Later in the story, Jamilah used language in ways common for children and adults as they sequence experience through a smaller series of events. She guided the listener to understand the temporal progression of events through conjunctions like “and then,” adjuncts like “every time,” and circumstances of time like “when I’m a big girl.” She used behavioral processes—“I was sleeping next to my mom and dad”—and doing processes’—“And I go downstairs and watch something”—to construe experience as a series of events. Jamilah concluded the story with a comment signaling the usuality of events, using the adjunct ‘always’ to signal the frequency: “And every time I wake up in the morning. And I always wake up in the morning. And I go to my daddy’s room.” When teachers recognize the characteristic ways that children use language in affiliative stories, the pattern of orienting through affiliative ties before relaying a series of events and commenting is evident
Stories that foreground relationships reflect and reinforce interdependence by fore fronting and centering familial ties as what is most significant about any happening. Jamilah was a child who began most of her stories with various tellings of her own becoming—her parents’ wedding, her mother’s pregnancy, being born, being a baby—as a precursor to the telling about more recent habitual and novel events with family and friends. A teacher does not need to share this culturally-shaped way of telling stories, to hear and understand the meaning Jamilah is making about the centrality of familial connection in her life. However, awareness of the pattern as an equally sophisticated, meaning-making alternative to topic centered, linear, temporal accounts helps teachers to recognize, appreciate, and build on such interdependent classroom contributions.
Topic associating stories
Children in the story circles drew on diverse languages, dialects, and underlying storytelling patterns. While Jamilah centered and forefronted a description of the familial relationships that serve as anchor to understanding present day happenings, Daima, (4:3), used dialect features of AAVE in a long, episodic, topic associating story in which she recounted adventures in the home with family. Topic associating stories reflect an underlying relational logic in which like or associated happenings are woven together into a larger whole (Champion, 2014).
When my sister take me outside. And then a big dog was come to bite me. And then we’re just huddled around. And then. And then, and then a big dog came. And then we wanted to play so. With her puppy. And then her (inaudible). Throw me out at grandma house. And then, and then a big dog was trying to get me. And then we get into the garage. My grandma garage. And then we turned around I just say “open the door!” And then my sister open the door. Her just close it. And then my, my other sister. Open. No, no my brother just open the door for me. And then. Um. And then my sister. And then my sister come. And then my brother put my my mouth in my finger. And that was so funny. And I, I was thinking. And that was so gross. Then my little sister who was next in line. My grandma brought me, I was watch grand um. With her having my grandma fall. And then her just fall. And then her just fall. In the water. And then went in and saw her. And then heared her just screaming. And then the other girl. Her just came. And then her just fall in the river. And there was stuff coming out. And then. And then when they were at the place. And then into my house when I’m sleeping. Or something, I don’t know. And then, then I was even talking to my sister. To get stuff from me. And then I open it up. And then I turn to eat it. And then. And then her take it and put it with the rest. And then that (inaudible). Then her show me. And then I must not be mad. Cause then I want to go to my momma room. And then I want to sleep with her, and go under the blanket with her. And drink some milk with a cup. And then go in the bathroom. And then I, I want to go into my other sister’s room. Because, but her say “No! You don’t have to come with me. In my room.” Because her sound so mean. And then when the last morning. The girl, the girl was coming. And then. My little sister was walking. And then I just see her. And then I can open the window and I say “Lila you want to get some candies?” And then her say “Yes!” And then and then her want to put that. And then her I was so laughing. And then her once. I think I have a candy right here. And then I think I can. And then I just have to say. “Close your eyes, close your eyes. I’ll come find them.” And then her goes “Oh Daima.” And then I saw her go under her bed and laughing. And then. My sister was not here today. And then last one. My teeth was like this. Was like a square like that. And then lost no time to fix it. And now, and just doctor tries to fix it. And then I wouldn’t have teeth. And then it stays in. And then I just open my mouth up when I’m sleeping it just falls. Then when I’m sleeping I just did something. When I, when, when, I open my mouth I touch my teeth. And then I push out like this. And then it would be lost. Now it bes lost.
Topic associating stories like Daima’s tend to be long stories that frequently include humor and exaggeration. There is often an emphasis on holding the listeners’ attention through the high interest of happenings. In this case, Daima, a quiet child in the classroom, shared a wealth of interesting occurrences in the home—playing with a dog and its puppy, laughingly sharing candy with a friend, the ongoing saga of a loose and eventually lost tooth.
Episodic, topic associating stories like Daima’s do not easily fit dominant culture expectations of story to be focused on a single topic elaborated through a linear, temporal progression. However, Daima shows remarkable sophistication in her ability to introduce and manage multiple participants who are thinking, feeling, and speaking in interaction with one another. She included moments of evaluation in which the storyteller expresses attitudes that make the significance of events clear like when Daima said, “I was thinking. And that was so gross.” Young children use evaluation more sparingly (Flynn, 2021; Nicolopoulou et al., 2022).
Daima also needed to coordinate multiple experiential contexts as events are unfolding in different times and places and involve different people. In topic associating stories, children differentiate the distinct, but related episodes through intonational contours as well as by orienting the listener to a new time, place, and participant like when Daima said: “And then into my house when I’m sleeping;” “And then when the last morning. The girl, the girl was coming;” and “And then last one. My teeth was like this. Was like a square like that.”
Daima orchestrated a number of resources of language in her story including dialect features of AAVE (See Craig and Washington, 2006 for a description of dialect features used by children from preschool to fifth grade and Champion, 2014 for a description of dialect features in storytelling). For instance, she indicated possession by word order, dropping the possessive ’s’ in “my grandma garage” and “momma room.” She used undifferentiated pronoun cases in which subject and object cases are used interchangeably when she said, “her just fall in.” Daima concluded the episode where her sister will not let her come in her room with the point of emphasis, “her sound so mean.” Dialect features were used in another point of emphasis that ended the story when Daima used the habitual ‘be’ as a way to communicate an ongoing state when she said, “And then it would be lost. Now it bes lost.”
It is important for teachers to remember that AAVE is as systematic as standard American English (Adger et al., 2007; Delpit, 2006; Smitherman, 1977), the dialect simply applies a different, though equally sophisticated, set of semantic choices to construct relational and experiential meanings. Use of dialect when storytelling not only injects the sense-making of home and community life into the classroom, but it also serves as an important way of establishing relational affinity between young children and others who look and sound “like me.”
An underlying system of meaning that prioritizes relational or associative reasoning shapes Daima’s storytelling, reinforcing the overarching meaning that experience is less about a temporal succession of events and more about like events that constitute experience. In this case, there is a transactional back and forth between participants in the garage door that is open and closed to escape the dog, in the “stuff” the sister takes and the relief sought in the mother’s room, in the shared candies hidden in a game with a friend, and in the tooth that alternately stays in and falls, eventually being lost. To hear Daima tell it, experience is an ongoing back and forth with family and friends. It can be “funny,” “gross,” make you “mad,” or have you “laughing.” When teachers focus on meaning and are aware of the underlying logic of diverse forms, the sophisticated weaving of stories like Daima’s can be appreciated.
Observations
The length of Daima’s story is evident when compared to observational stories that preschool children tell. Observations are stories that describe a happening and evaluatively comment to help communicate the significance of the event to the listener. Observational stories lack a progression through time that teachers often think of as part of storying experience. Nonetheless, observations are a type of story practiced by more mature community members like older children and adults (Martin and Rose, 2008). Observations are ideal for communicating what a happening was like through description.
Though observations are less common than temporally focused stories in both children and adults, description has been documented as more common amongst some cultural communities like amongst Latino/a/x children (Cheatham and Jimenez-Silva, 2011; Jimenez-Silva and McCabe, 1996). Observational stories serve as an important meaning-making resource for children to communicate what an experience was like, highlighting relevant details from the child’s perspective. For example, Diego, four and a half year old bilingual, told an observation about a recent snow fall in response to a story circle mate’s story told in Spanish about throwing snowballs with family (Flynn et al., 2021).
In Diego’s story he described the winter clothes that he wore to play in the snow, including the boots that he was wearing in the story circle. Daima had concluded a long, topic associating story right before Diego’s story by saying, “Then. I was looking at the, weather tomorrow. Then it start to storm. And everyone says it’s going to be stormy. And it’s very scary. The end.” Diego concluded his story with a shrugging, “Eh. Ya se acabó,” meeting Daima’s worry with a commenting nonchalance. Moments like this where children use different dialects, languages, and storytelling patterns in the same storytelling circle illustrate the culturally sustaining potential of story circles to serve as a child-centered dialog where language diversities and underlying systems of meaning meet. The children connect over shared ideas like the recent snowfall while using and modeling for one another different resources of language to make meaning about relationships and experience (Flynn, 2021).
Recounts
Many children cast their experience as a series of events that end with a natural conclusion like returning home or the day ending. It is important to note that while lengthy, episodic, topic associating stories have been documented as a culturally-shaped storytelling style used by African American children, most young children know and tell multiple kinds of stories that reflect different underlying meanings (Champion, 2014; Flynn, 2018b; Katz and Champion, 2009). It is important for teachers to be ready for, recognize, and value multiple distinct ways of storying experience as part of children’s larger linguistic repertoires.
So far, we have seen Jamilah, a Somali immigrant, who foregrounded extended family relationships in a similar fashion documented amongst some Latino/a/x storytellers (Cheatham and Jimenez-Silva, 2011; Jimenez-Silva and McCabe, 1996) and Daima who used features of AAVE in her lengthy, topic associating stories that relied on an underlying relational logic. Destiny, a four and a half year old, offers another useful example of storytelling from an African American preschooler in the story circle.
I have a superhero costume. And, um. And my mom bought it.
We went trick or treating at everyone’s house. Then, they gave us a lot of candy. And, then they drove. But then we drove off. At my cousins. Their name is J.J., Naenae, Batman, and. . .
Mister!
Mister. And. Man Man. And me. And Gabriel. All done.
In this story, Destiny constructed experience as a series of events using temporal markers like “then,” to signal the progression of events from one to another. Circumstances of time are used sparingly in observations like Diego’s, but in recounts a temporal succession of events is used to communicate a larger experience. Destiny concluded her story with the natural ending of driving off. She then provided a roll call of her cousins with her cousin Gabriel, a listener in the story circle, chiming in. Concluding a story in this way offers another option for placing emphasis on the centrality of extended family relationships common in Black family and community life as children are more likely to be embedded in extended networks of friends and family which are central to the relational self (Ladson-Billings, 2009).
Destiny drew on a number of different markers of culture, a common practice in story circles, as even young children combine elements from larger cultural repertoires that reflect their engagement in a pluralistic society (Flynn, 2021). In this story, Destiny draws on superheroes, Halloween, and the use of nicknames common in many working class, Black families (Heath, 1983). For instance, Man Man is a nickname frequently used as a reflection and reinforcement of a certain type of budding Black masculinity. There is a rhythmic, lyrical quality to the way that Destiny spoke her roll call, “J.J., Naenae, Batman, and . . . Mister. And. Man Man,” similar to language play of play songs (Heath, 1983).
Narratives
Narrative stories are the most highly valued underlying meaning-making pattern for middle class, White, European American cultural community (Bliss and McCabe, 2008; Cheatham and Jimenez-Silva, 2011). Narrative stories with the signature pattern of complication and resolution have been cast as the storytelling ideal. Many European American teachers recognize and value this storytelling form more highly than other patterns without being consciously aware that their own culturally-shaped meaning-making priorities are reflected in such stories. Though members of marginalized cultural communities are expected to learn the language, dialect, and meaning-making patterns of the dominant group, it is less common for members of the dominant group to know, understand, and be prepared to support the meaning-making patterns of other cultural communities (Delpit, 2006; Tatum, 2017).
In story circles, narrative stories were just one of several underlying story patterns. No one type of story is prioritized over another. Most children tell more than one type of story over the course of the school year. Yusuf, a four year old Arab American, told a narrative story with a repeated complication and resolution as his sister repeatedly made a mess which he cleaned up. The story concluded with an evaluative moment as Yusuf declared, “That’s that!” He used intonation to exclaim his exasperation and announce the final resolution, one last bought of cleaning.
One day. One day there was me. And then. When my sister comes. And when I was. Finished cleaning up my bedroom. Then my mom gave me a sticker. Then my sister made a mess. And then I cleaned. My mom made. And my sister made a mess. I clean it up. My mom. My sister made a mess. I was there. I cleaned up. And then my sister made a mess. That’s that! I cleaned up!
The underlying meaning of narrative stories reflects the kind of independent conception of self which is prioritized in White, European American developmental theory that teachers often learn in preparation for teaching. Narratives tell again and again the story of the individual overcoming obstacles and successfully resolving complications. Narrative stories often involve multiple participants in relationship with one another, but conflict is central to a narrative story as the people in the story are often working at cross purposes. The complication and resolution of narrative stories is often constructed through changing participant roles like Yusuf used when he said, “Then my sister made a mess. And then I cleaned.”
While interdependent conceptions of the self emphasize relationality and encourage children to coordinate their actions with others as a maturational ideal, independent conceptions of self tend to cast the needs and interests of the self as in conflict with others. This core conception of self is reflected in the stories we tell. Of course, conflict, implied or directly stated, is present in other culturally-shaped ways of storying experience like when Daima’s sister would not let her join her in her room. It is just that conflict is not at the heart of the story, driving the action forward like it is in narrative tales.
Discussion
The current study explored the culturally-shaped, meaning-making patterns evident in young children’s storytelling in story circles in multicultural, multilingual classrooms. Illustrative examples show the way that classroom communities of racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically mixed groups of children use multiple forms of language diversity to make meaning through story.
Story circles have the potential to serve as a culturally sustaining teaching practice by opening the floor for children to use multiple languages, dialects, and culturally-shaped meaning-making patterns in the classroom in a dynamic exchange. All young children need opportunities to use language to learn language. Developing larger repertoires of meaning-making resources requires teachers to make space and time for children to practice and extend sense-making from the home and community in the classroom in the interest of meeting children’s own real world ends.
Aspects of linguistic diversity like the use of different named languages are often more salient to teachers than the culturally shaped, patterned ways that young children have learned to make meaning in the home and community. The pattern, or genre, of story plays as significant a role in interpretively constructing meaning as what a story is topically about. Rooting a story in the extended, familial ties that give everyday experience significance, associating like experiences, and describing what an experience was like, all reflect forms of relational reasoning central to the interdependent, cohesion-oriented cultures in which so many U.S. children learn and grow.
Implications
Centering multiplicity as an educational end
Preschool classrooms at the cultural crossroads offer an often untapped language learning potential because young children bring the early emerging seeds of “dynamic cultural dexterity” with them from their experiences in family and community life. If our classrooms are to realize the potential present in the everyday multiplicity of multicultural, multilingual classrooms then all children need to be assisted to root experience in affiliative ties, to describe and comment, to make associative connections between events, to recount a series of events, to complicate and resolve daily dilemmas, and to develop diverse strategies for evaluatively making the significance of events clear. In doing so, the field of early childhood can sustain and extend children’s sense-making, rather than replacing it with a singular vision of story - the topic centered, temporal, linear account.
Educating teachers toward “dynamic cultural dexterity”
An important first step to realizing the instructional possibility of extending children’s meaning making from the home in the classroom lies in educating teachers to recognize the multiple patterned ways that children story experience. The kind of “linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism” called for by culturally sustaining pedagogy is possible in the early years. The field can begin to meet the National Council of Teachers of English learning standard to develop children’s understanding of “diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects” (NCTE/IRA, 2012) by centering the diverse, patterned ways that children make meaning through story in teacher education.
In the U.S., the last couple decades of early childhood policy has made a remarkable push to “ready” children for kindergarten. An equal effort is needed to create ready preschool classrooms with teachers prepared to accurately appraise and extend what children have already cultivated with family and community. By recruiting, educating, and sustaining early childhood educators knowledgeable about and capable of modeling cultural dexterity, classroom communities that value and nurture linguistic diversity can become the norm, rather than the exception.
Children develop such wonderful repertoires of meaning-making resources in the home and community. Recognizing that there are multiple ways to effectively make meaning with language provides an orienting foundation for children and teachers to center multiplicity as a good, and the ultimate end for language learning in early childhood and across the lifespan. Though children sometimes use language in ways that teachers do not expect, when we listen well, we can hear what they mean, and begin to understand what matters from children’s perspective.
Footnotes
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood grant (16-0007PCF) and by Portland State University Office of Academic Affairs.
