Narratives in Early Childhood Education Communication, Sense Making and Lived Experience

Over the past few decades, a growing body of literature has developed which examines children’s perspectives of their own lives, viewing them as social actors and experts in their understanding of the world. Focusing specifically on narratives, this unique and timely book provides an analysis of these new directions in contemporary research approaches to explore the lived experiences of children and teachers in early childhood education, in addition to presenting original research on children’s narratives. The book brings together a variety of well-regarded international researchers in the field to highlight the importance of narrative in young children’s development from local and global perspectives. While narrative is clearly understood within different countries, this is one of the first texts to build an international understanding, acknowledging the importance of culture and context. It presents up-to-date research on the latest research methods and analysis techniques, using a variety of different approaches in order to critically reflect on the future for narrative research and its insights into early childhood education Narratives in Early Childhood Education will be of interest to postgraduate students, academics and researchers in early childhood education, as well as early childhood professionals, government policy makers and early childhood organisations and associations.

Biographies 1. An introduction to narrative research SECTION A: Stories told 2. "I wanna tell you a story": Exploring the multimodal storytelling voices of children’s lived experiences 3. Narratives characteristics of kindergarten children from three areas in Taiwan 4. The importance of storytelling as a pedagogical tool for Indigenous children 5. Stories of style: Exploring teachers’ self-staging with musical artefacts 6. Narrative insight into the influential macrosystem elements on children’s resilience development in Taiwanese public preschools 7. Children’s re-storying as a responsive practice SECTION B: Storied investigation 8. Book reading and dual language narrative elaboration in preschool 9. The contribution of narrative to early reading comprehension 10. The organisational patterns of first graders on three narrative tasks SECTION C: Re-thinking what we know 11. Which comes first: the story or the text?: How digital affordances challenge us to re-think children’s construction of narrative during art-making 12. Narrative engagement and children’s development

Susanne Garvis is Professor in early childhood education at theUniversity of Gothenburg, Sweden. Niklas Pramling is Professor in the Department of Education, Communication and Learning at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.