Cultural imaginaries and oral traditions as creative resources for connecting home storytelling to English learning

Abstract

When teachers and learners of English face challenging circumstances such as limited access to books and teaching supplies, local practices such as oral storytelling traditions can provide creative resources for supporting language and literacy development. We describe how a cultural imaginary of stories told by Rwandan and U.S. students supported dramatic retelling through reader's theater in English camps for Rwandan upper elementary school students. The students embodied and dramatized their favorite stories written in English or Kinyarwanda and redesigned them into reader's theater scripts. Often these stories originated from creative storytelling practices by the students in their homes, thus illustrating how storytelling traditions connected funds of knowledge from home to resources for teaching and learning.