Enchantment in storytelling: Co-operation and participation in children's aesthetic experience

Abstract

In early childhood education, storytelling has traditionally been seen as a learning activity that lays the groundwork for children's vocabulary and literacy development. The present study uses video-recorded storytelling events to examine young children's emotional involvement and aesthetic experiences during adult storytelling in a regular Swedish preschool for 1- to 3.5-year-olds. By adopting a multimodal interactional perspective on human sense-making, socialization, and literacy (Goodwin, 2017), it contributes to research examining multimodality in early childhood literacy (Kyratzis & Johnson, 2017). The analytical focus is on co-operation in aesthetic experience: the teachers’ ways of organizing an entertaining, affectively valorized and ‘enchanting’ storytelling, and the children audience's verbal and nonverbal participation (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004).The study shows that teachers used ‘lighthouse’ gaze, props, marked prosody and pauses to invite the child audience to participate, join the attentive multiparty participation frameworks and share the affective layering of story. The young children exploited the recognizability of the story and contributed by co-participating through bodily repetitions, choral completions, elaborating or volunteering anticipatory contributions, and pre-empting the upcoming story segment. The study suggests that through adult-child co-operation, the embodied telling becomes a site for children's affective and aesthetic literacy socialization.