Young children co-constructing stories with teachers

Abstract

Children’s story experiences are foundational to their social, emotional, and communication development. Viewed through a sociocultural lens, variability in the ways children and teachers interact during stories across diverse learning contexts is expected. This article explores the social and cultural knowledge demonstrated by children of different ages as they co-construct meaning multimodally during stories with teachers across two early childhood educational settings, in Canada and New Zealand. Teachers’ gestures, gaze, questions, and verbal and non-verbal affirmations centred on themes, characters, and actions as they co-created stories with children. Teachers’ mediating roles and practices supported and sustained children’s embodied actions, languages, and cultures. Teacher–child stories shared in this article highlight the value of everyday stories as contexts for extending children’s learning, and the multimodal nature of story interactions underpinning the co-construction of meaning in early childhood education contexts.