Making Meaning in Primary Classrooms
For every individual, stories are one of the earliest and most enduring ways of sharing and constructing meaning. Narrative schemes, overt and hidden, are at work in all children's lives as they try to connect new information and concepts with their existing understandings. They are also at work in primary classrooms in ways both small (an individual story told) and large (a community story in process). This book explores the central place of "storying" in classroom learning, considering the power of story as a mean of tapping into fresh understandings of teaching and learning. The book advocates the application of multiple stories, multiple lenses, multiple entry points. It advocates opportunities for learners to make choices about what and how they learn. It promotes an environment in which students find new reasons to learn, new attitudes to learning, and new energy to pursue their learning goals. In particular, it looks at the ubiquity of storying in learners' lives, and its significance as a learning currency; examines the effect of learners' own metanarratives on their literacy success and life chances; looks at stories as existing sets of pragmatic knowledge that students bring to the classroom; sets out the relationship between storying and the inquiry process; shows how stories serve to mediate across human differences; presents ways to establish a "storying classroom" that operates as a collaborative learning community; and offers criteria and techniques for presenting powerful and resistant stories. Some views of learning that inform the book are: ethnography, scaffolding, poststructuralism, social constructivism, and systems theory. Each of the seven chapters includes references.