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  • Children’s StorytellingToward an Interpretive and Sociocultural Approach
  • Ageliki Nicolopoulou (bio)

Recent years have seen increasing efforts to integrate narrative theory with developments in cognitive science (e.g., Herman 2003; Keen 2007; Palmer 2004). Thus far these efforts have been pursued most vigorously by narratologists who recognize the value of creating intellectual bridges between narratology and cognitive science. My own experiences as a developmental psychologist have convinced me that psychological research on narrative—in particular, research on children’s narrative activities and their acquisition and development of narrative skills—should be paying equally careful attention to models, trends, and ideas in the domain of narratology. To highlight the potential value of intellectual cross-fertilization between narratology and developmental studies of narrative, I present the interpretive and sociocultural approach I have developed over the years in my research [End Page 25] on the narratives of preschool children, outlining some of the concrete analyses that have emerged from this long-term research project. The approach I have sought to develop emphasizes the need for understanding children’s narrative activity as a form of symbolic action linking the construction of reality with the formation of identity; it attempts to integrate the formal analysis of linguistic structure with the elucidation of structures of meaning; and it attempts to situate children’s narrative activity in the sociocultural context of their everyday interaction, their group life, and their cultural world.

In what follows, I first explain how I got involved in analyzing the stories of young children and why I concluded that the dominant approaches to narrative analysis in developmental psychology were inadequate to address important issues raised by this research. Next, I explicate the approach I have developed and illustrate some of its applications. I believe narratologists will recognize significant parallels between this approach (and some of its motivating concerns) and approaches emerging in contemporary narratology, especially in work informed by the idea of “storyworlds.” I conclude by exploring some similarities and differences between my own developmental approach to narrative inquiry and these “postclassical” narratological approaches, suggesting why cross-fertilization between these two enterprises is both possible and desirable.

How I Got Involved in Narrative Research: A Focus on Situated Storytelling/Story-Acting Activities

It may be useful to provide a brief account of how I got involved in narrative research and the challenges I encountered along the way—so that I can explain how my interests came to converge with themes and approaches in narratology, both classical and postclassical. My first research project on children’s narratives was a collaborative analysis of stories spontaneously produced by children over the course of an entire academic year in the four-year-olds’ classroom in a university child care program. We used an unusual method in our study. My collaborator, the head teacher of the class, had introduced in her classroom a storytelling/story-acting activity pioneered by the teacher-researcher Vivian [End Page 26] Paley (1990). During this daily activity, three or four children each day had the opportunity to dictate stories to their teacher, who transcribed each story as the child told it, with minimal intervention. Then later on that day, during large-group time, the child-author and the children whom he or she chose acted out these stories for the benefit of the entire class. These stories were a unique and rich source of data that immediately captured my attention—and that have continued to be the focus of my research up to now.

Several features of this elicitation method make it unique. The typical way that children’s stories have been elicited in psychological research is by asking children individually to tell a story to an experimenter who listens to and tape-records it; more rarely, either the experimenter or the child writes the story down. Children are often asked to tell a story based on a wordless picture book or on a shorter sequence of pictures, or to retell a story the experimenter told them, or to finish a story that the experimenter started; they are much more rarely asked to tell a story of their own creation. Also, the usual setting for the story elicitation is either a university...

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