Abstract
Children’s storied play, or in other words, their fictive world-building, has much to teach us with regard to understanding story and how story pedagogy might be otherwise shaped in curricular spaces. In this article, we explore this proposition by drawing on interconnected and entangled moments of children’s outdoor storied play in a Canadian first-grade class. By mapping the children’s movements within three storied-play encounters, we animate how what could appear as the most ordinary and mundane ways of composing story in outdoor, open-ended and make-believe play, offers a lively form of protestation to the predominant Western narrative paradigm of beginning-middle-end story structure. Bringing the three moments into conversation with literary theorist Marielle Macé’s concept of narrative stylization, we attend to ways story lives and grows within children’s storied and playful worldbuilding. Ultimately, we argue that limiting instructional methods to that which is centred around the objectification and rationalization of storying (i.e., typical beginning-middle-end story structure) can displace other pedagogical directions that recognize and extend the myriad ways in which stories are made, learned, and understood. We conclude the article with an exploration of how educators might promote and build upon the narrative stylizations – fiction-in-the-doing – that children are always already engaging in their storied play.
Keywords
Introduction
Stories and storying arise in sometimes familiar and sometimes surprising ways as children play in human and more-than-human worlds. Over a period of several months spent observing children in a first-grade (Year 2) class engaged in outdoor storied play, our attention was captured by (un)familiar rhythms in their embodied and voiced composing. The gestures, repetitions, and provisional emplotments within their compositional play called us to move toward it and seek to follow its openness and complexity. Its narrative and narrating movements tumbled and paused, circled about, moved forward, and entangled us, as literacy educators and researchers, in questions about the stories these events might tell about stories (Haraway, 2016). It prompted us to reconsider familiar ideas about story, composition, how story pedagogy is shaped in curricular spaces, and how these might be otherwise. The data story we share below (and expand on later in the text) comes from field notes taken as a small group of students played-with (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017) the soil of their schoolyard, the roots of a tree, one another, and the material and immaterial fascinations of dinosaurs and paleontology. Crouching, feet flat and planted wide, the children hold on to the edge of tree roots just at the surface of the ground. Their bodies shift and sway as they meticulously use their hands and small brushes to move the soil away from the roots. Their feet, in direct relationship with their alert gazes, move first; hands and brushes soon follow, lingering over the texture of the woody roots. Slow brush-hand rhythms intertwine and overlap with those of the fast feet, both alongside the tree’s own silent time signature. The contrapuntal gestures of human and more-than-human movement gathers and disperses playful intensities. The woody roots appear as lines of force: directional, as if running away from their trunk, reaching out to cover the open ground, and calling the children and materials to follow. The children’s voices episodically punctuate the apparent silence of their tactile, dialogic responses to the roots and soil: “Here, I found another dinosaur bone!” “This one for sure; this one is a dinosaur bone!”
Story?, this encounter asks. What does it mean to story? What counts as a story? How is story created? Where does story live and grow? Is story always pre-planned or only recognizable when it adheres to a particular formula? Is story only composed in the solitary mind and transposed through the hand and mouth? Who stories? Is it just humans or do the more-than-human also weave narrative? Questions one might ask and be asked in relation to story are seemingly endless, highlighting its centrality throughout history.
Recognizing the importance story holds for humanity and the need to learn to understand its meanings and cultivate its telling, attention to story is found in school curricula worldwide. In our home country (Canada), story and learning to story are integral elements of English Language Arts programs. Here, education is provincially regulated and curricular documents vary across the provinces and territories; however, all of these curricular materials adhere to the singular idea that children in their early years of schooling must learn to identify the beginning, middle and end of a story when they read, and to establish chronological order when they write. In this article, our intention is to query the deep entrenchment of this practice in early years literacy pedagogy.
The teaching of these three temporal elements – i.e., beginning-middle-end writing pedagogies – leans on the Western phenomenological understanding of narratology, where narratives in literary works follow what Ricoeur (1990) names the logic or order of action. In the logic of action, events and hazards are brought together to form a plot – that is, a set of events that move the story towards its outcome. For Ricoeur, cohesive stories advance through the laying out of a series of events that move towards the emergence of a problem, followed by a chain of new events that resolve the apparent problem.
Numerous ways to achieve a sense of cohesion through narrative structure have been observed, described, and offered as templates of sorts for narrative writing – for example, Three-Act structure with its elements of set-up, confrontation, and resolution; Seven-Point structure, comprised of a hook, set-up, catalyst, debate, break-up, confrontation, and resolution; or the classic Five-Act structure, with its inclusion of introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution (Booker, 2004). While offering support for one form of writing, when used extensively in the writing classroom, such conventional narrative configurations engage teachers in a pedagogical quest that objectifies and rationalizes the ways stories “should” be made – that is, they fossilize a notion that good stories are object or goal-oriented and always follow a particular linear trajectory. This practice also ignores the way epistemological traditions outside of Western ways of knowing, being, and doing understand story. As Ursula Le Guin (2007), has written, the idea of a story with a beginning, middle and end “splendidly describes a great many stories from the European narrative tradition, but it doesn’t describe all stories. It’s a recipe for steak, it’s not a recipe for tamales” (n. p). It is one form of story. And there are others, each with enriching potentials for children’s literate lives and for pedagogies seeking to more expansively connect with children’s narrative processes and relationships.
Over 2 years of sitting with two different classes of children in Mme. Howard’s play-based, first-grade classroom as they engaged in outdoor play one afternoon a week, we have watched their movements, listened to their utterances, followed the ways their storied play forms, accumulates, shifts, and re-accumulates over time. As suggested in the data story opening this article, we have come to see a sophistication in their collective play that challenges a commonly held notion that there is something so juvenile, haphazard, and unformed in their early storying that it needs to be fully supplanted by a higher order of thinking and planning: a well-reasoned (rational), goal-oriented (objective) story with discernable beginning, middle, and end.
Indeed, whether written into official curricula or simply held as a common view, it has been our collective experience, as three early years educators and literacy researchers over the last 40 years, that teachers of young children overwhelmingly view the temporal story structure of beginning-middle-end as the simplest and most necessary foundational frame for children to grasp as they learn to compose fiction in classroom settings. These views are reinforced in instructional resources that focus pedagogical attention on helping students formulate stories this way (e.g., Gear, 2020; Kozdras, nd). They are further amplified by contemporary confidences in the “Science of Reading” and its disproportionate prioritization of text features and structures (Hoffman et al., 2021; Whittingham et al., 2024). In this context, what then are we to make of the kind of storying unfolding in the example above? For us, the response has been: take it seriously and consider its implications. With this in mind, we are positioned to ask: how might early years writing pedagogy move with such emergent forms of embodied storying?
To accomplish the desired shift, we think-with (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) the ideas of Francophone scholar and literary theorist, Marielle Macé. Macé’s research resonates with our posthuman, sociomaterial approaches to understanding, as it leans on disrupting Cartesian divisions such as mind/body, subject/object, and life/story as associated with reading, writing and making meaning of narratives. For Macé, “Literature does not stand on one side, and life on the other” (Macé and Jones, 2013: p. 2). In other words, stories do not only follow a mechanical and logical process to become identifiable, separate objects from the world that an audience can grasp. Stories also follow and are made of streams of affects and encounters in relationship with the materiality of the more-than-human world, which in turn shape stories’ meanings, cohesiveness, and sense of time.
Children’s storied play, or in other words, their fictive world-building, has much to teach us with regard to understanding story and how story pedagogy might be otherwise shaped in curricular spaces. In this article, we draw on interconnected and entangled moments of children’s outdoor storied play in the first-grade classroom, bringing them into conversation with the concept of narrative stylization (Macé, 2013). In so doing we attune to the ways story lives and grows within children’s fictive and playful worldbuilding.
Guided by our observations in Mme. Howard’s classroom over a period of 6 months in the second year of our study – by what the children in that class have shown us – our intention in this article is to think otherwise about how story composition might be approached in the early years of school. We will argue that limiting instructional methods to that which is centred around the objectification and rationalization of storying can displace other pedagogical directions that recognize and attend to the subjective aspects from which stories are made, learned, and understood. Critically considering the logic of action narrative convention (Ricoeur, 1990) allows us to pay attention to children’s astonishing and often dismissed ways of storying with time and with/in open-ended play – modes of storying relegated to the margins of curriculum once children reach the first grade.
By mapping the children’s movements within three storied-play encounters, we hope to animate how that which could appear as the most ordinary and mundane ways of composing story through outdoor, open-ended and make-believe play, offers a lively form of protestation to the predominant Western narrative paradigm. As we elaborate further on, through their open-ended play, with its embodied precarity and fluidity of event, the children in this study convincingly disrupt the idea that story cohesiveness comes only through an objective and rational logic of action (Ricoeur, 1990).
In what follows, we present a theoretical framework that considers story and storying as primary modes of thinking and learning. Then, following an explanation of our methodology, we share three linked data stories of children’s playful, storied encounters that serve to challenge our gaze as literacy educators and researchers, and shift us into thinking otherwise about what we are seeing in children’s play. Finally, we explore ways that encounters such as these might pedagogically open up what has come to be a narrow and potentially stifling approach to schooled storying pedagogy and to make room for open-ended play as an emergent form of storying.
Storying story
In its most basic form, story has been described as a structured sequence of mental imagery through which humans express “almost everything which happens in our lives” (Booker, 2004: p.2). While it is helpful to begin with a shared understanding such as this, in this article, as we move away from notions of story that seek to delineate it as that which meets particular criteria, such as Ricoeur’s criteria for cohesion (outlined above), we do not seek to elaborate on what constitutes story, what a story is. Rather, aligning with our posthuman theoretical sensibilities, we ask, “What can story do?” To accomplish this, we turn to looking at the many functions of story and the way it is understood through the expertise of different knowledge systems and theoretical orientations.
Story’s functions
Since time immemorial, humans have utilized story for a multitude of purposes: to record, remember, make sense of, and share aspects of living, to articulate and build a sense of collective and individual identity, to convey knowledge, to build empathy and perspective, or to inspire action. Western conceptualizations of story have tended toward understanding its primary functions as entertainment and/or behavioural guidance (Archibald, 2008; Booker, 2004). However, other ways of understanding story exist outside of this tradition. For example, in addition to its instructive elements, Indigenous cultures have long noted and put to use story’s powerful explanatory function (Archibald, 2008; Cajete, 2017; Maracle, 1994).
As Tewa author and scholar Gregory Cajete (2017) explains, “story is the way humans context information and experience to make it meaningful” (p. 115) and “listening to stories is a way to know how things have come into being and how they are related to everything in the world – plants, animals, places, the stars, and we as human beings” (p. 114). In other words, to story is to theorize. Elaborating on this, author Lee Maracle (1994) of the Sto:lo nation states that story is “the most persuasive and sensible way to present the accumulated thoughts and values of a people (p. 1). Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson (2014) notes story’s many functions within individual and collective consciousness, as it communicates interpretations of worldviews, carries out critical social interventions, and reproduces learning networks. Learning from these Indigenous thinkers, we see that in its many conceptualizations and functions, story opens generative pathways along which storymakers, storytellers, and story listeners might enact and explore individual and collective ways of knowing, doing, and being.
Angus Fletcher, a professor of story science (with a scholarly background in neuroscience and literature), also provides some helpful thinking related to story’s explanatory and exploratory role. He makes the case for understanding its main function as creative action.
Fletcher’s (2023) neuroscientific approach to narrative examines how and why our brains think in story. He observes that, in Western tradition, story has been understood as a means for communicating ideas and not a mode for producing them. In contrast to this traditional or conventional understanding of story, Fletcher argues that story isn’t just for telling, it has a far more fundamental role: story is for thinking. He coins the term storythinking to identify this function. Thinking pedagogically with the concept of storythinking, Fletcher argues that in order to enhance our potential for storythinking, we need to think less about an ideal product (e.g., one eternal, universal story structure) but instead seek an enhanced narrative process.
Taken together, Indigenous understandings of story, Fletcher’s storythinking, and Macé’s idea of narrative as that which is made of streams of affect and encounter with the material world, we might then see story’s function in children’s lives as an emergent means for making sense of the world, as well as a mode of exploration in relation to life’s movements. In bringing these functions together, the matter of childhood learning to story takes on added importance.
If storying provides a way to make sense of the world, and to creatively respond to it, do we want to communicate to children that there is but one acceptable way to story? Do we want to potentially limit their capacity for thinking through story, for creative action, with early seeding of a notion that the one proper mode for storying is that which always follows a rational logic of beginning-middle-end? Seeing these as more than rhetorical questions and with a view of storying as a worldbuilding process that more closely approximates the emergent unfolding of life, we next explore Macé’s ideas regarding narrative in more depth.
Storying otherwise through narrative stylization
Macé (2011a) provides a theoretical perspective that suggests there is no singular way to create stories, but instead a plurality of ways for inventing and participating with/in them. This plurality offers an unprecedented promise of enlarging our approaches to teaching storytelling. Furthermore, akin to the time-honoured direction of Indigenous storytellers worldwide (e.g., Archibald, 2008; Cajete, 2017; King, 2003; Maracle, 1994), Macé’s (2011b, 2020) this conceptualization provides an approach to story creation in which the lived experiences between the human and more-than-human are entangled in a fictional network. In this regard, Macé conceptualizes literary work and storying, not as a solely human practice – isolated and disembodied – that announce a world; but rather, as creative literary doing – material practices – that emerge from worlds living and operating alongside and in cooperation with the human world.
Macé (2013) suggests mobilizing an alternative to the current predominant narrative paradigm with its tendency to objectify and rationalize the ways we tell and learn how to tell stories. She calls this alternative, the stylization of entangled material-fictional worlds. In the creation of meaningful stories, stylization gives form to what we sense through a process of subjectification in which humans make sense of themselves and their worlds through their material and social relations. The modalities of this stylization process include: rhythm, attention to heterogenous forms, and assemblage of affects. While these modes work in close conjunction with each other and are, in practice, inseparable, here we tease them apart to further explicate Macé’s concept of narrative stylization.
Rhythm
Macé conceptualizes rhythm as not necessarily a matter of tempo, but rather as contingent movement: a gestural mode that takes shape in response to environmental conditions, and individual and collective intentions; a passing form, always in the process of doing and becoming, a way of making life and stories flow.
A child walking to her neighborhood school provides a helpful example of rhythm as a mode. At a steady pace, it is a 10-min walk but her accompanying parent knows from past experience that more time will be required. The child walks at a fast, energetic pace at times, but her stride also slows when she carefully places her steps like a tightrope walker on the edge of the sidewalk, or when she stops for a moment on the projected shadow of the parent behind her, suddenly jumps on the ventral part of this shadow, and then with a burst of momentum, leaves the shadow behind and resumes her steady pace in the direction of the school. As the contrapuntal rhythm of their walk unfolds, some movements are purposeful, others improvisationally contingent; all are potential contributors to fictive world-building.
Attention to heterogeneous forms
This mode refers to an attunement that takes place in the in-between – that is, attention that arises with/in the coming together of entities. Macé frames attention to heterogeneous forms as an embodied attentiveness that recognizes and appreciates uniqueness of form, and senses through touch, listening and observation. Rather than assigning a particular meaning or definition to a more-than-human entity, attention to heterogeneous forms specifically holds that meaning is co-created through encounter between entities.
For example, the child who jumps on the ventral part of the projected human shadow, begins to distinguish the other parts of her mother’s shadow; she moves with it, trying not to leave its contours, and mimics in detail the movements of the walking shadow. A playful scene between the young child and the shadow unfolds over a short time, where the child appreciates and moves with the unpredictable and shifting form of the moving shadow. The scene is then disrupted when the child’s attention is drawn to the suddenly numerous cracks in the sidewalk and memories of her perennial crack-avoiding game temporarily propel her into a new form of movement before returning her attention to the shadow. At times, fragments of story are co-created with the shadow, and at times with the sidewalk cracks as the child attends to heterogenous forms in her storied walk.
Assemblage of affects
This mode relates to the notion that life is lived within relational assemblages. Through assemblage, entities continually come to be, to do, and to know – being and knowing are mutually entangled as entities come into association with each other (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). These associations produce affect, a form of embodied knowing, a visceral intensity that informs immediate, practical actions (e.g., Massumi, 2015; Stewart, 2007). Macé’s assemblage of affects emphasizes the idea that it is the affect produced with/in those associations that forms the substance and liveliness of story. Together, rhythm and assemblage of affect are what give story movement and vitality.
Continuing with our example, the walking-dancing-jumping bodies and blurry contours of the unpredictable shadow are accompanied by the morning sun. The sun warms the backs of the child and her mother. Together, the sun, shadow, child, and adult stoke a morning energy and feeling of renewal following a long winter. Simultaneously, the mother checks the time and with a sudden sense of embodied urgency, wonders if it is time to exit the storied world they have been building and inhabiting together in the interest of getting to school on time.
Together, the three modes of stylization – rhythm, attention to forms, and assemblage of affect – engender a dynamic that acts with/in our ways of perceiving the world, and this interplay can, in turn, allow decisive transition from generic action to particular ways of storying or stylizing our worlds. This is not to say that all generic action results in identifiable story (Macé and Jones, 2013), or that in the doing, all play is recognizable as story. Rather, the point is that they hold the potential for doing so and thus should not be dismissed as haphazard or immature. The modes, gathered together in the dynamic of stylization, act by giving a unique form to what we are calling fiction-in-the-doing: storying that is entangled with the sensuous and material world.
In our example, child, parent, planned-for destination and unplanned-for ways of quickly-slowly getting there, sidewalks, sunshine, and shadow all assemble, affect, and attend to one another in emergent rhythms, rippling outward, possibly filling onlooking passersby with light-hearted cheer. Some aspects of their storying may come to be spoken aloud and others may remain unvoiced, communicated through relational and responsive movement. Fragments of the rhythms, heterogenous forms, and assembled affects in their play may later become recognizable or identifiable as elements of story – perhaps through repetition on a future walk, rehearsal that evening during dinner or bedtime chat, or recording in the child’s school journal.
Narrative stylization can be understood as another way of giving form to fiction-in-the-doing, by allowing rhythms, attention to forms, and assemblage of affects, at times moving in concert and at times discordantly, to find their own articulations.
Considering the provenances of narrative stylization for the creation of fiction that relates to and draws on the precariousness of events and their rhythms can provide interesting and helpful disruptions to the dominance of the logic of action framework (Ricoeur, 1990) with its prescribed and manufactured cadence. We explore these possibilities in this article with the caveat that in so doing, we are not suggesting that the teaching of storying through the logic of action (beginning-middle-end pedagogy) and the teaching of storying through playful stylization are mutually exclusive. Once recognized and given space in early years story pedagogy, narrative stylization provides both an alternate avenue to fictional story creation and also a potential enrichment to the logic of action framework.
In the section that follows, we offer an explication of our theoretical positioning. We will then turn to our data stories and put Macé’s concepts to work in an exploration of our first-grade children’s storying.
Assembling the research
In this work, we (three literacy researchers) think with a posthuman understanding of assemblage, which maintains that lifeworlds are composed of human and more-than-human entities continually moving into and out-of relation with each other. When joining an assemblage, such as the first-grade classroom in this study, we understand ourselves to be entering a milieu already in progress. Accordingly, with our observations with this particular group of children, we joined an assemblage of multiple ongoing and entangled histories, happenings, and trajectories.
Posthumanism has at its heart an ethic of listening to and being guided by the minor (Braidotti, 2019; Davies, 2014; Manning, 2016). In our case, intentionally attuning to the movements, words, and affective intensities of young children and the more-than-human – i.e., those often considered to be minor in Western societies – with whom they explore and story guides our work. In this article, as we consider what might happen otherwise in children’s story pedagogies, we take up posthumanism’s injunction to move beyond engaging in critique for the sake of critique (Braidotti, 2019; Latour, 2004); instead, working toward a “creative actualization of the virtual” (Braidotti, 2019), an ethos of invention, and speculative creativity (Haraway, 2016). In other words, in addition to critiquing the dominance of a particular story structure pedagogy (beginning-middle-end) because of its tendency to exclude other ways forms and functions of storying, our work – prompted by the storying we witnessed – takes up the matter of how story pedagogy might be enhanced in inventive and creative ways by recognizing and working with children’s narrative stylization (Mace, 2013) or fiction-in-the-doing.
Bringing these two ideas together, we understand young children and their earth-other companions – all minoritarian subjects (Braidotti, 2019) – as having a capacity to carry out alternative modes of relating and becoming-with – ways of being and doing that break up patterns that typically segregate. In the case of this article, the points of segregation decomposed by the children, soil, roots, and wind are two-fold. First, their movements challenge the educational trope that there is one right way for children to learn to story; that is, a story articulated via a beginning-middle-end linearity and composed in a pre-specified unit of time. Second, the children compose alternative ways of becoming-with-fellow-minoritarian subjects, such as soil, mud, trees and roots in their storied play. In this way, as they join the ongoingness of the world (Haraway, 2016) the children demonstrate an ethic of care produced by storying-with rather than storying about.
A year and a half before our observations began, the teacher in our study’s classroom, Mme. Howard, had made a pedagogical commitment to explore the potential of extended time for play-based learning in her first-grade classroom. To this end, she set up the daily schedule so that the children in her class began their day with a half-hour of guided, materials-based play associated with math and literacy, and then engaged in self-guided play every afternoon (see Hanzel (2024) for more on this). One afternoon of each week, Fall, Winter, and Spring, the afternoon play took place outdoors in the school yard. Mme. Howard provided materials with which to explore the play space – e.g., buckets, bowls, trowels, sieves, skillets, chalk, paintbrushes, biodegradeable paint – all bundled together for trundling out of the school in the classroom’s two “wonder wagons.” Beyond this provision of materials, Mme. Howard did little to direct the play. However, without exception, the majority of her students knew exactly what they wanted to do with this time prior to heading out of doors (see Mosher and Lenters (2024) for a full rendering of this play space and philosophy).
In what follows, we provide our findings in the form of three data stories, informed by our close observations, field notes, photographs, and conversations with seven children and their teacher, accompanied by more general observations and field notes documenting movements of the class as a whole. By following the movements of the children in their human and more-than-human assemblages, we engaged in a research process of nomadic mapping (Braidotti, 2019; Latour, 2005). That is, following what the children, paintbrushes, soil, and roots were doing with each other in their play across time and space. In keeping with the methodological ideals set out by Bruno Latour (2005), as we engaged in this mapping, we did our best to hold back on deciding on what was happening in advance of our analysis but rather plotted the movements of the human and more-than-human actors and then looked for the hotspots (MacLure, 2013), the moments of intensity, the times and places where something seemed to be happening, even if it was a something for which we did not immediately have words. As we pondered these moments, we came to see ways in which these happenings resonated with the ideas of Macé. Bringing these lively moments into conversation with Macé’s ideas, that is thinking with theory (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012), produced the three data stories and the reflections that follow each of them. From there we asked ourselves, what does all of this mean? And it is those wonderings that constitute the latter section of this article.
Rooting and grounding narrative stylization
Stylizing with/in contrapuntal rhythms
In the first of three linked data stories, we return to the four boys with whom we opened the article. Sheltered by a large pine tree and its soft but irregular branches, four first-grade boys, rising and squatting, paintbrushes in hand, bustle about. It is late morning, mid-February, in a Western Canadian schoolyard. The sun is moving towards its peak, while the cold ground, coming into contact with the warming air, crackles in response. Close to the muddy ground, the four children, bundled in layers of winter clothing, are silently absorbed in what is at play under their feet, until one of them breaks the apparent silence and calls out to Mme. Howard, “We found dinosaur bones!”
So begins the storied and storying encounter we shared earlier. We will not fully repeat it here, but do draw attention to it again for its gestural propositions, intertwining, overlapping rhythms, and for its lively narrative world-making, and the ways the students’ bodies, reassembled as brush-hands and feet-ground players, moved with the grain of the roots and the ground that held them. “Here, I found another dinosaur bone!” “This one for sure; this one is a dinosaur bone!”
In the children’s storying with the woody-bones, visible-audible occurrences of children’s steps, brushing roots, strips of woody roots in-discovery, sighs, silences and exclamatory voices are engaged in a process of becoming – continually moving forward in concert with each other. In this human and other-than-human body-matter-story assemblage, propositions arise and present anew, over and over again (see Figure 1). More precisely, in these series of gestures, the visible, repetitive coalition of children’s bodies with brushes, soil, and the woody-roots, together participate in the formation of what becomes a contrapuntal rhythm. After a while, before a single word is even pronounced, this polyphonic rhythm sets in, acting in the background as a force that comes to stabilize the ways in which the fictional beings together enter into story and fictional world-making. Dinosaur bones and archeologists’ tools.
The children’s brush-hands fully participate in the fictionalization of the place in this assemblage, following the trajectory of the already-there, stylistic, animated textures, colours, shapes, and arrangements of the woody-roots. Ensconced with/in this earthy and woody milieu, the children’s brush-hands move in accordance with that which the roots suggest as next directions. It is in this relationally textured assemblage of affect that the children and the roots physically, audibly, and collaboratively build a storied world. The sudden proclamation, “Here, I found another dinosaur bone!” alerts us to the role they have assigned to the roots. The exclamation and declaration disrupts the precarious contrapuntal rhythm in which the children, the roots and the brushes operate, and at the same time opens the story towards a new form of rhythmic stability. While these same woody-roots seem to hold the framework of a silent story of their own, the children, intent on their stylization of the roots, repeat: “Here, I found another dinosaur bone!” “This one for sure; this one is a dinosaur bone!”
Stylizing via attention to heterogeneous forms
In this second data story, we take a small step back in time: Earlier that morning, before being called into the boys’ woody-bones story, a girl stands upright with a slight forward lean, under a tangled network of shrubbery branches, apart from her classmates. Using a hand trowel, she digs and peers into a root-filled hole in the ground. In a quiet voice she says, “There might be dinosaur bones somewhere in here.” She stops digging: silently pausing. Then, with her shovel-hand, rather than returning to digging, she covers the protruding roots with mud. “Mud is good for trees,” she says. “Ice was there first and then there was dirt on it – that’s how it became mud. But first there was water: first, before the ice.” A half-hour later, the girl, brush in one hand, enters the dinosaur bones site, sits and joins the boys in their root-brushing. One of them firmly rejects this perceived incursion. Sitting tall on his knees, open chest thrust towards the girl, he shouts, “Only boys can be archeologists!” The other boys gather within their friend’s refusal to see a girl usurping their roles. One echoes in a quieter, but equally defiant proclamation, “Girls can’t look for bones.” Dropping her brush but otherwise holding her ground, the girl stares at the group and says in a calm but assertive voice, “Girls can look for bones. I know where they are. I'm really a scientist, not pretending. I’m a real scientist.” (See Figure 2) A scientist enters the archeological site.
We enter this data story with the girl playing under the shrubbery branches, following the ways her close attention unfolds and lovingly engages with her storied place. Through a prolonged and repetitive series of gestures, her body settles into a sensitive mode of relationship with the roots. She digs, peers and pauses: “There must be dinosaur bones somewhere in here.” This musing plunges us into a plot and a fictional world not ordered from a fabricated beginning but woven together with a singular, embodied attention to the successive and multiple appearances and human stylization of the lively roots. The fictional world even appears to take shape here, from a sudden disruption of the young girl’s series of gestures as she moves from uncovering the roots, appreciating their uniqueness of form, and then re-covering them with mud.
The discordance between seemingly oppositional gestures (uncovering and re-covering), which nonetheless always remain in association with the protruding roots, stories the subjectivity the girl assigns to the roots, stylizing them, not as dinosaur bones but as living roots. This chosen stylization weaves the very fabric of becoming for another story: roots that benefit from human and more-than-human care. Indeed, the vegetal and mineral creatures, including the water and the ice, take their part in the story-played, as these creatures, disposed to action, make this story take a turn. Caught up in the doings of this storied place, the girl’s emergent storying tells of the creatures' interactions: water and dirt make mud; mud is good for the trees; the water was first, but then it became ice. With this storythinking, as she becomes real-scientist, she describes her encounters with entities that are also becoming a storied ecosystem of tangled shrub, root-filled hole, shifting soil, and nurturing water-ice in her fictive world-building.
When the young scientist and the archaeologists meet, a conflict arises. The animated textures, shapes, colours, and directional lines of the woody-roots-dinosaur-bones participate in storied worldbuilding through the evocative forces of divergent values, goals, and renderings that find their ways through affects embodied by the young girl scientist and the young boy archaeologists. The coming together of two fictions in this complex assemblage of affects, draws our attention to the woody roots and the dinosaur bones, as well as to the ways in which the scientist and archaeologists maintain their entangled relationships to the human and more-than-human characters they have stylized in their fictive world.
Furthermore, as these conjoined stories take shape, they generate a fictional world where there is room for very real, embodied affects, values and categorizations, and attention to creatures (modes of attention to heterogenous forms) – making space for the concordances and discordances that form an inhabited world.
Rhythmic intensities and heterogenous forms in an assemblage of affects
Exposed under a bright, piercing sun, all the first-grade students sit on rocks arranged in a circle, gathered for their outdoor learning meeting. It is late May, and 3 months have passed since the wood-roots-dinosaur-bones storying emerged. The soil is now drought-level dry and the wind whips the dusty soil into the air. On a table next to the rock circle that serves as the class meeting point, brushes, paints, chalk, pots, and a large jar of water have been neatly set out. While most of the children impatiently make their way towards the nearby tables, three children smoothly slide from the top of the rocks to the ground. The real-scientist-girl and two boys, following their slide, now sit with their backs against the rocks. As they begin to rub crumbly lumps of soil with hands, legs and feet, the scratching sounds of their movement mingles with the sighing of the wind. They remain there for a moment, seemingly contemplating their role in raising the now swirling dust. Time slows down on this west side of the rock circle. Meanwhile, it speeds up on the east, as everyone else bustles about. The sonic and material space around the wind-children-dust-swirling is filled with children’s voices, bodies and voices weaving in and out of the rocks as they cook and scavenge for utensils on the tables, diverting arts tools from their original purpose. These out and about children are fast, almost frenetic in their storied play: “I’m making hot sand, so I can cook;” “I’m trying to build a recipe;” “I’m burying berries with sticks;” “I found something to smash the berries!” The scientist-girl, still sitting on the ground and rubbing the dusty soil-lumps with her hands, climbs out of her reverie. Joining her voice with the boisterous vocal stream around her, she proclaims, “I found something, I found, like, a rock-sand.” The two contemplative boys engage with her story: “Oh, those must be dinosaur bones!” Scientist-girl: “I think it is probably huge; we have to gently brush it.” One of the boys: “I found a brain. I found a tooth. It shows that the dinosaur is a carnivore, but he eats veggies?!” Attuned to the rock-sands, their multiple forms and expanses, the scientist-girl continues, “That can’t be a human skeleton; it’s bigger than a human skeleton.” Tracing the distance from the white-capped peaks of the mountain range visible in the distance, to the rock-circle-archeological-site with an airborne finger, she adds, “It goes down the mountains, all the way down to here.” Then holding up a pebble, she interjects, “Hey, I found another tooth, I think it’s a molar.” She then turns to the researcher taking notes nearby and playfully quips, “I think you’re sitting on its tail!” Becoming more serious, she continues, “I think we have the whole body of the dinosaur and this is the neck. See?” Turning towards the other boys, she says, “Guys we are sitting on the body, I am sure. I am sitting on the head!” As their collective encounter with the rock-sand sonically amplifies in intensity, curious classmates enter the rock circle to see what is happening. The scientist-girl explains, “We found a mammoth tooth but we’re thinking it’s a T-Rex. We don’t know, maybe it’s a mammoth, not a T-Rex.” Mme. Howard calls out to signal the end of outdoor learning time and the girl tentatively adds, “It is a mammoth, right?”
This last data story fully expresses the richness and subjectivity of children`s fictive stylization. Indeed, in this vignette, a combination of rhythmic intensities – the slowing down on the west side of the rock and the speeding up on the east – comes into view. Simultaneously, attunement to heterogenous forms in the deep, pausing observations of the soil works in concert with the rhythms of wind-swirled dust and the frenetic attention to pretend-berry cooking (see Figures 3 and 4). Contemplative excavations amid a flurry of activity. Prehistoric teeth.
These swirling and entangled human and more-than-human rhythms and attentions make the story flow – a flow that is unique to this moment and place, yet connected to past storied worlds the children have collectively built. Their fictions are seemingly irrational, even contradictory, as the slow and fast movements, the spinning dust, and their respective intensities appear incommensurable on the surface. Yet these movements come to find ways of living side-by-side in the stylized archeological site and beyond. The human and more-than-human polyphonic rhythms and heterogenous forms all play a role in the complex streams of affect in which the scientist girl and the two boys are playfully spinning the story of their dinosaur discovery. When the girl trades quips with the researcher and the children muse amongst themselves about whether or not they are sitting on a dinosaur or a mammoth, they seem to be intuitively, or perhaps even consciously, picking up on and moving forward the overall wobbly, playful, embodied rhythm of their storying.
The children’s attention to heterogeneous forms, played out and revealed in this dinosaur-mammoth fiction, entangle with the embodied rhythms and relationships of human and more-than-human in this affect-laden archeological site to produce a sophisticated form of storying. The children’s understated, humourous wonderings of whether they were in the presence of a dinosaur or a mammoth connotes an elegance that draws on the depths of the materiality of the schoolyard, the rock-sand, the pebbles, the hardness of the soil and its crumbly forms. As they ground (pun acknowledged but not intended!) and provide depth to the archeological site, these elements act to orient the fiction itself and the becoming of the child scientists.
Discussion
Through Macé’s literary concept of narrative stylization, our intention has been to animate how what might be seen as disconnected, disorganized, or random storied play could be seen otherwise: as the evolution of emergent, relational story thinking that may, over time, produce temporally cohesive, recognizable story. While not wanting to suggest that all play will, or even should, display elements of identifiable story, or that story is only a story when recognized by adults, our hope is that in this thinking with (literary) theory (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012), what has become apparent in the children’s storied play is a form of sophisticated storying. Throughout the three data stories, rhythms, attention to heterogenous forms, and assemblage of affects were modes involved in the stylization of the children’s playful fictions. Through their open-ended play, with its embodied precarity and fluidity of event, the children invented snippets of seemingly oxymoronic factual fiction that came together over time to convey story and to disrupt the idea that story cohesiveness comes only through an objective and rational logic of action (Ricoeur, 1990).
Considering the provenances of stylization for the creation of fiction that relates to and draws on the precariousness of events and their rhythms can provide interesting and helpful disruptions to the logic of action framework with its prescribed and manufactured cadence that dominates classroom instruction. Moreover, we believe that narrative stylization can open up practical pedagogical avenues for educational and literary communities. Understood as another way of giving form to fiction-in-the-doing, narrative stylization gives voice to rhythms, attention to forms, and space for assemblage of affects – modes that at times move in concert with each other and at times discordantly, yet reflect children’s entangled living in and contributing to narrative worlds.
Young children’s ways of being and doing with/in the world are too often dismissed as minor, diminutive, not yet enough, and in need of adult intervention (see Davies, 2014; Murris, 2016; Thiel, 2020). As argued in this article, this orientation to childhood doesn’t just exist in larger, societal approaches to childhood but also exists in the ways fictional writing instruction is practiced with young children. Indeed, considering stylization of narratives can position educators to wonder what children’s stories are made of, what those stories do, what they engender, and how they do all of this; rather than simply asking what they are/if they are and where exactly their plots are going.
Holding these insights from our theoretical and empirical work at the fore, we further argue that children’s creation of fiction through embodied emergent, often improvisational storying – fiction-in-the doing – should be attended to and supported, rather than dismissed as mere child’s play. While we are not advocating for a new curricularized regime in relation to fiction-in-the-doing, we do see attending to it as a means for adding to typical classroom writing pedagogies. With this in mind, as we conclude this article, we extend an invitation to recognize, rather than dismiss what children are doing in the fictive world-building of their play and to consider alternatives for storying otherwise with them and the rhythms, streams of affect, and attention to the more-than-human they are already engaging. This invitation may be taken up in classrooms dedicated to providing regular, extended and ongoing opportunities for play, and in pedagogical situations where working in the gaps and marginal times, and with the fragments of children’s storied play are the best or only options.
Working with narrative stylization in the classroom
The following practice-oriented, actionable suggestions for the ways that Mace’s narrative stylization might be engaged in early years’ literacy learning not only invite classroom educators to the threshold of these ideas but also hold the door open for them. While they are by no means the only way to explore fiction-in-the-doing, our hope is that these suggestions provide helpful examples for what might otherwise feel like abstract theory.
Narrative stylization in classrooms with dedicated playtime
Extending the storied play.
Picturebook suggestions.
Have a regular meeting space for these discussions, perhaps opening the play time by eliciting children’s noticings of the sky, weather changes, soil, birds, insects, aromas, and sensations. Returning to that space at the close of play time for recountings, retellings, re-embodiments, and reflections is one option. And/or the post-play exchange could move indoors, into the classroom space where oral and embodied discussion might easily move to more representational modes through art materials, wall banners, or story journals.
The underlying aim within these ideas is to explore how, as classroom educators, we might expansively connect with children’s narrative processes and cultivate a collective understanding of storying that can spur further depth and plurality of composition.
In all of these suggestions and offerings we are keenly aware of the press of time educators and children experience in the primary grades of schooling. Next, we explore ways educators might build on what children and Macé’s literary theory have shown us.
In the marginal moments
Drawing on and working with the marginal moments might draw on children’s ordinary experiences when telling stories in their informal and playful moments by noticing and highlighting what might seem to be disorganized story’s fragments and finding ways to nourish these moments as a collective. Listening attentively outside and inside the usual formal learning schedule, the educator becomes a story keeper and a story weaver for the collective. Working in the margins might also involve seeking the snippets that arise in even the most mundane of collective experiences, such as the well-practiced daily circle time. Without a plan for where the discussion will go or a particular purpose, other than narrative stylization in mind, call upon the human and more-than-human characters with whom students are always and already inventing stories during their recess, lunch hour, on their way to and from school. By giving the children and the characters a voice, even in tightly scheduled, formalized learning situations, educators can mobilize children’s abilities to stylize their storied play, that is to compose with rhythms, affects and attention to heterogeneous forms. We suggest that this process does not need to remain solely in the hands of the teacher; it might also become one in which the children eventually transition to taking a leadership role.
Finding creative and collective ways of noticing, prolonging and continuing the child-more-than-human, informal and often fragmented, world-building storied play, in which children are always and already engaged, can add depth and important recognition of difference to writing instruction as children enter the formal years of schooling. Resisting the confident singularity of the presumed gold-star, to-be-strived-for logic of action story model (Ricoeur, 1990) with its defining beginning-middle-end structure, and entering into the tentative emergence of fiction-in-the-doing as an additional mode of storying may be an uneasy process, but it also may open pedagogical directions that recognize and extend the worldly and ongoing encounters from which children make, learn, and understand stories. And in that possibility, lies a gift of hope.
Footnotes
Ethical Approval
The University of Calgary Conjoint Faculties Research Ethics Board has approved this research study.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this project was made possible by the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada through an Insight Development Grant (#430-2020-00492) and the Canada Research Chairs program (CRC-2019-00210), as well as funding from the Alberta Advisory Committee for Educational Studies (AACES).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.