A playful orchestration in narrative expressions by toddlers—a contribution to the understanding of early literacy as event

ABSTRACT

This article describes literacy competence in the narratives of toddlers and investigates how they make use of different modalities, like gestures, sounds and physical actions. The body phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty serves as a theoretical frame for the researcher’s lens, which is an A/r/tographer’s lens applied in multimodal narrative analysis. In this article, emerging literacy is studied as event connected to toddlers’ playful storytelling. Using a micro-ethnographic narrative approach, the article paints a cultural portrait of children aged one to three years and their narrative expressions. The analysis is based on video recordings, observations and field notes collected in a kindergarten with 20 children as research participants. The examples, analyzed with the use of a multimodal matrix, reveal the meaning-making process in children’s narrative expressions. The multimodal expressions in the toddlers’ narratives are embodied and relational. The storytelling moments are literacy-as-event, because the moments are fluid, easily disturbed, but still reveal emergent narrative literacy. However, the child holds the key to each narrative expression. This is also a key to development of adults’ competence in acknowledging the narrative competence of the child.

KEYWORDS:

• Toddler
• narrative expression
• playful multimodal orchestration
• exploration
• literacy event

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article I take an a/r/tographer´s gaze, which means the intertwined perspectives of the artist (storyteller), researcher and teacher educator. (Irwin et al. 2018).