Fiona M. Collins

The Use of Traditional Storytelling in Education to the Learning of Literacy Skills

This paper focuses on the potential contribution of storytelling to education. It examines theoretical frameworks used to contextualise storytelling in formal education. The aim of the review was to identify a range of answers relating to the question: What does storytelling offer to the formal education of primary age children? Five major kinds of contributions, identified in the review of relevant literature, are discussed. They reflect the present state of knowledge about storytelling in education and the aspects which major theorists consider to be important. I have tried to explicate the links between the themes, and to discuss interrelated aspects of the use of storytelling in schools by educationists and storytellers. The first section begins by analysing the relationship of storytelling to other language and expressive arts: writing, talking, reading and drawing.The second section considers thinking and feeling, and the contribution of storytelling to the inner world of affect. The focus moves in ...

Building communities: Teachers researching literacy lives

In the light of wide recognition that the traffic between home and school is traditionally one-way, this article reports on a deliberately counter-cultural project that involved teachers in researching children’s everyday literacy practices and ‘funds of knowledge’ (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) over a year. Eighteen primary teachers from 10 schools in five local authorities in England were involved; this article focuses on two of the practitioners’ experiences. Drawing on a wide range of data, it is argued that the project challenged teachers’ perceptions and beliefs about children and families, prompting dispositional shifts and new understandings of difference and diversity. However, creating responsive curricula that connected to the lived social realities of the children represented a considerable professional challenge. The article highlights the affordances of collaborative research partnerships, and argues that considerable time, space and support is needed in order for teachers to appreciate and understand children’s and families’ funds of knowledge and blur the boundaries between home and school.

If I Had a Magic Wand I'd Magic Her out of the Book: The Rich Literacy Practices of Competent Early Readers.

This article explores the reading behaviours of 10 young competent nursery and reception children, The 10 children were selected from a group of 54 case study children involved in the national Bookstart evaluation study, Bookstart: Planting a Seed for Life (2005). This group of young readers, from different socioeconomic groups, were identified as reading in advance of their peers. The first part of this article explores the childrens attitudes to reading, their responses to selected texts and their understanding of early phonological and letter knowledge. Second, the article reports on the findings from interviews with the parents of these children in order to illuminate the home literacy events that shape these young childrens reading competences. This article is based on the larger scale national evaluation study of the Bookstart project, Bookstart: Planting a Seed for Life (2005). The evaluation was set up to explore the effectiveness of the Bookstart programme and the impact of early book giving on the first national cohort of Bookstart children as they entered school.

Expressing identity: the role of dialogue in teaching citizenship through art

Images and Identity (2008–2010, http://www.image-identity.eu/) was a Comenius funded project in which six European Union countries explored the cross-curricular links between Citizenship and Art Education with both primary and secondary age pupils. The aim of the project was to enhance and develop a sense of the pupils’ identity as European citizens using digital media as a means of expression and communication. As the project developed, it became evident that the role of talk and collaboration was a key element of supporting the pupils’ understanding of their European identity. This article explores that particular dimension in relation to the work carried out with two classes of culturally diverse 9 and 10 year olds in two inner-city primary schools in London, UK. As Zander argues, when working on an artistic production, a creative community is established whereby pupils develop a shared meaning through dialogue which in turn becomes an inherent part of the understanding of their own creative output. In this study, such a creative community was established and this supported the pupils’ emerging understanding of the EU and their own identity within it.

‘The right book to the right child at the right time’: Primary Teacher Knowledge of Children's Literature

It would seem to be axiomatic that primary teachers are experts in children’s literature and its potential for teaching, but such knowledge is far from consistent across the profession. The article analyses why this is so, offering an historical overview and discussion of how English education policy, over time, separated the teaching of reading from the reading of literature and the resulting impact on teachers’ knowledge and use of children’s texts in the primary classroom.

School Children's Visualisations of Europe.

‘Images & Identity’ was a two-year curriculum development project in which citizenship and art educators in the Czech Republic, England, Ireland, Germany, Malta and Portugal collaborated on the production of teacher education materials. The article begins with a critical analysis of educational policy for European citizenship and of the potential contribution visual art and citizenship education might make to understanding what it means to be European. The main body of the article reports on a small-scale survey of school childrens visual representations of Europe carried out in advance of the curriculum development. This survey elicited received, recreated and created representations. Whereas many were totemic symbols of European identity downloaded from the Internet, a surprising number were personal artworks in which children explored and developed their personal feelings and ideas. This article describes and analyses the images the children selected, remixed and/or created, focusing on the subject matter, metaphorical meanings and interpretative themes. Findings about their orientation to European citizen identity were that it was dominated by physical and social perceptions, and whilst largely positive, these perceptions varied according to nationality, ethnicity and age.