In accountability cultures, early childhood educators often find it hard to make space for children's own stories. Storytelling in Early Childhood explores the multiple dimensions of storytelling and story acting and shows how they enrich language and literacy learning, to contribute to an inclusive classroom culture that embraces young children's diverse interests and learning needs. Foregrounding the power of children's own stories in the early years and primary classroom, it provides evidence that storytelling and story acting, a pedagogic approach first developed by Paley, affords rich opportunities to foster learning within a play-based and language rich curriculum.

Foreword Introduction 1. Laying the foundations: narrative and early learning 2. Paley's approach to storytelling and story-acting: research and practice 3. Promoting oral narrative skills in low-income pre-schoolers through storytelling and story acting 4. Apprentice story writers: exploring young children's print awareness and agency in early story authoring 5. Young children as storytellers: Collective meaning making and sociocultural transmission 6. Stories in interaction: creative collaborations in storytelling and story acting 7. Dramatic changes: learning in storytelling and story acting 8. Vivian Paley's 'pedagogy of meaning': helping Wild Things grow up to be garbage men 9. Equity and diversity through story: a multimodal perspective 10. Promoting democratic classroom communities through storytelling and story acting 11. Storytelling and story acting: rays of hope for the creative early years classroom Index

Teresa Cremin is Professor of Education (Literacy), The Open University, UK

Rosie Flewitt is Reader in Early Communication and Literacy, UCL Institute of Education, UK

Ben Mardell is Project Director at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA

Joan Swann is Emeritus Professor of English Language, The Open University, UK