Abstract
As a genre of talk, narratives represent important building blocks in children’s learning in many fields. The purpose of the study presented in this article is to examine how teachers can encourage children’s learning about people’s beliefs through narrating. Narratives play an important part in children’s learning to understand other people and how they will act according to what they believe, think or know. This study is based on video observations of six children, 3 and 4 years old, and their spontaneous personal narratives told to teachers over a period of 8 months. The narrative analysis revealed that in most of the narratives the teachers were passive listeners or were concerned about the structure of events. The teachers seldom asked questions about the children’s mental state or disagreed with the child in ways that revealed their different beliefs. Suggestions about implications of this study are that early childhood teacher education should focus on talking with children about what they may think or believe concerning narrated events, and also reveal what they think and believe themselves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The term Kindergarten refers to the Norwegian Kindergarten (barnehage) for children from 1 to 6 years of age.
Ole did not pass the False Belief test (Perner et al. 1987), but Vera did.
References
Aukrust, V. G., & Snow, C. E. (1998). Narratives and explanations in Norwegian and American mealtime conversations. Language in Society, 27, 221–246.
Bloom, D. L., Katz, T., & Champion, L. (2003). Young children’s narratives and ideologies in classrooms. Reading and Writing Quarterly, 19, 205–223.
Borg, E., Kristiansen, I., & Backe-Hansen, E. (2008). Kvalitet og innhold i norske barnehager. En kunnskapsoversikt fra NOVA— Norsk institutt for forskning om oppvekst, velferd og aldring. Oslo: Rapport nr 6/08.
Bruner, J. (1983). Child’s talk. New York: Norton.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bruner, J. (1992). The narrative construction of reality. In B. Beilin (Ed.), Piaget’s theory: Prospects and possibilities (pp. 229–251). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bruner, J., & Feldman, C. (1996). Group narrative as a cultural context of autobiography. In D. Rubin (Ed.), Remembering our past: Studies in autobiographical memory (pp. 291–318). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Dickinson, D. K., & Caswell, L. (2007). Building support for early literacy in preschool classroom through in-service professional development: Effects of the Literacy Environment Enrichment Program (LEEP). Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 22, 243–260.
Gjems, L. (2006). What do children learn through narrating? A study of children’s learning through narrative practices. Oslo: University of Oslo.
Gulbrandsen, L., Johansson, J., & Nilsen, R. D. (2002). Forskning om barnehager. En kunnskapsstatus: Norges forskningsråd. Område for Kultur og samfunn.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1993). Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics and Education, 5, 93–116.
Hasan, R. (2002a). Semiotic mediation and mental development in pluralistic societies: Some implications for tomorrow’s schooling. In G. Wells & G. Claxton (Eds.), Learing for life in the 21st century: Socio-cultural perspectives on the future of education (pp. 112–127). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Hasan, R. (2002b). Ways of meaning, ways of learning: Code as an explanatory concept. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23(4), 537–548.
Heath, S. B. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language and society (Vol. II, pp. 49–76). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, E., Torrance, N., & Olson, D. R. (2001). Young children and the say/mean distinction: Verbatim and paraphrase recognition in narrative and nursery rhyme contexts. Child Language, 28, 531–543.
Lohmann, H., & Tomasello, M. (2003). The role of language in the development of false belief understanding: A training study. Child Development, 74(4), 1130–1144.
MacWhinney, B. (1991). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Mercer, N., Fernandez, M., Dawes, L., Wegerif, R., & Sams, C. (2003). Talk about texts at the computer: Using ICT to develop children’s oral and literate abilities. Reading Literacy and Language, 37(2), 81–89.
Nelson, K. (1989). Monologue as representation of real life experience. In K. Nelson (Ed.), Narratives from the crib (pp. 27–73). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nelson, K. (1996). Language in cognitive development. The emergence of the mediated mind. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Nelson, K. (2000). Narrative, time and the emergence of the encultured self. Culture and Psychology, 1 & 2, 183–196.
Nelson, K. (2003). Narrative self, myth and memory: Emergence of the cultural self. In R. Fivush & C. Haden (Eds.), Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self: Developmental and cultural perspectives (pp. 3–28). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Nelson, K. (2004). Language pathways into the community of minds. In J. Astington & J. Baird (Eds.), Why language matters for the theory of mind (pp. 26–50). New York: Oxford University Press.
Nelson, K., & Kessler Shaw, L. (2002). Developing a socially shared symbolic system. In J. Amsel & E. Byrnes (Eds.), Language, literacy and cognitive development (pp. 27–61). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Nelson, K., Plesa, D., Skwerer, S., Goldman, S., Henseler, N., Presler, S., et al. (2003). Entering a community of minds: An experimental approach to “theory of mind”. Human Development 1998, 46, 24–46.
Nicolopoulou, A. (1997). Children and narratives: Towards an interpretive and sociocultural approach. In M. Bamberg (Ed.), Narrative ability and human development (pp. 179–217). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ninio, A., & Snow, C. E. (1996). Pragmatic development. Boulder: Westview Press Inc.
Ochs, E., & Capps, L. (2001). Living narrative. Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Perner, J., Leekam, S. R., & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-years olds’ difficulty with false beliefs. The case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 125–137.
Shwe, H. I., & Markman, E. (1997). Young children’s appreciation of the mental impact of their communicative signals. Developmental Psychology, 33(4), 630–636.
Siraj-Blatchford, I., & Manni, L. (2008). Would you like to tidy up now? An analysis of adult questioning in the English Foundation Stage. Early Years, 28(1), 5–22.
Sterck, E. H. M., & Begeer, S. (2010). Theory of mind: Specialized capacity or emergent property? European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 7(1), 1–16.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Tænkning og sprog II. København: A. Diderichsen.
Wellman, H., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about the false belief. Child Development, 72(3), 655–684.
Wells, G. (2007). Semiotic mediation, dialogue and the construction of knowledge. Human Development, 50, 244–274.
Wells, G., & Araus, R. M. (2006). Dialogues in the classroom. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15(3), 379–428.
Wells, G., & Nassaji, H. (2000). What’s the use of triadic dialogue? An investigation of teacher-student interaction. Applied Linguistic, 21(3), 376–406.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gjems, L. Children’s Narrating as a Way of Learning About Other People’s Beliefs in Interaction with Teachers. Early Childhood Educ J 38, 271–278 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-010-0413-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-010-0413-1