Transforming volcanos to buncanos in eventful dialogues: Children’s remembering-in-interaction

Publication date: Available online 16 July 2019Source: Thinking Skills and CreativityAuthor(s): Tina KullenbergAbstractMemory research has traditionally conceived of memory as an individual skill. Its inherent dialogicality has consequently been neglected and, moreover, little attention has been paid to its communicative functions in the educational practice. The aim of this case study is to explore the role of conversational remembering in preschool education. Using a dialogic lens in the spirit of Bakhtin, the research questions concern pedagogical premises for conversational remembering: how preschool children make sense of conversational remembering and how discursive frameworks might facilitate or restrict young students’ creative reasoning. The empirical case contains transcribed interviews and interaction data from three preschool children (aged 5-6-years old) and their instructing teacher, participating in an educational game about parts of the world. The children’s creative remembering did not merely reveal communicative functions of cognitive memories. They also displayed a sense-making discourse that vividly propelled peers’ reasoning into imaginary play worlds, conceptualised as a narrative play world discourse. This particular discourse contrasts the other key discourse at play: the institutional preschool discourse. Finally, I discuss the findings in relation to the issues of teacher roles and children’s agency in schooling. Allowing for students’ sali...

Source: Thinking Skills and Creativity - July 17, 2019 Category: Science Source Type: research