Man-Made Woman, Cremin Ciara Colin

Storytelling in Early Childhood is a captivating book which explores the multiple dimensions of storytelling and story acting and shows how they enrich language and literacy learning in the early years. Foregrounding the power of children's own stories in the early and primary years, it provides evidence that storytelling and story acting, a pedagogic approach first developed by Vivian Gussin Paley, affords rich opportunities to foster learning within a play-based and language-rich curriculum. The book explores a number of themes and topics, including:

• the role of imaginary play and its dynamic relationship to narrative;
• how socially situated symbolic actions enrich the emotional, cognitive and social development of children;
• how the interrelated practices of storytelling and dramatisation enhance language and literacy learning, and contribute to an inclusive classroom culture;
• the challenges practitioners face in aligning their understanding of child literacy and learning with a narrow, mandated curriculum which focuses on measurable outcomes.

Driven by an international approach and based on new empirical studies, this volume further advances the field, offering new theoretical and practical analyses of storytelling and story acting from complementary disciplinary perspectives.

This book is a potent and engaging read for anyone intrigued by Paley's storytelling and story acting curriculum, as well as those practitioners and students with a vested interest in early years literacy and language learning.

With contributions from Vivian Gussin Paley, Patricia 'Patsy' Cooper, Dorothy Faulkner, Natalia Kucirkova, Gillian Dowley McNamee and Ageliki Nicolopoulou.

• Nuanced understandings of how writer identities are shaped and formed;
• Insights into how classroom practice changes when teachers position themselves as writers alongside their students;
• New understandings of what this positioning means for students' identities as writers and writing pedagogy; and
• Illuminating case studies mapping young people's writing trajectories.

With an international team of contributors, the book offers a global perspective on this vital topic, and makes a new and strongly theorised contribution to the field. Viewing writer identity as fluid and multifaceted, this book is important reading for practising teachers, student teachers, educational researchers and practitioners currently undertaking postgraduate studies.

Contributors include: Teresa Cremin, Terry Locke, Sally Baker, Josephine Brady, Diane Collier, Nikolaj Elf, Ian Eyres, Theresa Lillis, Marilyn McKinney, Denise Morgan, Debra Myhill, Mary Ryan, Kristin Stang, Chris Street, Anne Whitney and Rebecca Woodard.