Making Culture Visible: Telling Small Stories in Busy Classrooms

Classrooms are busy institutional settings in which conversational agendas are typically ordered by teachers due to the focus on curriculum content. Opportunities for extended storytelling, outside of focussed literacy times, may occur infrequently. This chapter investigates how children engage with each other and with curriculum concepts referred to as “culture”, through telling stories. The data are video recordings of young children (aged 4–5 years) telling stories during their everyday classroom activities. The data are drawn from a study on what intercultural competence “looks like” in the everyday interactions of preschool classrooms in inner-city Queensland, Australia. An ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis highlights three fragments where children tell something about themselves. As they tell stories about aspects of their lives outside the classroom, children make their “culture” visible to other children and co-construct a local peer culture. The implications of the study’s findings point to how classrooms can be conversational spaces where children practise and build culture in action. The children share aspects of their everyday lives that are sometimes tangentially aligned with curriculum, but always available as a resource for making cultural connections. The children themselves do not name these activities as culture, but their association to what is known about how culture is defined, shows that they are orienting to these aspects.