I am delighted to share that my latest paper, co-authored with Professor Nóirín Hayes of Trinity College Dublin, has just been published in the Early Childhood Education Journal with Springer. The paper is titled Oral Storytelling and Emergent Critical Thinking in Early Childhood and is available open access.
The study grew out of my doctoral research and examines a question I have long believed deserves more attention:
can children as young as three engage in critical thinking, and if so, what conditions make that possible?
Over ten weeks, two preschool educators implemented structured oral storytelling sessions in their classrooms. Through careful analysis of children’s talk during those sessions, three interrelated elements emerged: reasoning, perspective-taking, and collaborative meaning-making. What struck me most was that these did not appear spontaneously. They were shaped by specific things educators did – the questions they asked, the thinking language they modelled, the pauses they allowed, and the way they re-voiced children’s ideas back to the group.
The resulting StoryThinking framework offers a practical, transferable model for any early childhood educator who wants to use everyday storytelling to support children’s developing thinking.
In a world where the ability to question, reason, and see beyond a single viewpoint has never mattered more, I believe this work makes the case that we cannot afford to wait until secondary school to start.
The full paper is available to read here.
