without a teacher present, although sometimes the teacher will have left an agenda for
the group to address.
Children’s novelists, poets and picture book artists are invited into schools, and may
engage in subsequent correspondence with their young readers. Book Weeks include
speakers, story-tellers and writers along with events for parents, sometimes presented
by the children themselves. Local bookshops, or the school’s own bookshop, provide
displays and a sales counter. Radio and TV programmes about books for children, which
have improved markedly in recent years, are also used.
The enthusiastic teacher may also subscribe to reviewing journals, or attend local
group meetings of like-minded teachers, to stay abreast of new titles and to share a
pleasure in children’s books. Cuts in funding and curriculum pressures have sometimes
sapped the energy of teachers. Nevertheless, a resilience sustained by the books
themselves and a concern to introduce them to students mean that much excellent work
continues.
Story-tellingFor many children, their first encounter with literature in school may not in fact be
through print or pictures, but through listening to stories. Advice on how to tell stories—
including how to take a printed text and turn it into a told story—has been remarkably
consistent throughout the century. Marie Shedlock’s classic The Art of Storytelling
(1915) is currently available in paperback and is used on story-telling courses in North
America.
In recent times, there have been exciting developments in this field. The National
Oracy Project argues (in Common Bonds (Howe and Johnson 1992)) that story-telling
should be an important feature of classroom practice for students right through to
school-leaving age. Professional story-tellers visit schools. There are training courses
and weekend gatherings where teachers learn that there need be no mystique about
becoming an effective classroom story-teller.
Telling has some qualities which set it apart from reading, though it is clearly facile to
regard one activity as superior to the other. Oral story-tellers have a special immediacy
available to them; they can ‘play’ their audiences, draw them into the tale through pace
and inflection, the use of the eyes, the hands, the posture of the body. Adults as well as
school students of all ages report a sense of community, of sharing gifts even, as they
hear stories together over a period of time. Teachers find their story-telling becomes a
particularly positive way of establishing bonds of trust and affection between themselves
and their classes.
There is a parallel here with the way in which early peoples used stories to bind their
communities together, to explain to themselves who they were, where they came from,
their relationships with each other and with their environments; similarly, cultural
minorities may preserve their identities through stories in the present day. Classes
which become a community of listeners move, by a short stride, to a community which
reads, writes and tells stories. One story leads to another—a story heard prompts a
recalled anecdote from a listener; teachers such as Betty Rosen in Britain (1988) and
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