The Great Globe and All Who It Inherit (Narrative and Dialogue in Story-telling with Halliday, Vygotsky, and Shakespeare)

Every storyteller soon discovers the difference between putting a story inside children and trying to extract it with comprehension questions and putting children inside a story and having them act it out. Teachers may experience this as a difference in “difficulty”, or in the level of motivation and enthusiasm, or even in the engagement of creativity and imagination, and leave it at that. This book explores the divide more critically and analytically, finding symmetrical and even complementary problems and affordances with both approaches. First, we examine what teachers actually say and do in each approach, using the systemic-functional grammar of M. A. K. Halliday. Secondly, we explore the differences developmentally, using the cultural-historical psychology of L. S. Vygotsky. Thirdly, we explain the differences we find in texts by considering the history of genres from the fable through the plays of Shakespeare. “Inside” and “Outside” the story turn out to be two very different modes of experiencing—the one reflective and narrativizing and the other participatory and dialogic. These two modes of experience prove to be equally valuable, and even mutually necessary, but only in the long run—different approaches are necessary at different moments in the lesson, different points in development, and even different times in human history. In the final analysis, though, this distinction is meaningless to children and to their teachers unless it is of practical use. Each chapter employs only the most advanced technology ever developed for making sense of human experience, namely thinking and talking—though not necessarily in that order. So every story has a specific narrative to tell, a concrete set of dialogues to try, and above all a practicable time and a practical space for children, their teachers, and even their teachers’ teachers, to talk and to think.