Transforming volcanos to buncanos in eventful dialogues: Children’s remembering-in-interaction

The purpose of the study is to investigate the role of conversational memory in kindergarten teaching. The author wishes to provide a broadened understanding of the role memory plays in relation to teaching communication. The study will also investigate how children can learn through dialogue with their peers and the teacher’s role in orchestrating this. The research questions are: (1) How do kindergarten children create meaning using conversational memory? (2) How can discursive frameworks facilitate or limit young children’s creative thinking?

The findings of the study were divided into two overlapping topics. The first is children’s playful sensemaking. The second revolves around the children’s ability to retrieve facts from memory on demand.

Children’s creative use of memory showed both communicative functions of cognitive memories and a meaning-seeking discourse that led peers further into discourse about narrative play worlds. This is in contrast to the other relevant discourse in the game: the institutional kindergarten discourse. The children create meaning with the help of conversational memories. The discursive frameworks can both facilitate and limit children’s creative thinking. The kindergarten teacher eased up on the discursive frameworks that were part of the educational game, and thus made the learning situation less teacher-led and more controlled by the children. The original discursive frameworks limited children’s creativity and were therefore changed.

The data collection for the study consisted of video observation of a teacher-led educational game with 3 kindergarten children, and an interview with the kindergarten teacher. The interview did not follow an interview guide, but instead took the form of an investigative conversation with the kindergarten teacher. The respondents consist of a kindergarten teacher with 30 years of experience, and 3 children aged 5, 5 and 6 years old in the kindergarten where she worked.

Kullenberg T. (2019).  “Transforming volcanos to buncanos in eventful dialogues: Children’s remembering-in-interaction”. Thinking skills and Creativity, 33.