Vivian Paley and Storytelling

Fig. 1 Bren Slade 2019.

Vivian Gussin Paley is an expert on play and storytelling in the classroom.  She has a great ability "...to attend to what emerges in the spaces between academic activities." (Harvard 2011). She has authored dozens of books on the subject and received numerous awards.

 In A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, she writes, “There was a time when play was king and early childhood was its domain,” (Paley in American Journal of Play 2009).

Now she sees 'play' dying out, as preschools and kindergarten become more 'academic' based and the time for free play and imagination is eliminated, even discouraged.  We are basically robbing our children two or three years of spontaneous, imaginative play (American Journal of Play 2009).  If children use play and imagination to process their world, what is happening to their brain development during these key developmental years?

Fig. 2: Photo Luke age 7, co-edited with Bren Slade.  

Children often use storytelling outlets to process the world around them.  Their fact becomes woven into fiction and expressed through dramatic play.  THEN the record of that dramatic play is often expressed through their physical art creations AS imagery is child's first language. But both imaginative play and production of art are being dissolved and hidden away, stomped by the more pressured academia of reading, writing and math.  

Paley emphasizes that play is not just a hobby or frivolous means in which children waste time- but a very serious and complicated occupation requiring dialogue, social engineering, problem solving and abstract thinking (American Journal of Play 2009).

If children are not allowed to free play how will they know how to be?  If children are not allowed to create art and images, how will they know to consume them in a healthy and appropriate way?  

"In dramatizing a concept, the child finds the natural method for concentration and continuity and satisfies the intuitive belief in hidden meanings." (Paley 1990. 6)

  





PALEY, VIVIAN GUSSIN. 1990. The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Harvard Educational Review 2011. Paley Vivian Gussin "Voices Inside Schools: Getting to Know Derek". Harvard Educational Review 81(4), 745–50.

The American Journal of Play 2009. The Importance of Fantasy, Fairness, and Friendship in Children’s Play An Interview with Vivian Gussin Paley. Vol. 2. No. 2. [online] Available at: https://www.journalofplay.org/sites/www.journalofplay.org/files/pdf-articles/2-2-interview-paley-fantasy-fairness-friendship.pdf [accessed July 2019].