Young children’s embodied engagement with storyworlds: Attuning to movement and affect while playing with stories as an inclusive reading practice.

During this Fellowship, I will carry out activities that illuminate the significance of young children’s embodied engagement with the storyworlds of picturebooks as a valuable and inclusive reading practice. The Fellowship will also support my career ambition of becoming an academic, focused on literacy in education. My research contends that young children make meanings with their bodies. Yet, in classrooms there is an emphasis on children talking about stories, overlooking the body’s role in meaning-making and disadvantaging those with diverse communicative competencies. To redress this imbalance, my research explores young children’s embodied engagement with the storyworlds depicted in picturebooks. Bridging research with practice, I positioned myself as a class adult, designing a novel play-based activity to foreground young children’s embodied engagement with storyworlds. Video observations of play were innovatively analysed by attending to the interplay between movement and affect, surfacing the unseen elements of embodied engagement. This cutting-edge approach illuminated how young children used fluctuations in movements and shifts in proximity to extend and deepen their engagement with storyworlds. Significantly, this fluidity arose as children interacted with objects and individuals. Deviating from dominant understandings in literacy research, my findings advanced an original conceptualisation of young children’s embodied engagement as relational and distributed. Class adults occupy salient contingent and generative roles within this conceptualisation, with their movements reacting to but also influencing children’s embodied engagement. These findings matter to teachers, highlighting how embodied approaches can support young children’s reading engagement as a route to reading enjoyment. I argue for changes to education practice and policy so that young children’s embodied engagement is valued and embedded as part of reading. Through this Fellowship, I will maximise the impact of my innovative classroom-based research through targeted dissemination, networking and teaching activities. I will write a monograph entitled ‘Embodied Reading: Young Children Engaging with Stories Through Movement and Affect’ that outlines the study’s provenance, before presenting the research’s original insights and considering implications for classroom reading practices. The monograph’s readership will be teachers, teacher educators and literacy researchers, with Routledge’s Education series being the proposed publisher. A short-form accessible article for a reputable online outlet will be produced to complement the monograph. Alongside these activities, I will engage a wide range of academics in my research through presenting at three high-profile European education, literacy and early childhood conferences. Additionally, I will build networks by curating a three-part researcher-practitioner seminar series. Networks created through this series will be used to carry out further limited research (less than 25% of the Fellowship's time) linked to the PhD, in the form of two focus group and action planning workshops with teachers, investigating how teachers attune to movements and affects. Insights from these workshops and my PhD research will be used to create online practitioner resources. Finally, I will influence the research and teaching culture of the Open University by providing cutting-edge teaching related to young children’s embodied reading practices for Education courses. My research and the activities of this Fellowship are vital and timely, given heightened international concerns regarding children’s reading engagement. Ultimately underpinned by a social justice stance, the activities of the Fellowship will foreground children’s diverse ways of making meanings and, in so doing, advance an inclusive approach to young children’s engagement with stories, one that is capable of enthusing children about reading.