Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of figures

Part One Beginnings: Storytelling, Narrative, and Play

Chapter One: Story - Schooling and Performance

• A series of personal beginnings
• Story(telling) and schooling
• Narrative knowledge
• Storytelling as performance
• The present study

Chapter Two: Storytelling as Cultural Practice

• Introduction
• Historical origins and social significance of Storytelling
• Storytelling as 'powerful' social practice
• Storytelling and children's play
• Summary

Part Two (Re)casting the Players - Rehearsing the Theory

Chapter Three: Discourses Framing Research on Children's Storytelling

• Introduction
• Storytelling as a feature of progressive pedagogies
• Storytelling as narrative knowledge
• Storytelling as a communicative act
• Storytelling as discursive practice
• Discursive shifts in the research: An overview
• Conclusion

Chapter Four: Ways of Reading the Performing Body

• Introduction
• Postpositivist research
• The limits of structuralism
• Poststructuralist theories: Making discourses visible
• Subjectivity and identity
• Feminisms and the social construction of gender
• The politics of narrative
• The body at play: Bakhtin and carnival
• Foucault, bodies and power
• Towards a methodology for reading the performing body
• Summary

Chapter Five: The Study

• Introduction
• Researcher as reteller of tales
• Phases of the research process
• The setting: Impressionist tales
• The tellers, commentators and critics
• Research methods
• Assembling the collages

Part Three Romance, Adventure, and Carnivalesque Tales

Chapter Six: Picture Stories

• Introduction
• A workshop vignette
• Patterns of cultural representation
• Tales of love and marriage
• Tales of adventure
• Summary

Chapter Seven: Familial Tales

• Introduction
• A workshop vignette
• Not by words alone: (Re)membering the body and voicing desire
• Intermezzo
• Storyplay as carnival
• Concluding comments

Chapter Eight: Body Politics

• Introduction
• The politics of voice and gesture
• A storytelling habitus/ethos
• Humour as a political ploy in gestural and verbal discourses
• The politics of the gaze(In)conclusion

Part Four: Happily Ever After?

Chapter Nine: Re/framing the Performing Body

• Introduction
• Framing the performative
• Student bodies as sites/sights of resistance and compliance
• Telling signs on the researcher's body
• Shifting contexts

Chapter Ten: New Tales for New Times

• Multiple knowledges
• New tales for new times: Beyond mainstream identities

Appendix A - Series Told in Two Workshops

• A1: The diamond of the heart
• A2: The Snooks family

Appendix B - Letters Seeking Consent

• B1: Letter to Principal
• B2: Letter to parents seeking consent to videotape workshops
• B3: Letter to parents seeking consent to audiotape interviews

Appendix C - Overview of Workshops
Appendix D - Sample Page from Field Journal
Appendix E - Mapping of a Storyplay
Appendix F - Pictures Used in Children's Stories

References - References and Select Bibliography
Index