"Once upon a story": Entering into the world of stories to exp-lore the imaginary and (re)living-through experiences of children

Abstract

Reading is a transaction, a two-way process, involving a reader and a text at a particular time under particular circumstances (Rosenblatt, 1982). An interest in working with children, and an intrigue in the ways children transact with the stories they hear and/or read has turned me into a "Storycatcher" (Baldwin, 2005). As a storycatcher-researcher, I ventured into the world of stories at the Ottawa Public Library in order to exp-lore the narrative transactions of children between the ages of 3 and 6 years old. My Storycatching is a narrative within a narrative because my focus is on the four (4) child-storytellers' verbal and pictorial narratives, as they embody the literary transactions between themselves, their imaginations, and their live(d) experiences in response to the stories they hear during storytimes at the library.