Exploring children's embodied story experiences: a toolkit for research and practice

Literacy research and practice are invigorated by evidence that stories enhance empathy and concentration. Both benefits are associated with attending to inner sensory states afforded by stories. Yet children are rarely asked about how stories, steeped as they are in characters' bodily actions, affect them in bodily terms. We have conducted a qualitative study inviting 9- to 12-year-olds (N = 19) to share their embodied story experiences. To this end, we developed a toolkit of story excerpts and activities supported with bespoke props that can be adopted in research but also in classrooms and other practice. The toolkit was tested in school-based focus groups (accompanied by in-class observations) and home-based individual interviews. We introduce the toolkit and discuss some of the key prerequisites of its use. Further, we present three main types of embodiment statements provided by our participants: what-statements about the trigger of one's embodied experience, how-statements about the sensory or motor quality of the experience and what-and-how statements combining both aspects. We consider the distinct potentials of these statement types for fostering children's embodied self-awareness and story awareness in educational settings and beyond.