Children’s communicative capital: Promoting inclusive storying in a diverse preschool community through critical participatory action research

Advocating for inclusive literacy teaching pedagogies, to support 3–5-year-old children’s multimodal and multilingual storying, is fundamental in diverse nations. In Australia, for example, there are over 26% of 5-year-old children connecting with language backgrounds other than English, 7% are Aboriginal, and over 5% are diagnosed with special needs ( AEDC, 2021 ). Arguably, children draw from their own cultural, linguistic, and neuro diverse ways of expressing; hence, visual, gestural, spatial, auditory, and touch-type modes of expression, deserve greater recognition in literacy. Our critical participatory action research advocates for an expanded view of literacy focusing on children’s assets to communicate stories beyond vocal or written versions of story’telling’ in English, by incorporating translanguaging. We consider ‘storying’ to be a more inclusive term that incorporates multiple and multilingual modes in story creation. Our research on Kaurna country (the Adelaide Plains), involved 66 three to five-year-old culturally, linguistically and neuro diverse preschoolers, and their families. They interacted and translanguaged with 10 educators to explore multilingual, Aboriginal, and autistic children’s storying. The 6-month research project questioned: ‘How do diverse children communicate stories and how can children’s storying be encouraged with culturally responsive community involvement?.’ Observation, interview, questionnaire, artefact and reflective journaling data identified diverse children’s storying capabilities, highlighting touch, embodied expression and movement of props, as children expressed imagined stories. Thematic analysis led to the emergence of the concept, ‘communicative capital,’ a component nestled within Bourdieu’s (1991) ‘cultural capital,’ highlighting multiple modes of expression beyond named languages (as per the concept of ‘linguistic capital’). We argue that children’s communicative funds of knowledge and semiotic systems for meaning-making deserve increased value in inclusive literacy education, curriculum development, teacher education, pedagogy, practice and policy, so to embrace and expand the storying strengths of children with autism, First Nations children, multilingual children, and all children worldwide.