NAEYC’ s Centennial Year: 100 Years of Impact
Still on Stage!
Engaging Children in Telling and Acting Out Stories to Impact Learning
Diane Pesco and Andréanne Gagné
Nearly forty years ago, attendees at NAEYC’ s 1987 Annual Conference were invited to visit Vivian Gussin Paley, the teacher and writer who contemplated children’ s stories and fantasy play and who popularized the idea of children dictating stories to their teachers and acting them out. As described in a September 2011 interview in Young Children, Paley believed that the combination of story dictation( children telling stories, and teachers writing them down) and story acting( dramatizing the dictated stories without props) gives children opportunities to express themselves, grapple with their concerns, and shape events( Paley 2011). Paley described make-believe
( which is inherent to story acting) as a key“ thinking tool” for children( 91).
Story dictation was not unique to Paley’ s setting. Yet she was novel in making it a central activity and pairing it with children’ s enactments of their stories( Wiltz & Fein 1996). Long before she passed away in 2019, Paley predicted that these joint practices would endure the passage of time( Lindfors & Paley 2004). Indeed, they continue to be adopted by teachers and explored by researchers like us( the authors) in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other countries.
62 Young Children
Spring 2026