The use of self-story as a pedagogical tool in a meta-cognitive exercise to support children in understanding their material choices in the school library

Abstract

This paper examines the notion of self-story as a sense-making scaffold to self-knowledge via the Zone of Proximal Development in a school library setting. A teaching strategy is presented utilizing ideas from Vygotsky, Bruner, and Dervin in which children are asked to remember stories about themselves to support language development and movement towards greater self knowledge supporting their choices of material in the school library. Children may lack the vocabulary/language to describe/explain their own behavior. Since language is culturally constructed and children lack experience with culture and, thus, language, not only may they have difficulty communicating with others, but since thinking is informed by language, they may have difficulty understanding their own thoughts and feelings since they do not have the words to name them. They need to access the appropriate language/words to express these things. One strategy that may assist them in this task is the use of self-stories.