Article Review
Kociubuk, J., & Campana, K. (2019). Sharing stories: An exploration of genres in storytimes. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 52(3), 0961000619882751. doi:10.1177/0961000619882751
Kociubuk and Campana from Kent State University discuss their findings from investigating the different genres and story varieties in 69 different public library storytimes. By incorporating different genres and promoting inclusion into storytime, the authors believe that librarians have the opportunity to be even more helpful with supporting learning. In their review of early childhood literacy literature, they found that young children lack an exposure to a variety of reading genres, with the most common being a “narrative/storybook genre” (p.906). The related studies illustrated that even when other genres were exposed to children, the time spent reading those are very limited compared to the storybook genre. Exposing many different genres to children is beneficial to literacy development, singling out oral storytelling as a genre that should be frequently found. Previous findings demonstrated that storytimes “support a variety of early literacy and learning behaviours and skills” but that research is still needed on the importance of what is selected to be read in storytime.
Through studying three areas of storytimes: the type of genre, the time spent on the genre, and if the titles selected were unique or repeated throughout the study, they proved their conclusion that children are not being exposed to all genres equally. They grouped their findings into five distinct genres of stories used in storytimes: storybook, non-narrative informational, narrative informational, oral and other—such as poetry. A total of 262 stories were analyzed, finding the storybook genre made up 58.78% of the total stories, while taking up 63.51% of the total time read. Of the 182 stories with identifiable titles, 166 were unique stories, and 42 of the 79 oral stories were unique, with publishing dates ranging from 1945-2013 (p.910-911). Their findings support the trend found in the literature review that storytimes overwhelming favour the storybook/narrative genre across all storybook age groups in titles chosen and time spent reading.
The research method of analyzation was of a dataset from a collection of 242 storytime recordings from across Washington State in the US. This dataset was originally used to help storytime providers be “intentional and interactive” with early literacy content, and improve storytime execution overall (p.909). Kociubuk’s and Campana’s study was a secondary usage of that dataset. The 69 storytimes for this study consisted of 11 baby storytimes, 12 toddler storytimes, 39 preschool storytimes, and 7 family storytimes. The data extracted in this study came from content analysis of the videos. Titles had been sorted into one of the five genres by definitions created in previous research, but I felt they were self-explanatory for librarians in the field. The time portion was calculated for each age group by adding together the total time and then calculated as a percentage of all the time spent reading. By examining the uniqueness and genres of the titles, they were able to make conclusions about the diversity of titles being used in storytimes.
In the discussion section of their article, the authors grouped the genre variety and time spent reading because the topics are intertwined with each other. This created great opportunities to illustrate how one affects the other. Time spent on genres is just as important as showcasing multiple genres. Overall oral stories were found to be second most popular genre and to have time spent on them, but baby storytimes had a very minimal usage of oral stories. By giving advice to providers on how to bring more oral stories to baby storytimes by using props rather than a felt board, they are contributing to practitioners and academics studying storytimes. A clear contradiction was demonstrated in what studies were reporting and what they were seeing in the data in regards to genres chosen in the preschool storytimes. There is a large lack of exposure to informational texts in this age group storytime, both narrative and non-narrative. As they say, this is “in spite of studies that found that young children are able to interact appropriately and learn from informational texts” as well as reporting sometimes enjoying these titles more than storybooks (p.911-912). But in family storytimes, the information genres are shared at a high rate. The authors note that more research has to be done to find out why this disconnect exists, but it does show a difference again between practitioners and LIS academics. The authors note understandable reasons for why this disconnect could exist, and they suggest using narrative informational titles in storytimes to branch to non-narrative informational titles on the same topic.
Kociubuk and Campana demonstrate the need for more diversity in not just genres chosen, but also the specific titles practitioners are choosing to showcase in storytime. Most of the stories examined in this study were published within the last two decades, but with some going back to the early 1940s. As the authors discuss, there are many timeless, beloved classics parents want their children to hear, but these stories can contribute to a lack of diversity in titles during storytimes. Storytime providers and librarians have the opportunity to expose adults and children to diverse characters, cultures, and topics in their storytimes, but choosing books from the 1990s and early 2000s are still going to lack the diversity books being published today are encourage to have in them. The finding that 9% of the stories at 69 different storytimes over the course of two years over a huge geographical section were the same was to me, as well as the authors, “unexpected” (p.912). Storytimes can serve as important readers’ advisory tools and repetition such as this limits the exposure of books that adults would not be aware of or choose without the storytime experience with them.
This article highlights an important connection that has to be made between practitioners of storytime and of academics studying early childhood learning. The literature review found multiple studies citing the importance and reasons why different genres are important for children to be exposed to, with literature dating back to the early 2000s, but it is not reflected in their findings that study current practice. 58% on one genre out of five is a huge call to action to choose other stories than storybook/narrative. It is the same with the uniqueness of titles. This was not a large dataset, so finding the same stories coming up multiple times is surprising. As librarians, we should be helping caregivers explore all sorts of different stories for children, not doing the same storytimes because they are already easily planned out. This article contributes to children’s librarianship by giving concrete numbers to librarians who want to diversify their storytimes into other genres but might receive pushback, and the literature review gives findings and examples to librarians who are hesitant to include genres other than the storybook/narrative genre.