Narratives Expressing Emotion Support STEM Learning in Library and Children’s Museum Programs

This poster was presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, CA in April 2019.

Young children have been described as immersed in a diverse world of personal stories, with different structures and functions, through family narrative practices (Miller, Chen & Olivera, 2014). Drawing on story schema theory (Mandler, 1978) and linguistic approaches to the analysis of narrative form (Labov, 1982), personal narratives that support learning and remembering must include evaluation of actions, and emotions, to convey what is meaningful and memorable. Our goal is to explore how engineering experts’ personal stories support children’s science learning beyond what is available from direct experience with objects (Bruner, 1990) during family visits to children’s museums.