Oral Storytelling and Emergent Critical Thinking in Early Childhood

Abstract In a time characterised by widespread misinformation and the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence, the capacity to think critically has become a foundational educational priority. While critical thinking initiatives have largely focused on adolescents and adults, far less attention has been paid to how such dispositions can be nurtured in early childhood. This paper draws on design-based doctoral research conducted in two preschool classrooms to explore how oral storytelling can serve as a dialogic and responsive pedagogical practice for fostering emergent critical thinking in young children. The present study offers a distinct focus on the pedagogical conditions through which critical thinking is enacted. Across a 10-week intervention, educators implemented structured oral storytelling sessions emphasising open-ended questioning, perspective-taking, and collaborative problem-solving. Data were generated through classroom observation, video recordings, audio-recorded transcripts, and collaborative researcher/educator reflection. The findings suggest that preschool children can meaningfully engage in emergent critical thinking when supported through intentional educator mediation. Three interrelated elements, reasoning, perspective-taking, and collaborative meaning-making, were observed to emerge dialogically within storytelling interactions. These were closely associated with the pedagogical conditions, including open-ended inquiry, the modelling of thinking language, provision of thinking time, and dialogic mediation. The study contributes to early childhood education by positioning critical thinking as a socially mediated and dialogically enacted process rather than an individual cognitive skill. The resulting StoryThinking framework offers a transferable pedagogical model to support educators in fostering critical thinking through everyday classroom practice.