Storycrafting in Bangladesh: a culturally adapted participatory pedagogy for fostering imagination and children’s agency in pre-primary classrooms

This study explores the use of storycrafting in Bangladeshi pre-primary classrooms to strengthen children’s agency and foster imagination, creativity and cognitive development. Storycrafting enables children to create their own narratives, while adults act as attentive listeners and facilitators. Although storytelling is included in Bangladesh’s national pre-primary curriculum, classroom practice remains largely teacher-centred and dominated by rote learning. This qualitative case study comprised a baseline classroom audit across five government primary schools, followed by an in-depth case study using classroom observations, teacher interviews, ten children’s anticipatory stories and accompanying drawings. Findings show that children creatively combined compulsory, optional and free story elements while expressing socio-emotional themes such as revenge, solidarity and reconciliation. Teachers reported that storycrafting enhanced children’s participation, supported intentional teaching and promoted peer-assisted learning despite limited resources. The findings demonstrate that storycrafting offers a culturally responsive and participatory pedagogy for promoting children’s creative expression in Bangladeshi pre-primary education. More broadly, the study suggests that that culturally adapted storycrafting can support the development of child-centred early childhood education in resource-constrained Global South contexts without simply replicating pedagogical models developed in Western settings.