Developing Prospective Preschool Teachers' Competence in Working With Children's Literature

Young children meet literature through the voice of an adult, so the way a teacher selects, reads and talks about a book largely determines what the book means to a child. Yet teacher preparation often reduces this work to knowing the history of children's literature and following methodological recommendations. This article describes an approach to developing prospective preschool teachers' competence in working with children's literature, implemented in retraining courses at a regional center of pedagogical skills in Uzbekistan. The competence is conceptualised as comprising literary-analytical, performative (expressive reading and storytelling), methodological and reflective components. The "Book Workshop" approach combined three strands: selecting and analysing texts for children of different ages, practising expressive reading and storytelling with audio self-recording, and designing book talk and creative activities based on children's personal responses. Compared with trainees in a conventional course, workshop participants justified their choice of texts with reference to children's age and literary qualities, read with more varied pace, pauses and character voices, and replaced recall questions after reading with open invitations to share impressions, puzzles and connections. Children in their sessions talked more and responded to one another's ideas. The findings suggest that performative skill and a dialogic stance towards children's responses need to be practised explicitly in teacher preparation.