This session directly connects to the conference theme, “Telling Our Way Forward: Learning Stories of Belonging and Resistance,” by centering storytelling as a relational, reflective, and humanizing practice in early childhood education. In learning environments increasingly shaped by standardization, documentation demands, and accountability pressures, storytelling offers educators a powerful way to slow down, notice deeply, and honor children, families, and teachers as co-creators of meaning.

Through stories, young children see themselves reflected, encounter the perspectives of others, and begin to make sense of emotions, relationships, identity, and community. Storied Beginnings invites participants to explore how storytelling and children’s literature can nurture belonging, support social-emotional development, and offer gentle forms of resistance to practices that reduce children to checklists or outcomes. Instead, this session lifts up stories as bridges—between home and school, child and educator, imagination and lived experience. The two presenters will share their own stories and in return ask for stories from the participants to help them shape them into tales to tell the children in their care.