Who was Vivian Gussin Paley?
Vivian Gussin Paley (1929-2019) was an American kindergarten teacher, writer, and advocate for the importance of play in young children’s lives. For almost forty years she taught in classrooms in New Orleans, New York, and then at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where she spent the rest of her teaching career.
Vivian Gussin Paley's legacy
Vivian wrote thirteen books and countless articles rooted in her observations of young children. She listened to children’s stories and conversations, and paid close attention to their fantasy play, gaining insight into how children grow socially, emotionally, and intellectually. Her work on Storytelling and Story Acting, where children dictate their own stories and then act them out with their friends, earned her a MacArthur genius grant in 1989, along with awards from the Erikson Institute, the John Dewey Society, Harvard University Press, and the National Council of Teachers of English.
For many of us in early years, Vivian’s legacy goes beyond her writing. She is the teacher who sat on the classroom floor, listening more closely than anyone, writing down children’s words, taking them seriously, and treating them with care. She showed that when we listen to children’s stories, the culture of a classroom changes.
Vivian was patron of MakeBelieve Arts, the charity behind Helicopter Stories, until her death in 2019. Helicopter Stories, with its focus on children dictating their stories and acting them out, is directly based on her approach and rooted in her generosity in sharing what she had discovered in her own classroom. Her support and guidance were central to how the approach took shape in the UK.
What Vivian believed about children, story, and play
Vivian did not set out a list of principles, yet across her books and interviews, certain beliefs appear again and again. They are echoed in the memories and reviews of those who knew and loved her.
Every child has a story waiting to be heard
Children use stories to try out their ideas and make sense of their worlds. In stories they show us who they are. Vivian treated every dictated story, whether a few words or a full narrative, as a novel waiting to emerge. Her belief in the value of children’s stories, and the respect she gave them, meant every child in her classroom felt seen, heard, and understood.
Play is the work of children
Vivian described fantasy play as “the main repository for secret messages, the intuitive language with which children express their imagery and logic, their pleasure and curiosity, their ominous feelings and fears” (Paley, 2004). In her classroom, play and storytelling were never treated as extras. They were how children explored friendship, power, fear, loss, and belonging.
Children need classrooms where they truly belong
Vivian’s famous classroom rule, ‘You can’t say you can’t play’, emerged from her deep concern about exclusion. She saw how painful it is when the same children are left out day after day, and how easily adult routines can reinforce those patterns.
As her understanding grew, she began to remove practices that separated children. She also adapted Storytelling and Story Acting so that every child would be invited into a role, rather than being chosen or rejected by the author.
In her book The Kindness of Children, Vivian described the recurring theme she observed in children’s stories: someone is alone and a friend comes, someone is in trouble and help is on the way.
Her work invites us to notice and protect those moments of kindness.
Children thrive when we listen deeply
Vivian’s work was built on listening deeply to everything that happened in her classroom. She paid close attention to children’s stories, their conversations, and their fantasy play. She wrote down their words exactly as they were spoken and read them back without correction. In doing so, she showed each child that their thoughts were valued.
Teachers who worked with her recall how, every night, she listened back to the day’s tape-recorded conversations, studying what she and the children had said. She listened for the threads that connected everything that was said and done in the classroom, noticing how each moment shaped the children’s growing sense of community. She would regularly ask herself whether she had missed an opportunity to strengthen that community, and return the next day determined to do better.
Teachers grow when they learn with children
Across all thirteen books, Vivian is honest about her own uncertainties. She writes about changing her mind, noticing what she struggles with, and listening to criticism from children, parents, and colleagues. Whether she is exploring race in White Teacher and Kwanzaa and Me, thinking about kindness, or rethinking punishment, she lets us see her learning in real time, alongside the children.
Storytelling and story acting
Vivian’s most influential contribution is the approach she called Storytelling and Story Acting, and that is now known in the UK as Helicopter Stories.
Children are invited to dictate a story to an adult scribe. The adult writes the words down, exactly as they are spoken, and later the class gathers to act the story out.
Vivian writes in her book Wally’s Stories about the first time she invited a class to act out a child’s story. She describes how they acted out the story of a child who had been sent to the time-out chair twice that day, and how she wanted to find a way to reconnect with him.
This shift from only acting out adult-written material, to acting out children’s own stories transformed her classroom. As a result, the children developed a shared repertoire of images, characters, and events that felt entirely their own. They could refer back to one another’s stories with as much reverence and knowledge as they would a story in a book. They became a community.
In The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter, Vivian shows how Storytelling and Story Acting helped a child who felt alone and misunderstood to feel part of this community. By working patiently with his ongoing game about a broken helicopter, and inviting him into the acting of other children’s stories, Vivian helped him move from the edge of the group into its centre.
Vivian shows how this simple practice becomes a way to understand and support children who are struggling. Storytelling and Story Acting provide a safe, shared space where these themes can be explored together.
The role of play and fantasy in Vivian’s work
In her book A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, Vivian argues that fantasy play is not a distraction from learning, but the most usable context for young children. At a time when expectations for younger and younger children have become more precise and more pressured, she reminds us:
“It was not the monsters they invented that frightened them in kindergarten; it was being told to sit still and pay attention for long periods of time.”
(Paley, 2004)
Her classroom research, documented in books such as Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays and Mollie Is Three, shows how children use play to retell their own lives, act out tricky moments, and test identities. She traces how three-year-olds begin to understand themselves as characters in their own stories, and how four- and five-year-olds weave complex plots about birthdays, babies and bad guys as they work through big themes like loss, jealousy, and power.
Vivian’s influence on early years practice today
Vivian’s ideas have reached far beyond her own classrooms. Storytelling and Story Acting has been taken up by teachers and researchers around the world. Her books have been translated, studied, and held close by educators who recognise, in her writing, the kind of schooling we all long for.
In the UK, her work sits at the heart of Helicopter Stories. In Boston, USA, her methods have been used in Public Schools. In Taiwan and elsewhere, teachers have written about adapting her approach to their own cultural contexts, while holding on to the same core values of kindness, inclusion, and deep listening.
Perhaps her most lasting legacy lies in the way she helps us to see the classroom through children’s eyes. She reminds us that
“Storytelling is still the only activity I know of, besides play itself, that is immediately understood and desired by every child over the age of two.”
(Paley, 2001).
Vivian once wrote that those of us who have been outsiders understand “the need to be seen exactly as we are and to be accepted and valued”. (Paley, 2001, as cited in Griffin, 2019). Through her listening, her stories, and her insistence that every child’s words should be heard and acted upon, she gave that experience to generations of children.
References & further reading
Griffin, J. 2019. “Vivian Gussin Paley: A teacher and author who stressed the power of storytelling.” Forbes, 6 August. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jillgriffin/2019/08/06/vivian-gussie-paley-a-teacher-and-author-who-stressed-the-power-of-storytelling/
Lee, T. 2017 Princesses, Dragons and Helicopter Stories: Storytelling and Story Acting in the Early Years. Abingdon: Routledge.
Lee, T. 2019. “Vivian Gussin Paley obituary.” The Guardian, 23 August. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/aug/23/vivian-gussin-paley-obituary
Paley, V.G., 1979. White Teacher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paley, V.G., 1981. Wally’s Stories: Conversations in the Kindergarten. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paley, V.G., 1986. Mollie Is Three: Growing Up in School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Paley, V.G., 1990. The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: The Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paley, V.G., 1991. Bad Guys Don’t Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Paley, V.G., 1992. You Can’t Say You Can’t Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paley, V.G., 1995. Kwanzaa and Me: A Teacher’s Story. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paley, V.G., 1995. The Kindness of Children. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paley, V.G., 2004. A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Saucier, J. 2020. ‘Remembering Educator and Play Advocate Vivian Gussin Paley, 1929–2019’. The Strong National Museum of Play Blog, 7 February. Available at: https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/remembering-educator-and-play-advocate-vivian-gussin-paley-1929-2019/
Reference this article
Lee, T. 2026. An introduction to Vivian Gussin Paley. The Voice of Early Childhood. Available at: www.thevoiceofearlychildhood.com/introduction-vivian-gussin-paley/
