Stone Soup: A story about using story for research

As librarians serving youth, we have an advantage when it comes to creating and communicating the meaning of our work and research: our knowledge of traditional and contemporary literature. Folklore often provides the shared framework for a culture to understand and guide behavior. The story of Stone Soup offered a culturally shared framework that informed my theories about what was going on in collaboration and communicated those theories to others in my research. This paper explores the use of three variants of this folktale as a conceptual framework for research into the collaboration of a school librarian with a team of second grade teachers.