Abstract
Even before the worldwide surge of online classes during the pandemic, researchers highlighted a need for early digital pedagogies. There is a gap between educational practice in primary education and new digital affordances amidst extensive, ongoing technological transformations and societal challenges. Digital storytelling has often been discussed for its benefits on literacy development and adaptive learning across subject areas. Yet, little research has explored how the new affordances of interactive and technology-enhanced storytelling can benefit the primary classroom. MEKIDS aims to investigate possible interventions for collaborative, guided storytelling that provide natural opportunities for media education with children aged 9-11. The research pursues the double goal of developing a design solution and theory-building by adopting the educational design research (EDR) approach. As an EDR project, the research unfolds following the three stages of analysis and exploration, design and construction, and evaluation and reflection. Concerning analysis and exploration, a theoretical review connects media education, new literacies studies, interactive digital storytelling, and child-computer interaction to characterize interactive digital narrative learning arrangments (IDNLA). During design and construction, a development study has been based on a set of tentative design principles assembled from design literature and research on existing storytelling systems. Thus, a customizable, browser-based storytelling tool called Fantastinomio has been developed. The Fantastinomio uses storytelling to generate curiosity and interest in complex topics, enables children to self-express, and encourages them to engage creatively with digital media. Teachers can curate and customize the story elements that act as narrative material with which children create stories. In two subsequent studies, the arrangement has been further adapted and evaluated in actual primary classrooms. The first study was structured as a cooperative inquiry in a Montessori school in South Tyrol, Italy. The 6-week intervention focused on storytelling related to media education. During multiple workshops with 3-4 children each, video and screen data has been recorded. This data, along with observational notes and the students’ creative products, enabled a detailed contextual analysis of the childrens’ interactions to expose their collaboration patterns and conceptualize a framework for plural literacy practices. The second empirical cycle was carried out as a qualitative case study in a larger primary school in Portugal and focused on social-emotional learning (SEL). Here, children created the entire story element library by themselves, which encouraged them to elaborate personal experiences through stories and increase their emotional awareness. Overall, MEKIDS resulted in a set of design principles for interactive digital storytelling systems and revealed several theoretical insights relevant to guided storytelling, such as factors that facilitate children’s storytelling and their narrative preferences. As the design-based research was exploratory, more extensive effect studies are yet to be conducted. Future studies may inquire about recommendations and obstacles for using the Fantastinomio in a more extensive set of classrooms and for additional learning objectives, such as multilingualism or computational thinking. Thereby, it will be possible to elaborate more detailed didactic guidelines and improve its usability.