Abstract:

Creating digital stories provides with important opportunities to practice and master a number of specific 21st-century skills, content, and technology standards.

Storytelling has been extensively used in children’s education as a valuable and creative tool, however, its use in the higher education process has been less common and this paper proposes that storytelling can be used as an effective reflective tool in higher education.

Digital storytelling is essentially the application of technology to this age-old experience of sharing personal narratives and seeking to teach and learn from them. What is different, and what makes these digital stories so potentially powerful, is the availability of the tools for developing, enhancing, storing and disseminating the stories in new ways.

If Digital Storytelling is to become accepted in today’s schools, it will be important to collect data to be able to draw conclusions about the impact that the process has on student learning, motivation and engagement and how teaching practices and strategies change with technology integration through digital storytelling.

Digital Storytelling facilitates the convergence of four student-centered learning strategies: student engagement, reflection for deep learning, project based learning, and the effective integration of technology into instruction.

The American Digital Storytelling Association defines digital storytelling as ‘the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling (in which) stories derive their power by weaving images, music, narrative, and voice together, giving deep dimension and vivid colour to characters, situations, experiences and insights’.

Using storytelling in these ways enables the student to make their own decisions about what story to tell, from what viewpoint, and what they wish to convey through the story. This leads the reflective process away from being a potentially passive task, with the student simply going through the required motions to get the task done, to a process whereby the student must make informed decisions to enable their story to make sense to a particular audience.

This paper reports on the use of digital storytelling as a means of encouraging student engagement and reflection. The digital storytelling model used is that of McDrury & Alterio’s (2003).

McDrury & Alterio’s model represents how individuals identify, tell and build on their story. Important in this model is the way that stories can be expanded and amended through collaborative processes.

The McDrury & Alterio (2003) model recognises the collaborative element of storytelling and how stories can be processed and developed. It is recognised that the process of developing and creating the digital stories can itself be reflective.

The present work describes the results of a research conducted with 450 students and 52 laboratory teachers attending the degree course in Specialization support activities of the University of Palermo during the academic year 2017-2018. The validity of the Mcdrury’s & Alterio (2003) Storytelling model was checked thanks to the research process and in order to reinforce students’ reflective skills, narrative competence and critical revision. The research methodology has been both quantity and qualitative.

Keywords:

Laboratory, Storytelling, reflective learning, research, narrative competence.