Abstract:

This paper discusses empirical evidence about how project-based activities favored the enhancement of competencies at schools (from pre-school to high school).

The discussion is based upon the experience gained by work of teachers (all grades) who engage their pupils with a storytelling activity. The activity is carried on within the frame of a competition organized by HOC-LAB of Politecnico di Milano: PoliCultura. The competition is about creating a digital story that can include video, images, audio, et. A specific tool (named “1001stories”) is used by schools; images, audio and videos are glued together, in order to create an interactive narrative that can be accessed via web. The tool makes authoring very easy (even for kids and/or inexperienced teachers), and yet is powerful enough to allow the creation of engaging and rich narratives. From school year 2006/07 a large number of participants have made PoliCultura probably the most successful experience for creating multimedia narratives at school: 2188 narratives have been submitted; nearly 46000 students [estimated] and 3800 teachers have participated.

Each narrative is created by a whole class of students: typically, between 20 and 40. Between 1 to 3-4 teachers orchestrate the work. The role of teachers differs according to the level of schooling. At pre-school kids do drawing, acting in video or audio; at high school students are almost independent authors, with teachers simply coordinating; for primary and junior high school, the role of the teachers follows in between.

The fact that each narrative is the outcome of a group of students is a factor of success: it creates a team feeling with everyone striving for a common success that can take a different flavor: completing the narrative and submitting it is already an achievement; being “nominated” for the final event is a better achievement; winning one of the prizes is a major achievement.

The paper discusses how competences are developed with learners participating; the source of information is the opinion of the teachers (collected via a mandatory report and a discussion in a panel). There are several interesting observations. Collaboration competences and professional competences (e.g. teamwork, leadership, ...) are high. Technical competences, that were very high 10 years ago, now are marginal, in the sense that those competences are already there before starting.

The most interesting observation is a split generated by the attitude of the teachers.
Some teachers want “to win”: they favor a professional approach to team work, emphasizing specialization of role. The positive side is that the quality of the work is high and each learner follows her “natural attitude” about what role to take in the team. The negative side is that competences are scattered unevenly: some learners develop technology; some learners develop wring or communication skills; some learners take pictures and videos, etc. Specialization is typical of real-life working environments, of course.

Other teachers take a different attitude: they want kids to try many activities and take different role, some times encouraging (if not forcing them) beyond their natural attitude. The positive side is a growth of competences for everyone and in all directions. The negative side is at times the resulting narrative is faulty and also that, some times, learners do not like being engaged in activities that they do not feel is “natural” for them.

Keywords:

Skills, competences, real-life learning.