Abstract:

Storytelling serves as an exploration of the understanding of normal or atypical phenomena within ourselves. Precisely in educational experience research, narrative inquiry is a tool for understanding the student, as it is both methodology and process (Bach, 2017; Connelly & Clandinin, 1988, 1990). The purpose of this article is to ponder the achievement of college students in creating protagonists for a short fiction film. Narrative as a human capacity can be understood as the construction of a story where characters and settings are its content (Chatman, 1978; Prince, 1979). In such stories, the account of culture, social context, as well as the narrators' thoughts, feelings, doing, suffering, control, and perceiving are permeated (Bach, 2017; McEwan and Egan, 2012; Rath, 2002). Therefore, 8 groups of students were tasked to freely develop the script of a short film in a virtual course during the beginning of the pandemic in Peru in 2020. Using the methodology of narrative inquiry to explore the practice of new learning, the texts that these students created to present the protagonist profile of their short films are analyzed. In this way, the learning process and its practical application in creative writing are explored. As result, it was found that the students presented the dimensions of the character with a concrete emphasis on typologies such as youth, beauty, relationship problems, mental health imbalance, frustration with their environment, and rebellion against expectations. In conclusion, for this group of students, a sense of their pandemic experience is observed, where there are tensions in their young and confused protagonists, which at the same time symbolize struggles with mental health and the social environment. Thus, they present the nature of their being linked to idealizations that they have consumed in series and movies.

Keywords:

Narrative inquiry, Storytelling, Pandemic, Protagonist profile, Short film.