Young storytellers building knowledge and communication with digital stories

Abstract

This study discusses the experiences of young storytellers who make and share digital stories on a social network for pedagogical purposes. In order to produce their work, these students from primary schools in Greece put effort, practice and apply techniques, and convey their messages through series of pedagogical actions. In this way they reveal the dimension of digital story as collage, not only in terms of the media used but also in terms of the sets of shared purposes and decisions needed in the act of storytelling. Also, the fact that digital stories open up the space for collaboration and require multiple implementation stages deepens the level of involvement and increases the degree of ‘authorship’ attributed to the young people. In this way, through purposeful and youth-initiated action the space opens up for creative and innovative pedagogies. Innovative pedagogies aim for discourses that, rather than the improvement of technologies, target the deepening of human reasoning toward critical over descriptive understandings of reality.