Digital Storytelling with Pre-service teachers - Raising Awareness for Refugees through ICTs in ESL Primary Classes

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by dhado

This article designs and implements a Digital Storytelling (DS) learning experience with pre-service teachers in a foreign language setting, using it as both a social awareness and pedagogical tool for higher education and primary students. The study guides teachers to strengthen their L2 by researching the Syrian refugees’ conflict and writing a short academic paper, then transforming their work into DS scripts. Some digital stories are shared broadly with society through the 4ª MICE competition.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages16

Reading Time40 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Introduction

Background: schools, digital natives, and new literacies

Definition and characteristics of Digital Storytelling (DS)

DS in EFL contexts and reported learning outcomes

Digital Storytelling with Pre-service teachers . Raising Awareness for Refugees through ICTs in ESL Primary Classes 1 Maria Alcantud Diaz [maria.alcantud@uv.es](maria.alcantud@uv.es) Universitat de València, Spain Abstract This article describes the design and implementation of a Digital Storytelling (DS) experience that was carried out in a foreign language setting with pre-service teachers . This case study sets out to assess the effect of DS aimed at becoming a social awareness and pedagogical tool for both, high education and consequently, primary students . The overall structure of the study revolves around the teaching-Learning process that involves educational centres and society. The first stage of this procedure was to make pre-service teachers enhance their L2 by researching on the Syrian refugees’conflict prior to write a short academic paper . Freely available online resources through their mobile devices in class became the source materials . Then, their writings evolved into the scripts of a digital story. Formerly, they transferred their knowledge beyond university boundaries: to primary children because some of the pre-service teachers used DS with the primary students of their practicum internship period. Conversely, their digital stories were shared also with the society in general in the 4ª MICE (International Contest of Educational Cinema) . Overall, these results indicate that this experience provided some useful insights into the use of DS with pre-service students and its repercussion in primary education . Keywords Digital Storytelling, CLIL, primary and pre-service students, social awareness, interculturality 1 This article is framed within the Project UV-SFPIE_RMD16-417489 funded by Vicerrectoradode Polítiques de Formació I Qualitat Educativa de la Universitat de València M. Alcantud-Díaz 1 Digital Education Review-Number 30, December 2016-[http://greav.ub.edu/der/](http://greav.ub.edu/der/) I. Introduction Schools as social institutions are currently embedded in a disconcerting situation due to the presence of students, teachers and teaching and learning models that have been born or created in different centuries . Times have changed and are changing at a very high speed, which has made our students, digital natives, to be born in a world conquered by technology. That is why teachers (most of them native migrants) and schools cannot turn their backs on new cultural forms related to communication that digital technologies are engendering within our society (Soler-Pardo, 2014) . Thus, teachers should get through their students and into their environment in order to achieve an entire teaching-learning process . So that this target is really achieved, multimodal new literacies should be brought into stage; new literacies such as: (i) the audio-visual one (that develops the skills needed to analyse and produce audio-visual texts and to prepare students to be responsible and critical consumers of mass media products such as films, television, advertising and even videogames, Autor et al. 2014); (ii) the technological/ digital literacy (that develops those skills related to computers: hardware and software and allows the user to connect within a bigger and bigger community); (iii) the information literacies (that aims at developing the skills and abilities to learn to search for information based on a given purpose apart from locating, selecting, analysing, andreconstructing it); (iv) multi-literacy (whose target is that students meet the necessary requirements to face the numerous, current media and languages of culture by means of an integrated approach of the different literacies); (v) global literacy (whose purpose is to instil those skills related to reading, decoding, answering and contextualizing messages from a global perspective) and (vi) visual literacy (that develops those competences related to understanding, producing and communicating through visual images) (Soler-Pard

FAQs

How does the study structure the Digital Storytelling experience for pre-service teachers?

It starts with pre-service teachers researching the Syrian refugees’ conflict to improve their L2 and writing a short academic paper, then converting those writings into digital story scripts. Freely available online resources via mobile devices provide source materials.

What purpose does Digital Storytelling serve in this work?

Digital Storytelling is used as a social awareness and pedagogical tool. The article also positions the teaching-learning process as involving educational centers and society.

How were the digital stories shared beyond the university context?

Some pre-service teachers used DS with primary students during their practicum internship. Additionally, their digital stories were shared with society in the 4ª MICE (International Contest of Educational Cinema).

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by dhado