Tell me your story: digital storytelling as a teaching and communication tool

• Autor(a) principal: Félix, Silvina
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Clemente, Violeta
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/36553
• topic: Digital storytelling; Teaching tool; Communication techniques; Student’s self- reflection

The paper describes an exploratory study focused on the use of Digital Storytelling (DS) as a tool for design students to communicate their self-reflection process and reveal their soft skills to a future employer. Digital Storytelling is widely recognised in the literature, as an innovative learning strategy supported by practical cases with implementation in classrooms. Based on the premise that DS can be used as a vehicle to help students “think about your own identity”, the creative process of finding students’ narratives led them to reflect on themselves and their life experiences. This study aimed to help students to reflect on their own cognitive profile during problem design solving and communicate creatively their soft skills to a future employer using a digital narrative. Product design students worked on their narratives for four weeks in practical classes during a course concerned with visual communication techniques. Students used digital technologies and computer software to create an individual short videos and communicate autobiographical narratives with original images and audio where the narrator is the story’s protagonist. The stories were visualized in a group session with an invited DS specialist and a focus group was held to find out teachers' perceptions about the suitability of the DS as a tool for students' self-reflection. As an outcome, students' narratives focused on remarkable personal life experiences or academic involvements, some of them showing a significant emotional charge, others trying to highlight singular characteristics which may be appreciated and valued by a future employer.