Digital Storytelling in Tomorrow’s World : Through Students’ Metaphors

The increasing demand for global citizenship education and the expansive use of digital technologies for learning create the need for innovative pedagogical approaches and classroom practices. These should encourage active learner engagement and a critical view of the surrounding world, such as, for instance, the role of social networks in young people’s lives, environmental hazards and how human relationships develop nowadays. In this study we will discuss storytelling in a social network for pedagogy by examining how adolescent (14 and 15 year-old) students from a lower secondary school in Greece experienced knowledge construction, sharing and learning with networked peers from Finland and California in the Boundless Classroom project. To do so, we will analyze the content of student interviews and their digital stories. As part of their learning activities the participating students from California, Finland and Greece created digital stories and developed traditional (e.g., speaking, writing etc.), digital (e.g., filming, editing, remixing etc.) and networking (e.g., appreciating and responding to projected cultural landscapes) literacies. Importantly, among others, through stories students expressed their views and worries concerning potential dangers of social networking, and what attitudes would reduce environmental risks. It is these student views that we intend to analyze in order to unlock meanings and metaphors underlying pedagogical storytelling that combined the physical (or actual) and the digital site of learning.Peer reviewe