Digital Storytelling: Capturing the Stories of Children in Transition to Their First Year of Formal Schooling

Abstract

Digital stories are short, personal multimedia presentations created through the capture of image (still and/or video), which the creator then edits on a computer with video-editing software to include a spoken narrative. This case adds to the very new move to reconceptualise the digital story by positing it as a useful research method that generates rich multimodal narrative data from young children. As a new method in social science research, the digital story seems, at least so far, to raise more questions than it offers answers. Methodological questions might include the following: How do you engage young children with the digital storytelling process? How do you analyse these multimodal texts? Without offering definitive answers, this case begins to offer some clarity by describing step-by-step how we responded to these questions, what we did, the difficulties we encountered and the insights generated from these type of data and analysis. This case provides an account of how digital stories were used as a method to capture the stories of children (aged 4-5 years) as they made the transition from a prior-to-school setting to their first year of formal schooling.

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