Investigating Social Emotional Learning at Primary School through Guided Interactive Storytelling

The combination of narrative learning, creative engagement, and Social Emotional Learning seems to be a promising approach to explore different subjects in educational scenarios. Yet, the use of technology for viable classroom interventions still needs to be investigated. This work looks into the essential characteristics of an interactive digital learning arrangement (IDNLA) for guiding storytelling to support Social Emotional Learning in the classroom. We conducted a study with an IDNLA authoring tool, named Fantastinomio, which facilitates storytelling through the choice of pictures, and aimed at promoting awareness on emotions through guided storytelling. The study was conducted in a Portuguese elementary school with a class of fourth-graders during three classroom sessions. The Fantastinomio’s story library was entirely created by the children with their drawings, which functioned as story elements that were displayed as random image sequences, and acted as stimulus for creating a story. Here, we present and discuss children’s representations of emotions in their drawings and in the stories they they produced. The results of this study indicate that it is possible to guide storytelling for the purpose of Social Emotional Learning in a classroom context, and that the intervention was positively influenced by the fact that the children authored the Fantastinomio’s library. Thus, expressive authorship and open-ended design for authenticity acted as essential characteristics for guiding storytelling for meaningful Social Emotional Learning. In future work, we will conduct further studies with the Fantastinomio exploring narrative learning for various classroom settings and learning purposes.