A Cultural Re-mediation Model for Storytelling in Pre-school Education

Abstract

The use of the emotional language of stories and the amplification of the empathic driver thanks to the identification with story characters, makes the storytelling a valuable educational approach, especially for children. In accordance with embodied and situated cognition theories, manipulative storytelling proposes interactive environments where it is also possible for learners to manipulate the story through objects and tangible interfaces. In line with this vision, we propose in this paper a new model enabling the design and the execution of educational stories for children aged from 3 to 6. Stories are seen as sequences of missions: game experiences where children can interact to reach the educational objective. A re-mediation strategy, able to adapt the story on three different axis (immediacy-hypermediation, similarity-dissimilarity and aggregation-disaggregation) on the basis of assessment results, is also presented. A proof of concept based on the popular Brother Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel tale is then discussed to demonstrate the capabilities of the model in the construction and deconstruction of the building blocks of a story.