Children’s digital storymaking: The negotiated nature of instructional literacy events

Narrative is used in early childhood education to engage children in reading and writing. With the advent of digital technologies, new contexts are created for multimodal ways of narrating. The purpose of this study is to illuminate the relationship between a digital storymaking activity and the stories made in an early years practice. The results show that the children’s texts to varying degrees approximate a narrative genre and illustrate how these variations can be understood in terms of how the participants negotiate the task.

"Software applications like Storybird might offer various possibilities, such as the different organizations of images, but it is the teacher’s scaffolding that enables the fulfilling of the educational task. In the studied literacy events, the teacher – as seen in terms of spatial metaphors – primarily mediates the children’s attention to the ‘vertical’ relationship between an image and its text (caption – even if each text graphically comes to stand beside its respective image) while the ‘horizontal’ relationship, that is, weaving a succession of events as pivotal to the development of a story, is less focused.... From our study we conclude that it is problematic to assess young children’s literacy skills from a final product, a completed text, since what is displayed in the written text does not reflect the collaborative storymaking process." (Authors, 186-187)