Digital Integration Story Telling Erasmus Project

Project Title

Digital Integration Story Telling

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Migrants’ issues; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

The project ‘Digital Integration Storytelling’ (DIST) was launched against the background of the European refugee crisis and based on the insight that it is necessary to develop teaching methods that promote understanding between people with different histories. The most obvious way to achieve this is to let pupils tell their (integration-) stories themselves. The diversity of the DIST consortium: two small non-formal educational institutions with social engagement, two university institutes with different focuses: teacher and media education, a large counselling and support organisation for refugees and a local educational institution specialising in English and the national language, have complemented each other very well for this task.
The main project objective was to strengthen social integration and understanding of diversity among school children.
The secondary objective was to promote the professionalism of teachers and student teachers with a view to using digital storyelling as a method to strengthen integration and diversity in their learning groups, but also as method which can be used for other purposes as well (e.g. language teaching).
A further secondary objective was fostering the pupils’ media competence.
With regard to these goals, the main result of DIST is that more than 500 children have participated in digital storytelling workshops. Out of about 270 videos, some of which they produced in small groups, more than 100 were published on the DIST YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC-RiQxg_v6JpzpRZ1tcNbA). The stories that the young authors did not want to publish, however, were shown at internal screenings with e.g. other students, teachers or parents.
In order to be able to carry out these student workshops at the different locations, project staff were trained as part of learning-teaching-training-activities. Based on the training materials and the experience gained from the first student workshops, a multilingual manual for teachers was developed. It enables them to conduct digital storytelling workshops themselves (http://www.dist-stories.eu/dist-manual/).
In total, over 3000 people were directly reached through various workshops and other events. The number of hits on the project website and the youtube channel is also well over 3000.

As described in the above-mentioned manual, the student workshops followed a scheme – adaptable to local conditions:
1) Preparation
At the beginning, it has to be explained to the students what digital storytelling actually is; in particular, it is about understanding digital stories, i.e. their typical length and possible narrative styles, etc.; in addition, technical information (software and hardware, data protection, etc.) and, of course, the subject matter to be dealt with in each case. Furthermore, it has proven to be useful to show sample videos, if possible with different aesthetic approaches, in order to convey an understanding of the variety of creative possibilities.
2) Telling and writing
This central phase can begin with a so-called Story Circle; here anyone, who wants to, can present the idea for a story, also to inspire others in concern of their stories. But most of all, this central phase is about writing a storyboard and the script for the story.
3) Creating audio/media
With a view to the script, it is then necessary to recite and record this text and to select or produce visuals (pictures, videos, drawings etc.).
4) Video production
With the help of a video editing software the different parts are then put together and adequately cut.
5) Screening
For the success of the digital storytelling method it is important that the individual results are presented – at least within the learning group. In the mutual role-takin, a specific understanding of the other(s) develops.

In order to be able to carry out the various student workshops and to address integration in a didactically appropriate manner, further activities were necessary in addition to those already mentioned; particularly video interviews with experts on this difficult topic were conducted (and documented on the youtube channel) and salient information was collected in the context of ‘country reports’ (http://www.dist-stories.eu/analyses-of-the-national-integration-situation/).

The evaluations of the student workshops show a high degree of satisfaction among the participants. The enthusiasm surprised even the project staff in many cases. In the long term, the partners in particular will benefit from being able to incorporate an effective method into their curriculum or portfolio.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 204708 Eur

Project Coordinator

Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg & Country: DE

Project Partners

• ELAN INTERCULTUREL
• Archivio della Memoria
• European Learning Centre
• LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY
• Zentrale Information und Beratung für Flüchtlinge gGmbH