There is a notable conceptual complexity around terms like stories, narrative, and storytelling, depending on the discipline and the analytical tradition. In their approach to what they consider a ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences, Moezzi et al (2017) distinguish these three terms, which will be very useful to us in the context of this paper. Their proposed notion of stories is deliberately very generic: following the tradition of folklore, they consider stories as a logical way to explain circumstances, structured with a beginning, a middle and an end, featuring a protagonist (a person, animated creature, object, practice, or idea), and accompanied by a process of transformation or change. The authors understand narratives as formal story constructions, which usually appear in set written, visual, aural or audiovisual formats, in contrast with other informal, private, and often ephemeral story constructions. Finally, the notion of storytelling is associated with something more concrete: the execution itself, the act of telling a story in its context, in a situated way. Thinking in the storytelling vein leads us to wonder what drives the generation of a story at a given moment, why and how it is explained in a particular context, depending on its audience, the chosen time or place, and the goal sought: “[t]he ‘same’ story may be told quite differently from one instance to another, even by the same teller, challenging the notion of stories as stable data points” (Moezzi et al, 2017, p. 3). As previously suggested by Benjamin (1991), storytelling allows us to recover our focus on the characteristic context and community practices of sharing stories, distorted by the predominance of formal narratives such as novels and films. Thus, we can understand storytelling as a continuing attempt to ask ourselves questions about what we experience in the world and show our efforts to find meaning in it (Pereira and Doecke, 2016).

It is important to take into account other theories which make the notion of narrative more flexible than the formalisation of stories. For Veland et al (2018), narrative can be understood both as a cognitive structure that enables us to make sense of our experiences, and as a specific praxis, a communication technique which uses a set of widely recognisable elements, such as heroes, villains, conflicts, or a sense of closure. The tension between both approaches, according to the authors, is what gives narrative its capacity to foster conversation about complex subjects where we need to understand and juxtapose different experiences, in a process of co-creation of meaning. As part of our consideration of this dialectical dimension of narrative, in this paper we talk about storytelling in order to highlight the set of situated, realised, contextualised manifestations of the act of telling stories.

In CdH we work with storytelling as a playful framework for the co-creation of fictional stories in the classroom. According to Walsh (2007), fictionality enables us to establish a concrete communicative framework, characterised by the use of a set of distinctive and recognisable rhetorical elements. Thus, fictionality defines a clear call to the participants, and lets us direct our interpretative attention towards what is considered particularly important within a given narrative, or around its construction.

As Alkaaf (2017) remarks, from an early age children acquire a sense of what is a story, and quickly internalise an understanding of the internal structure of a fictional story and its connections to the personal and social imaginary.

Different authors agree on underlining the educational value of fiction for raising awareness of social problems, as it provides an emotional framework and gives a moral dimension to a given subject, making it relevant to the here and now (Bilandzic and Sukalla, 2019). Similarly, Otto’s (2012) analysis of the relationship between fiction and education in ecological skills, considers fiction to be an “educational machinery”, enabling participants to compare the everyday and the fictional worlds and better perceive the inadequacies of current worldviews and practices, in a process he calls “cognitive estrangement” (Otto, 2012, p. 49), opening up possibilities of a critical discussion of social norms and the role individuals play in the system. Thus, fiction should be understood not as an escape from reality, but as an escape to reality, and therefore encourages us to understand the role it may play in the creation of true empathy, not directed solely towards those we feel close to (Bal et al, 2021). Meanwhile, Pak (2015) highlights the high educational potential of science fiction for prompting interdisciplinary reflection, as it considers the role of both experts and non-experts, people and their environments. As well as its political role, fiction contributes to creativity when tackling certain types of complex problem, enabling us to do so indirectly and at more of a distance, through analogy and speculation (Dunne and Raby, 2013). At the same time, it facilitates co-creative work, as it lets us frame group strategies in a shared framework, thanks to elements which emerge from the media and popular culture during the experience, which constitute a shared cultural baggage (Roig, Pires de Sa y San Cornelio, 2018).

All of these considerations reinforce the role of fictionality as a viable approach to discussing social subjects, especially those that look to the future, at any educational level - which is our hypothesis and the starting point of our research. Fictionality establishes a privileged space for imagination and the meaningful projection of possibilities and alternative futures, which Cuzzocrea and Mandich (2016) call navigational capability; a way of opening a space to the future, defining a broader margin of possibilities for action. Similarly, Sools (2020) affirms that imagining possible and preferable futures can guide and motivate action. And here the imaginative function of narrative is a key tool for giving meaning to lived experience. Consequently, this imaginative function of narrative, apart from speculation, opens a path towards social action, given that its focus is on the meaning of events, in contrast to a mere description of demonstrable events and their development: “imagining futures is a political act that configures present actions, behaviours and decision-making” (Yusoff and Gabrys, 2011, p. 519).

We consider that this approach to storytelling, as both a tool and a creative result around a process of collective construction of stories in an educational context, contributes not only to experimentation with new creative ways to deal with curricular aspects in learning processes, but also to tackling complex and immediate social issues in which we want to involve the students as citizens.

The goal of the game is for each group to obtain the basic narrative elements which will be key to the second phase of the workshop: writing the story. The class is divided into sub-groups of 6-8 students, each of which is organised around a game board (see Figure 1).

The game starts when each group is given a card which is placed at the centre of the board: the premise. Formulated as a question, the premise contextualises and personalises the underlying subject each group will be working on. The premise submerges the participants in a world which is fictional but also recognisable and relatable, and is an initial stimulus.

Once the premise is in place, the game effectively begins. Each participant receives 7 cards, and the rest of the pack is placed on a specific space on the board. Gameplay consists of laying down a card from any suit, as each player chooses, and then rolling the dice. The faces of the dice have instructions such as “Vote”, “Play another card”, “Draw from the pack”, etc., and modify the status of the card played, adding the variable of chance or group agreement as a constituent element of creative practices. At the end of this turn, the next player takes a turn. The next player may opt to play a card from another suit on the corresponding area of the game board, or to lay a card from the same suit over a card another player laid down.

The game ends when nobody has any cards left. The result will be a board with only 6 cards visible and face up, one from each suit. These will be the elements the group must use along with the premise in the second part of the workshop, the collective creation of a story.

This second phase of the workshop is subdivided into two stages, first an individual stage and then a stage of group sharing and working in consensus. Each participant has a set of sticky notes on which they start imagining possible stories, or parts of stories, based on the cards face up at the end of the game, and how they connect to the premise. They are asked to write down these ideas and place them on the spaces on the board assigned to story creation, and more specifically in the beginning, middle or end areas, as appropriate, as shown in Figure 1. In the second iteration of CdH a neutral area was added, called the “ideas bank”, to hold any ideas which did not yet have a clear position in the story timeline, opening up the possibility of other, possibly non-linear structures.

Figure 1:

Photo of a CdH game board showing the result of the game and brainstorming.

In this stage of the workshop, each student has time to individually set up and break down parts of a narrative and add elements linked to their own interests and knowledge. In the second stage, they share their individual contributions and start writing the “final story” as a group.

With the premise ‘What would happen if the Internet suddenly disappeared?’ a group of students in year 1 of secondary school (ESO) at the Instituto Juan Manuel Zafra developed the story “The dawn of the Internet”. During the game, multiple hypotheses emerged based on the premise; however, the cards and especially the dice did not help put these stories forward. During the feedback session after the experiment, the students stressed that they had wanted “a thing to come up, and it didn’t”. The final character card (Figure 3) described the character as “Woman, film director, maker of historical documentaries”.

Figure 3:

Character card appeared in the round which led to the story “The Dawn of the Internet”.

Although all the character cards in the second iteration of CdH were in the same format, balancing giving the right information to start creating stories without restricting them too much, the members of the group found it more promising to work with the character “Woman, archaeologist, travels the world in search of the remains of ancient civilisations. Collects rare stones” shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4:

Character card used in the story “The Dawn of the Internet”.

So the participants arrived at a consensus that the filmmaker would eventually die (although the final video shows the two women working together to tackle the challenge of the switch-off). As we have seen again and again in this and other groups, if the premise does not fit with the game, creative strategies and tactics emerge, and even narrative “cheats”. In this way, different formal and informal strategies are generated to get closer to having the elements to create a story which represents them. The students updated the story and its protagonists according to their preferences and the worlds which seemed closest to them, and we considered it important as facilitators to encourage this type of transformation.

As we indicate above, an important element in the design of CdH as a participatory narrative experiment is brainstorming, where the story begins to take a tangible form. This phase of the workshop was subdivided into a first individual stage and a second collective stage; this dual dynamic aligns with other collaborative experiments which, according to Weiler (2015), provide different types of agency. In the first stage, each member of the group generates as many ideas as they can think of, writing them on sticky notes, and places them on one of the areas of the game board, according to the place they might occupy in the story (beginning, middle, or end) or in the large ‘ideas bank’. Some groups went as far as proposing new organisation methods, such as adding ideas to the cards and giving them new attributes. After the individual production time, each member presents their proposals to the group.

At this moment, the CdH team give them the following instructions: don’t make value judgements; dare to suggest “crazy” ideas; don’t limit yourself in terms of quantity; build new ideas based on other people’s initiatives; allow yourself to ask questions; and talk about ideas that seem to provoke conversation. From all of these instructions, “no judgements” became the most important, and at the same time the one we considered most difficult to follow. However, based on the field notes of the research team, we saw that in general this principle was adhered to more than we had expected. One explanation is that the students tend to internalise cooperation and voting processes. Some even organised themselves into roles such as secretary, manager, or coordinator, reflecting dynamics and competencies previously worked on in the classroom. We also found that they were restrained when generating and sharing ideas. Terms such as balance, moderation, and respect for fellow players recur throughout the field notes.

They sometimes used the sticky notes to change or refine elements of the cards and to note ideas which had previously arisen during the game, but they also tried to create new relationships or introduce outside elements which had nothing to do with the original cards. Thus, in the brainstorming sessions, there were multiple references to the immediate context (the game) and the players’ mental and social encyclopaedia (Eco, 1979); in other words, the importance of the wide variety of cultural knowledge stored in our minds, which helps us interpret different types of text and social contexts.

3.3.1. Example case

During brainstorming, the team that developed the story “The Dawn of the Internet” thought about the premise and the cards that appeared during the game. They asked “What happens in the world without the Internet?” and quickly concluded that “at the beginning people would complain, they would be desperate…”. This is when the archaeologist comes into the story, recalling having read about a similar event in a book, and based on this decides to find the solution to the problem: “she knew what she had to do was solve an enigma and she went to the library.” During feedback, the group explained how the characters in their narrative had got the Internet back, and how they based what they did on the book and films they had seen before: “[The characters] ended up getting the Internet back on the beach because there was an enigma in that book, which is in a prehistoric film (…) And, well, it’s called Dawn”. The primitive film in their narrative appeared in relation to the stones the archaeologist collected and the enigma generated in the past as the key to resolving the problems of the present.

In the written story (Figure 5) we see that “the archaeologist found a stone which interfered with the Internet”; an arrow, added later, pointed to its name: “Aragonite”. In the stop-motion animation, Aragonite took the form of a stone which fell from the sky to Earth, like a meteorite, destroying, in the words of the students during the feedback, “the Internet centre of the whole world”.

Figure 5:

Fragment of the narration “The Dawn of the Internet”, second phase or plot writing workshop.

At this point it is interesting to see how the imaginary Internet is constructed in a centralised, tangible space, more like the educational/ cultural/ government institutions that adolescents are familiar with, as seen in Figure 6, than with the notion of the “cloud” that is the usual symbolic form of the Internet in the adult world.

Figure 6:

Image from the stop-motion animation of the story “The Dawn of the Internet”, showing the moment when “Aragonite” falls to Earth and the Internet stops working.

That being said, the imaginary of the adolescent and pre-adolescent participants (video games; animation; TV series; Internet celebrities such as YouTubers, Instagrammers and TikTokkers; family members; and institutions) was shown to be a substantial inspiration for the idea-generation process, as it allows for the reinterpretation of discourses, stories, and aesthetics for the production of these narratives (Masanet et al, 2020).

It should be remarked that some narrative elements are lost when the story shifts to the audiovisual form in stop-motion animation, although others arise due to their familiarity with the audiovisual language. Most of the groups mentioned the lack of time during the production phase of the workshop; however, later they said they felt the step of shifting the story from paper to audiovisual animation had been an “easy” transition, thanks to the different materials they were offered “and to our imagination”, which of course is a key element in this storytelling practice.