Narrativas en la era digitalmediaciones del relato y empoderamiento creativo en la generación Z

Abstract

Fairy tales transport us automatically to faraway places and distant times. This projection is neither magic nor childish: it is deeply rooted in human cognitive processes. Storytelling [narration, narrative] has gone hand in hand with humanity since the beginning of time, and has developed at its side through different times and cultures. Along this dissertation, narrative will not be considered just as a literary genre, but as a key gnosiological, ontological and sociological concept. Nowadays, a new narrative and media era is consolidating thanks to the Internet and the digitalization. If the writing led communication to the sensory world of eyesight, the connected digital world, involving several senses (hearing, eyesight, touch), goes beyond them. It acts as a prosthetic appliance to extent human experience to virtual worlds and digital-physical hybrid realities. In the face of this disruption of traditional patterns with respect to knowledge and social models, how are school and formal education institutions reacting? Academic literature on the topic reveals a feeling of institutional isolationism, describing a separation between the classroom and anything happening beyond its four walls. Literacy is still conceived on the base of writing and reading, which creates an abyss between education and daily media usage by learners and citizens. The main objective of the present dissertation is to bridge this gap by describing and implementing potentialities and strategies to reach narrative empowerment of youth from a new perspective. Several authors have highlighted the benefits of narrative creation for the learning process. Concurrently, several projects from the media sphere show their interest for education. Among them, we can find Educ’Arte, NFB Education, Minecraft Education, Scratch and la Maleta 7 de cinema. These proposals display learning strategies, in which the force goes from communication to education, thus changing the traditional vector direction. This new vector, labelled as com-educational, will be the silver thread of our work. Therefore, besides analysing the platforms, we will study the contemporary digital creation and its modalities through the knowledge and experience of their narrators. As a last step, we will build a pilot platform from a com-educational approach. The findings of this research are that the tripartite combination references - mimesis (imitation) - poiesis (praxis) is the main axis of the narrative learning process, being the latter of special importance. Under this method, knowledge is reinforced by the establishment of nodes among concepts, allowing a significant reconstruction in the form of a discourse and its appropriation. In the strategical approach, community, identity and (creative) agency determine a feedback system that should respond to emotio (impulse, private and collective necessity), empathy (connecting to others, social component), and transformation (social impact, system improvement). It is with this context that the online digital potential features (interactivity, hypermedia, connectivity, transmedia strategy, virtuality), together with the different media modalities, find their raison d'être and their goal. In opposition to technological utilitaniarism, this dissertation approaches the integration of digital narration for empowerment in education in a prospective way. It includes suggesting present and future meanings based on autonomy, agency and creation, reviewing sending and receiving codes -also from a praxis perspective-, using mediation in accordance with its objectives, tracing possible futures on the basis of community acceptation and recognition. The idea is to avoid that our destiny is ruled by alien, anonymous wills. On the contrary, communication should be undertaken by personal and collective actions -based on awareness and responsibility-, breaking the fourth wall in the classroom (and in the society).