Producing digital stories for language learning and digital competence across generations and positions of learners in municipalities

• Aim: There is a strong need for methods how to develop language learning and digital competence through all levels of education, and in particular for adult immigrants. In Sweden, the responsible organization for such adult education is called Swedish For Immigrants (SFI), hosted in municipalities. Our paper will describe and analyze a specific effort to create innovative models to not only enhance language learning but also digital competence, something that is emphasized in all levels in the Swedish educational system ranging from kindergarten to adult educations in which SFI is part of. Furthermore, it will also describe how future digital divide between new arrivals and their children growing up in a digital society can be prevented.Method and process: The study is framed as an action design research study incorporating initial trials in classroom practice of first translating stories from the mother tongue into Swedish and then later make a digital production using voice and pictures freeware functions in an app on surf tablets. These digital folk tales were then made accessible with QR codes in both Swedish and mother tongue. The latter with the aim of spreading digital folk tales in different mother tongues for children at kindergartens. In order to create an authentic situation for the adult learners in the SFI class, the teacher arranged for the learners to present their stories at kindergartens for both children and staff. At each visit there were 4 students, meeting 8-10 children and 8 staff. This turned out to be a true learning experience for all involved participants.Result: In a short period of time the immigrants learnt how to produce digital stories and QR-codes. The children were able to use their tablets and find different stories on different languages on laminated printed QR-code. After listening to the stories, the children could ask questions directly to the producer of the story what it was about including additional questions linked to the specific country the adult person came from. After the round of different stories in Swedish the immigrants hold a presentation for the kindergarten staff about how they had worked with the process of the making of the digital production. Inspired by the immigrants in combination of the response from the children, the staff became enthusiastic in relation to work with digital competence more related to their own work practice rather than a top-down demand, as they had previously experienced curriculum driven need to develop digital competence for their young children.Conclusion and future plans: In this case, we could clearly see promising effects from the combined effort of involving actors from children to top management of the municipality interlinked by the curriculum demand of developing digital competence and language learning combined with 21 century skills in life-long learning. Our argument is that story driven digital production combined with co-located presentations and cross generational meetings and talk, is a fruitful way of collaborative effort to empower both children, immigrant adult learners and professional practice of education. The next step is to enlarge the number of participant and have more kindergartens involved in this collaborative model of supporting lifelong learning to find out more about the positive effects seen so far in the design process as well as its problems.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik med samhällsvetenskaplig inriktning (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Information Systems, Social aspects (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Digital competence

language learning

digital stories

Work Integrated Learning

Arbetsintegrerat lärande

Informatik

Informatics

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)