Experiential and narrative elements in the learning practices

Nowadays, storytelling is considered not only as an interesting tool for contents, values, cultural practices re-elaboration, but also as a means for socializing and sharing knowledge. Through stories, “sketches”, tales, in fact, a considerable amount of formal and informal knowledge is shared both in small institutions and enterprises and in big ones (Salmon, 2007). In this paper, storytelling will be investigated as a laboratory activity for students: an experimental environment — based on 2.0 web tools that allow students to produce contents and to create simple “narrative scenarios” — will be analysed. Through the scenarios, formal, impersonal notions can be transformed into stories, personal re-elaborations, and they can be enriched by colours, psychology, as well as experiential depth. Furthermore, the elaboration of a storytellingbased learning methodology allows us to carry out interesting analyses from the instructional design point of view: from the development of the teacher’s role up to the relation between learning practices and media consumption. In fact, the “fictional” dimension created by storytelling can be associated to media education practices and learning contents can be analytically and critically compared with media stories, stereotypes and the whole implicit knowledge deriving from media landscape.