Promoting narrative competence and media literacy in early childhood education through digital storytelling. A research instrument for analysing digital stories

The Erasmus+ STORIES research project ("Fostering early childhood media literacy competencies", 2015-2018) pursued the general objective of defining and disseminating guidelines and best practises for media education in early childhood education through digital storytelling, based on theoretical and empirical research. The research design mapped this general objective to the different dimensions of media education and assigned a prominent role to narrative competence. Thus, digital storytelling was placed in the context of broader school or classroom projects dealing with narrative languages and asking children generative questions about the idea of story and storytelling and the possibilities of digital storytelling. Consequently, among the various criteria for evaluating multimodal productions, the coherence of the narrative discourse plays a central role: the question arises as to what are the most salient features of the practises associated with the best crafted stories, i.e. the most complete and narratively organised. This paper focuses on a research instrument developed and validated within the project, which can also be used in other contexts to obtain comparable research data.