Empowering the Learner through Digital Animated Storytelling: Developing Innovative Learning Designs for the Multimodal Classroom

The advent of new media offer potentials for multimodal learning [1] to the learners. This also calls for new learning designs that fully make use of digital media and explore how they can be used to create a motivating and
meaningful learning environment that addresses the learner’s individual needs and different preferences for expression.
With the old norms for authority based on teacher centric classrooms changing, there is a need to develop ways that can engage, motivate and empower the learners to take part in learning activities that are inherently meaningful to each student. Storytelling and narrative is fundamental to the process of meaning making according to the seminal works of cultural psychologist Jerome Bruner [2].
.As the Canadian educational theorist Kieran Egan [3] suggests, there is an important relationship between storytelling and imagination because it is ”central to the general ability to make meaning out of experience.”
One way to design for narrative multimodal learning is to introduce the learners to the tools to make digital animated stories as a way to work with literacies in the classroom. In this way it may offer the learners a platform for meaningful involvement in the school, where they are intrinsically motivated to perform task that they feel are relevant in the context of the narrative universes they are creating, fostering selfefficacy and a sense of empowerment, which may be important to further learning experiences.