Digital Storytelling with Pre-service Teachers: Raising Awareness for Refugees Through ICTs in ESL Primary Classes

This article describes the design and implementation of a Digital Storytelling (DS) experience that was carried out in a foreign language setting with pre-service teachers. This case study sets out to assess the effect of DS aimed at becoming a social awareness and pedagogical tool for both, high education and consequently, primary students. The overall structure of the study revolves around the teaching-Learning process that involves educational centres and society. The first stage of this procedure was to make pre-service teachers enhance their L2 by researching on the Syrian refugees’ conflict prior to write a short academic paper. Freely available online resources through their mobile devices in class became the source materials. Then, their writings evolved into the scripts of a digital story. Formerly, they transferred their knowledge beyond university boundaries: to primary children because some of the pre-service teachers used DS with the primary students of their practicum internship period. Conversely, their digital stories were shared also with the society in general in the 4ª MICE (International Contest of Educational Cinema). Overall, these results indicate that this experience provided some useful insights into the use of DS with pre-service students and its repercussion in primary education