Storytelling and digital story mapping: educational tools made available to our international young people to tell us part of their personal life paths related to early school leaving.
From 18th to 22nd September 2017 the Tell Your Story training course took place in Palermo, at CESIE. The project involved 18 NEETs from 16 to 25 years old – young people who are not in education, employment, or training – and 1 trainer per partner organisations coming from 6 different countries: France, Austria, Italy, Slovenia, UK and Belgium.
The youngsters, selected for their common early school leaving experience, had the opportunity to spend 5 intensive days sharing their stories through several tools. They have been able to deepen what storytelling means and which are the ways to tell a story, focusing then on digital storytelling.
Here they explored the ArcGIS platform, a tool provided by EUROGEO – European Association of Geographers to create personalised maps. Connecting with their own emotional past experience, participants revisited their personal life’s moments and selected some memories to integrate in their personal storytelling. The content has been thus transformed in a creative shape within ArcGIS platform and shared with the rest of the group on the last day.
The laboratory achieved very positive results among the participants: it clearly gave many young people the opportunity to compare life experiences different from theirs, to tell and share with others their own personal stories and to gain new digital tools to do it.
This training course will be soon followed by a piloting phase which will be run at local level by every partner:
- to test all the modules foreseen by the project;
- to produce results and share them in the publication Preventing early school leaving through maps and digital stories.
To see a Digital Story Map example created through ArcGIS by EUROGEO click here.
