Collecting aboriginal stories for education through immersion

Abstract

This research is in the area of life-long learning through storytelling, focusing on the use of multiple individual stories to create an immersive environment for learning cultural concepts or recreating historical environments. We take the approach that while an individual's story is developed through collecting stories from different times, more conceptual community narratives are developed through collection from many individuals from different perspectives. We have focused on stories explaining the experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia at the 'cultural interface' [1], an approach we explain in this paper. There is no one story of this experience, and some historians ([2]; [3]; [4]) claim that different people's stories could conflict. We consider here ways to either avoid or use these conflicts. This work is also aimed at enabling Indigenous people, who are more skilled users of multimedia than text, to construct useful learning material that retains their cultural values and intent. This will involve creative software tools, especially for surmounting the vast difference in culture and learning processes between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Australia. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.