Learning Narratives with Harry Potter. “Manuel de Fallas’s The Prophet Newspaper”

Abstract

This chapter presents, from an ethnographic perspective, how the use of multiple media platforms promotes the learning of new literacies in school as proactive participants in virtual and transmedia universes. The main goal has been to design scenarios that develop children’s narrative thinking while they learn to tell stories with a video games adventure, particularly “ Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ” . Data collection started on school year 2008/2009 and is currently ongoing. Twelve to thirteen year-old pupils of a public secondary school created a newspaper in their Spanish language class in which they told their adventures in the game. The students analysed the narratives of the game and generated new stories based on their own experiences. A teacher and the researchers have explored how pupils recognise that “there are many ways of telling stories” and that these are quite different depending on the “language” used to tell them.