Investigating Social Emotional Learning at Primary School through Guided Interactive Storytelling

Interactive digital storytelling serves as a powerful pedagogical framework for fostering social-emotional learning among primary school students. By utilizing tools like Fantastinomio, educators can provide a structured yet flexible environment where children engage in expressive authorship. This approach shifts the focus from prescriptive emotional instruction to a collaborative, creative process, allowing students to externalize and process complex feelings through the development of characters and narrative trigger events. Integrating personal creative elements, such as student-generated drawings, further enhances this experience by fostering a sense of agency and ownership over the emotional content being explored.

The effectiveness of this intervention relies on the balance between guided support and creative autonomy. When digital storytelling platforms offer suggestive rather than rigid guidance, students are better equipped to reflect on their emotional states and social interactions. This methodology is particularly relevant for addressing the unique behavioral and emotional challenges faced by children in contemporary educational settings, including the lingering impacts of global disruptions like the pandemic. By facilitating a space for narrative construction, the intervention helps students articulate and navigate their internal experiences in a safe, controlled manner.

This research underscores the procedural nature of interactive narratives and their potential to serve as digital manipulatives within the classroom. By grounding these findings in established theories of language acquisition and literacy, the study confirms that digital storytelling is a viable, scalable approach for primary education. Ultimately, the integration of technology into social-emotional curricula provides a meaningful pathway for children to develop emotional intelligence, demonstrating that open-ended design is essential for fostering deep, authentic reflection in young learners.