How to teach creativity and didactics to write children’s stories with a pedagogical aim. A case study of an international blended course

The Faculty of Education at UVic-UCC and the Department of Education at UNIRomaTre have organized an international blended course embedded in the Laboratory of English Language for pre-service Primary teachers in their 5th year in Roma Tre every semester for the last three years. The course aimed to foster creativity and language competences in pre-service teachers in their final year while providing them with methodological skills and examples of active engagement in creativity sessions. Task-based activities ranged from self-assessment questionnaires to story writing, making the Lab a sort of hub for innovative strategies and practices in language teaching using creative writing. Before starting Unit 3, dedicated to storytelling, students answered an individual questionnaire investigating previous knowledge on the topic. Students were then asked to write a story for children in English, in groups, with the imagined purpose of using it in a class of their own, discussing the steps of the task on the Lab online forum. Following the teacher’s guidelines, students were challenged to reflect on different structures and innovative strategies in storytelling sessions as both learners and trainee-teachers. The objective was to enable pre-service teachers to learn how to write good stories for primary school pupils learning English as a Second/Foreign language, starting from the narrative structures and base-chain given and complying to all the elements required The outputs collected, currently under research (based on a quali-quantitative approach), were meant as an assessment for the students. As for the clues for assessment/results, six items were evaluated, so to explore the extent of the students’ creativity and understand how they interpreted the potential of using stories to develop linguistic awareness and extra-linguistic competences in their pupils The SL/FL and creativity teaching and learning strategies implemented have proven effective also in conveying intercultural and inclusive attitudes (Leproni 2020), representing motivating challenges to tackle the future teachers’ reflective competences in a life-long learning perspective