Detecting Gender Stereotypes in Children Digital StoryTelling

Abstract

Gender is a major variable affecting identity and life opportunities from a young age. Our research aims to explore the persistence of gender stereotypes in multimedia stories created by children with the final purpose of attenuating this stereotypical thinking by proposing new processes and tools. The paper investigates the following research question: how can gender stereotypes be detected in the stories produced by children with Digital StoryTelling? We addressed this issue by analyzing 23 multimedia stories created by 83 children, aged 11-12 years. The outcomes were two main contributions. The first, methodological, is an evaluation methodology made of five lenses: Role, Embodiment, Personality, Agency, and Emotion. The second are implications for the design of a tool to stimulate children's discussion around gendernormative attitude and behavior.

Engaging Children in Story Co-Creation for Effective Serious Games

“…Children's ideas were constrained within the game examples they had encountered before, and novelty in terms of game design was generally low [3]. Consistently with previous work, the enactment of violent behavior [3,7] and strong gender stereotypes in storytelling [75] were common. Most of the heroes were tough male fighters, and the few female characters were relegated to loving companions or naughty witches.…”

Raising Awareness of Stereotyping Through Collaborative Digital Storytelling: Design for Change with and for Children

“…The multimedia stories kept the fairy tale structure and were narrated using audio, text, images, video and photos. Children were grouped in teams (up to 4 each) by the teachers, with the aim of balancing their language, digital literacy, and drawing skills (as in [68]). Teachers also considered children's ability to collaborate within a group.…”

“…A study demonstrated how the use of storytelling stimulates a higher motivation in programming in girls [43]. More recently, Rubegni's work investigated how gender stereotypes can be detected in the stories produced by children via Digital StoryTelling [68]. The authors developed an evaluation methodology made of five lenses (Role, Embodiment, Personality, Agency, and Emotion) and indicated implications for the design of a DST to stimulate children's discussion around gender-normative attitudes and behavior [68].…”

“…We also elaborated some concrete suggestions on how to design a DST tool with this purpose in mind. While phase 1 [68] and 2 [69] have been reported in other publications, this article is focused on providing an overview of the whole project and, as an original contribution, we report on the results of the prototype use by children in school.…”

Collaborative comic-based digital storytelling with primary school children

“…This aspect gave the students the opportunity to practice collaboration while working on the same narrative, waiting for the turn while being engaged and motivated by the peer. As it was noted in Rubegni et al [39], children often come up against problems while collaborating, as it is difficult to establish a turn-taking mechanism in traditional school activities; with a tool like Communics featured with a turnbased mechanism this problem could be overcome. Teachers appreciated also the individual story composition, as young students could still practice with the narrative elaboration, including the development of story path and the dialogue presented.…”