Material Design and Audio-Visual Narratives for Pedagogy: Theoretical Premises and Evaluation Tools for Experimenting Stop-Motion Animation as Teaching Method

Since the early 1900s the pedagogical research has matured a materialist perspective, recognizing the essential contribution of creative practice and material experience within learning paths. Starting from John Dewey's philosophy of experience (1938), passing through Maria Montessori and Bruno Munari's experimental teaching methods, Riccardo Massa's "educational materiality", to the most recent socio-material approaches, pedagogy has embraced the relationship between human beings, material art and experience design. These studies have explored and theorized how learning and knowledge are rooted in actions that encourage creativity, cooperation and reflective thinking. By starting from this theoretical framework and taking up the educational objectives formulated by the OECD for 2030, the proposed paper illustrates the methodological and theoretical coordinates of the research project “CCODE - Design, material experiences and stop-motion animation as didactic tools for developing creative thinking and cooperative learning”, that suggests an experimental learning method based on storytelling and stop-motion animation tools, thus amplifying the educational value of this art form. The understanding and analysis of a narrative text, its transposition into a screenplay, the material manipulation and the stop-motion animation process are the phases described to structure an unprecedented and interdisciplinary method of acquiring theories, techniques and develop socio-emotional-cognitive skills. The paper therefore aims at disseminating the project’s premises and ethical implications and describes both the experimental teaching module based on learning by doing (Bruner 1966, Dale 1969) and the evaluation tools carried out to validate the approach, the method and the educational objectives achieved.