Creating Stories of Learning, for Learning: Exploring the Potential of Self-Narrative in Education with 'Our Journey'

Participatory research led us to identify that students lacked means to represent their individual journeys through study and that their diverse goals, challenges and personal contexts were not easily understood. Prompted by this, we created 'Our Journey' to support them and harness the value of these narratives as a means for reflection and communication. This paper explores self-narrative processes and how they can be beneficial, describes the design of Our Journey, and introduces examples of collaboratively-developed pilots, where different activities using the platform are being devised and trialled. We reflect here on how new opportunities for self-narrative creativity can be supported in simple and engaging ways, and how flexibility in the design means the same underlying structure can be used online and in a physical form, for one-off retrospective narratives and ongoing journal activities, and with prompts for individual and shared reflection as appropriate.