Conference Program

The growing development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly assuming a central role in media communication processes. The textual and visual information that we produce and disseminate daily represents an important educational challenge today, requiring greater critical awareness of the role of artificial intelligence and media in democratic participation processes (Panciroli & Rivoltella, 2023).

This context highlights the need to promote forms of thinking oriented toward solving complex problems and managing contemporary challenges. Data from ISTAT (2024) show the importance of strengthening digital competence in order to improve citizens’ democratic participation. Long and Magerko (2020) also emphasize the need to develop skills related to data interpretation, understanding machine learning processes, and reflecting on the ethical and social implications of algorithms. In this context, it becomes crucial to train future teachers to critically understand media languages within educational processes. The new DigComp 3.0 framework (European Commission, 2025) highlights the importance of reflecting on artificial intelligence across the five areas of digital competence.

This paper presents a teaching experience carried out within a university course on Educational Technologies, involving students enrolled in the Primary Teacher Education program. The activity was designed as a digital storytelling laboratory in which students created short educational video stories intended for primary school pupils, using generative artificial intelligence tools to produce images.

The activity aimed to enhance narrative design (Bruner, 1990; Robin, 2016), multimodal communication, and critical reflection on the role of AI in the creation of educational content. The choice to adopt a narrative methodology is linked to the role that storytelling plays in encouraging learners to ask questions, construct logical and causal relationships between events, and develop alternative perspectives. Recent studies highlight how the integration of generative artificial intelligence in storytelling activities can support students’ creative and metacognitive processes, fostering a comparison between human ideas and AI-generated suggestions (Niclós et al., 2024).

Accordingly, this study addresses the following research question: how can the use of generative artificial intelligence in digital storytelling activities contribute to the development of critical competencies related to media and algorithms in teacher education?

The exploratory study adopts a qualitative approach. A sample of 100 video stories created by the students was analyzed considering three main dimensions: a. the narrative coherence and educational intention of the produced stories; b. the relationship between textual prompts and the images generated by AI systems; and c. the integration of multimodal elements in line with principles of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2024). A questionnaire was administered to explore students’ perceptions of narrative meaning-making and the potential and critical aspects of AI in generating stories and images.

Preliminary findings indicate that narrative guided the construction of visual meaning in the videos, shaping the use of prompts and the generation of both referential and evocative images. The analysis also revealed the presence of bias in the generated images, offering students an opportunity to critically reflect on algorithmic processes and on the role of artificial intelligence in the production of media content.