Instructional design and content

The learning content was primarily limited to the moral situations that happened on the public transports. The student participants repeatedly worked on the same moral scenarios over four weeks; though they tended to have a deep impression of these moral situations, they were not widely exposed to the various possible moral problems that could occur in different contexts. It was only in lesson unit 4 when the student participants were requested to provide various examples of considerate and inconsiderate behaviours that they went beyond the moral scenarios on public transports to think of other moral problems that occurred in home, school and other public places. It could be possible that since the student participants were grouped into four groups, each group could work on moral scenarios contextualised in different contexts. The learning content could then be expanded so that the student participants could be sufficiently exposed to and be more aware of the diverse moral situations and resolutions in different contexts.

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The DST procedures suggested by Lambert (2010) and Kajder (2004) emphasised on the clarification and structuring of a story; however, in hindsight, the step on the structuring of the story was found to be uncompleted in the new curriculum unit design. The planning of the story in the form of mind-map was done, but the mind-map was not further developed into a storyline or script before the start of the role-playing and storyboarding activities. The student participants did the playing based on the mind-map content, and not a prepared role-playing script, thus they tended to fumble for the initial ten to fifteen minutes of the activity as they were unsure of how they should carry out the playing task and the kinds of role-playing scenes they should take photographs of. After which, with the fragmented story content from the mind-maps and the random scene shots, the student participants’ visual and writing literacy skills were challenged as they struggled to organise the photographs into a story sequence and script-write concurrently. Thus, the quality of the created storyboards suffered and resulted to be over-simplified storylines.

Moreover, the role-playing activity turned out to resemble a silent scene shot process, whereby the student participants could only use facial expressions, gestures or other acting equipments to express the meaning of the scenes they had photographed. As such, the student participants’ moral affective dimension might not be fully triggered; they might not be able to fully immerse in the characters’ thoughts, feelings and needs to empathise with the characters’

situations. Nonetheless, according to the post-curriculum feedback, the student participants enjoyed the role-playing and photo-taking activities the most.

The curriculum unit could be revised to include a script-writing session, providing the students with time to develop the mind-maps into role-playing scripts and decide the critical scenes of the scripts that need to be recorded with photographs. With the scripts readily available, the students may more swiftly engage in and complete the role-playing activity. The way the role-playing process was conducted may also be revised. The students could act out

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the play according to the script with dialogues and actions, allowing them to better engage themselves in the characters’ roles. The students who are in-charge of photo-taking could also observe the entire play and take their discretion to take photographs of crucial scenes.

Furthermore, during the storyboarding process, the students would not need to worry about the storylines, but simply select and organise the taken photographs in accordance to the available story scripts. Consequently, less time would be needed for storyboarding and the students would have time to voice-record developing the storyboards into digital stories.

Due to the design of the template, the constructed digital reflection stories did not appear to be of a narrative story structure but a project presentation format containing slides with headings and mind-maps. The content was largely personalised as it contained the student participants’ life experiences and knowledge, but the student participants seemed to be constrained by the provided template and made little attempts to alter the template into their preferred format. The interviewed DST expert had mentioned that the structure of a DST may not necessarily be in the narrative style of introduction, body and conclusion, but in the structure that serves the needs of the subject lesson. Thus, the digital reflection story could be constructed in the exposition format. Instead of including mind-maps in the template, the students could do mind-mapping on paper and script-write the crucial content into their reflection story on the Powerpoint slides. The digital reflection story template could be adjusted to contain examples of sentence structures and guiding questions to the content sequences, reducing the students’ efforts to struggle with content sequencing and sentence constructions. Consequently, with the revised template, the end product would more likely resemble a digital story rather than a planning product of DST.

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