When the NINF came home: guiding parents and children in the co-construction of narratives linking home and school learning

Dialogues between children and parents about school are often uninformative providing little understanding of what a child is learning, how she is progressing and how a parent might better support this. We aim to help children, parents and teachers co-construct richer multi-perspective narratives linking home and school learning and hence improve overall understanding of the child’s learning. Our approach employs concepts from previous work on a non-linear interactive narrative framework. Here we describe a novel interactive learning environment, which travels between school and home on tablet PCs, and has helped improve parental understanding of children’s school-based learning. We discuss the limitations of this work, indicate some future directions and ask how else theories of interactive narrative might be used to enrich the stories parents build about their children’s learning.