Transmedia Storytelling in Education as a Practice of Media Ecology

ETC: A Review of General Semantics. 2023. Vol. 80. No. 2. P. 271–287.

Novikova A.

This article analyzes theoretical and methodological approaches to transmedial storytelling in schools. Schools and universities are integrating into the polymedia environment that reshapes our understanding of cultural tradition, social standards and practices of reality construction. This  necessitates augmenting pedagogy beyond traditional reading skills  and knowledge of  classical literature. Multi-platformed approach requires revaluation of traditional forms of humanities in education, including formation of intermedial and intersemiotic reading skill. Analyzing challenges of modern world and offering ways to solve problems, this research is based on well-known international cultural and media research, and on less internationally known  ideas of Russian thinkers Yuri Lotman and Yuri Rozhdestvensky. Transmedial strategy allows to address  the challenges these  researchers identified at the end of the XX century. In literature class, this  strategy improves  interpretation skills and intersemiotic translation skills. Through  creative projects based on classical literary works, tradition is reevaluated and new educational aspirations are formed. The effectiveness of transmedial educational strategy is viewed on examples of educational projects based on works of Leo Tolstoy, made by Higher School of Economics students in cooperation with the Tolstoy museum in Moscow.

Keywords: Leo Tolstoy, modernization of school education, Media literacy, intersemiotic translation, polymedia