Digital Prompts and Narrative Cues: Storytelling in the 1450s and in the 2020s

The Cent Nouvelles nouvelles present challenges to student learners of French linguistically, culturally and in terms of the content of the stories. Investigations designed to interrogate how the stories might have been collected in the second half of the fifteenth century end up demonstrating how the storytelling environment shapes the stories that are told and the way that they are understood. The experience of storytelling online during a period of pandemic learning is very different from the same experience in a pre- or post-pandemic classroom. Methodologies, such as critical pedagogy and inquiry stance pedagogy, which had limited resonance in the pre-pandemic environment, became much more central to the learner’s experience in the online, pandemic environment. This confirms the practices of ‘Flux pedagogy’, as advocated by Sharon M. Ravitch. Similarly, reactions to a story featuring the transmission of plague can be shaped by a framing that includes or excludes direct reference to the risk of infection experienced by the listeners.