Abstract

Digital storytelling is a strategy that has shown to be capable of developing a wide range of skills (e.g., Niemi, 2016). This research's main goal was to investigate pre-service teachers' perceptions of the relationship between digital storytelling and the development of critical thinking. For this purpose, a semester-long digital storytelling project was implemented in five subjects of a teaching training program at a Belgian university. At the end of the semester, eleven students from the course participated in semi-structured interviews. An inductive approach was utilised to code and analyse these interviews. The results suggest that pre-service teachers are able to perceive the relationship between digital storytelling and critical thinking are related to the possibility of deep reflection, using different sources of information, representing thoughts and thinking, empowering them on the knowledge they create and the possibility of thinking about the content differently. These results provide teacher trainers with tools to address the development of critical thinking in pre-service teachers based on the student's perspective of how they view the process of their instruction, using a strategy that sheds light on how to approach it in the classroom.