Disrupting leaps of experience: digital storyworlds, transformative poiesis/praxis and narrative agency

Entering the digital storyworld of Deakinopolis (a narrative-based world of interrelated settings, characters and situations) is about imaginatively entering an alternative fictional storyworld that largely presents as factual, an experience that mirrors tertiary learners’ realities. Malouf talks of experience of story as ‘… being taken out of ourselves into the skin of another; having adventures there that are both our own and not our own … Release … into a dimension where reality is not limited’ (2008: 19). The digital storyworld of Deakinopolis contains alternative or imagined realities, where learners project their own experience in making this world coherent through their engagement with potentially unsettling perspectives. To encourage agency in active learner exploration, the storyworld is suspended out of time and sequence so that participants can imagine themselves through lapsed borders into that seemingly peripheral world. The learners activate their immersive engagement in this digital storyworld through praxical experience of unsettling perspectives, with potential for disrupting singular perspectives into transformative immersion of imagination as poiesis.