Storytelling as a cultural practice permeates all phases and areas of human life and opens up possible worlds. From their earliest days, children grow into a culture of storytelling, acquire language and literature, develop writing skills, and learn to communicate through storytelling in multimodal ways: orally and in writing, by playing, drawing, designing, singing, dancing and more. Through the process of narrating, experiences are structured, identities are formed, social contexts are shaped, and desires and futures are imagined. Narrative connects different times in history, various disciplinary fields in education and diverse linguistic-cultural spaces, but it also requires time and space itself. Against the background of an educational landscape that is currently competence-oriented, the question arises as to what role the art of storytelling plays in educational contexts, and what possibilities it opens up for learning. This edited volume aims to address this question, theoretically and empirically, from pedagogical and linguistic perspectives.

Maria Cristina Gatti (PhD) is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), where she also directs the Center for Academic Writing. She is an advisory member of the Center for Intercultural Dialogue (CID). As an applied linguist, she is currently leading research programmes on narrative in multilingual and multicultural settings, the role of English in multilingual education and professional environments, and language variation in transnational communication contexts. Jeanette Hoffmann (PhD) is Full Professor of German Literature Didactics at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy), where she also directs the EduSpace ChildrensLiteratureLab. Previously, she was Full Professor at the Technische Universität Dresden and worked at the University of Education Upper Austria and the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests are graphic storytelling, reading engagement, literary learning and language education in multilingual and intercultural contexts.