Pedagogical Encounters with Inanimate Alice: Digital Mobility, Transmedia Storytelling, and Transnational Experiences

Inanimate Alice (IA) is a digital novel that employs strategies of transmedia and game-based storytelling in order to appeal to the “born-digital” generation. Using a simple episodic narrative structure, IA moves readers around the globe as Alice travels to various locations and homes in different national contexts. Thematically, the narrative both allays and raises anxieties about children’s experiences of mobility and migration. Incorporating literary and cultural analysis with multimethod qualitative research, this article investigates the ways in which children’s understandings of their practices of mobility are shaped by transmediation and their reading experiences of IA. It also considers how adults and young people might work together in their encounters with such texts to create “animated learning” scenarios that privilege what I call alternative pedagogies of mobility, in which adult-child hierarchies are disrupted and physical and virtual movements are considered essential to experiential, reflective learning.