In recent years, the population of Quebec (Canada) has been confronted with numerous natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Following such events, the school environment is often called upon to implement strategies and interventions aimed at ensuring the well-being of students. Yet, faced with the distress experienced by young people exposed to natural disasters, teachers can feel helpless and limited in the interventions they can put in place. In order to build the resilience and empowerment of teenagers exposed to natural disasters, this paper aims to highlight the relevance of using Digital Storytelling (DST) in schools. DST is a research and intervention method that combines the art of storytelling with a mix of digital media, including text, images, audio narration, music and video. A concrete example of the application of this method in two school environments will be presented, based on an experiment conducted with 28 teenagers following their exposure to floods and tornadoes in the Outaouais region (Quebec, Canada).

The results of the evaluation of the implementation of this method with the young people who took part will be presented and discussed. Among the observed benefits of DST, our study highlights the opportunity for teenagers to express themselves about floods and tornadoes, the increase in their sense of solidarity with their community, and the achievement of various learning outcomes. DST helps teenagers better understand the events they experienced when they were exposed to a disaster, by enabling them to analyze the turning points associated with this event in their lives. These benefits associated with DST are also identified in other studies, which highlight that this method can enable teenagers to express their experiences (Boydell et al., 2017; Gubrium et al., 2019), develop a sense of belonging to their community (Jachyra et al., 2021; Maltais et al., 2018) and develop knowledge and skills (Jachyra et al., 2021; Kervin and Mantei, 2016). By focusing not only on the negative consequences of natural disasters, but also on the positive consequences that can arise from them, our study seems to have had a cathartic effect on some teenagers, exposing them to encouraging information, a factor associated with post-traumatic growth (Yu et al., 2010).

Keywords: Digital Storytelling, Disasters, Teenagers, Schools.