Cinematic Learning: From Narrative to Inquiry

Exploring imagination, emotion and reflection through curriculum design

By David Billinge, August 2026

Who We Are (2026) - Aya running through the torii gates.

We had already visited the school shrine. Students had taken notes, made observations and recorded their questions using a See, Think, Wonder routine. One detail kept returning: animals seemed to be everywhere. Stone guardians stood beside shrines, while sleepy cats and street dogs wandered through the same spaces. Then, back in the classroom, Aya noticed an animal too — a mysterious fox waiting beyond a glowing torii gate. Like the students, she was curious. And like them, she had to decide whether to take a step forward. When Aya crossed the threshold, she entered a world of memory, belonging, loss and inquiry.

This is what I call Cinematic Learning: an approach in which students engage with a carefully constructed and intentional narrative before encountering questions, tensions and experiences that require questioning, reasoning and meaning-making. Through this process, patterns and connections begin to emerge, allowing students to relate the ideas within the story to their own experiences and understanding of the world.

What if students didn’t just study a concept, but identified with it and felt it?

So much of education is structured around right and wrong answers. I wanted to create a space that did something different: one that presented questions rather than conclusions, and gave students room to interpret, argue and construct their own sense of what might be right, wrong, or somewhere in between.

I did not begin with Egan’s theory in mind. The use of contrasts, tensions and open-ended questions developed much more instinctively through practice. It was only later, while reading Kieran Egan’s Teaching as Story Telling (1989), that I began to recognise why this approach felt so natural. Egan argued that imagination has often been treated as less important than other aspects of education, rather than as a central part of how learners make sense of the world. He showed how powerful contrasts, such as good and evil, safety and danger, or known and unknown, can give learners an imaginative structure for exploring complex ideas (Egan, 1989).

The narrative gives those ideas form. Rather than introducing identity, belief or loss as isolated concepts, the story allows students to encounter them through character, tension and consequence. Aya does not explain these ideas to the students; she experiences them, and the students are invited to interpret what those experiences might mean.

The narrative invites students to position themselves alongside Aya, both within her world and within her way of experiencing it. Her journey begins to mirror their own learning journey: she encounters uncertainty, makes decisions, discovers new possibilities, and experiences moments of belonging and loss, while students move through their own questions, challenges and discoveries in parallel. Bruner describes narrative through two intertwined landscapes: the landscape of action, concerned with what characters do, and the landscape of consciousness, concerned with what they think, feel and understand (Bruner, 1986). In Cinematic Learning, students are invited to engage with both. Aya’s journey gives form to their inquiry, while their own experiences give personal meaning to hers.

But the approach was not developing only as a theory of imagination and narrative. It was also solving a practical curriculum problem. A six-week Unit of Inquiry had to bring together multiple subject areas, standards and learning requirements without feeling like a collection of disconnected lessons. Egan provides examples of storytelling being used within individual academic subjects. My challenge was slightly different: how could those different subjects be integrated into one coherent student learning journey? ‘Who We Are’ became an attempt to use story not simply within the curriculum, but as a structure capable of holding the curriculum together.

Pepper’s Ghost emerged as a response to a particularly challenging science standard: students were expected to use a model to show how animals receive different types of information through their senses, process that information in their brain, and respond in different ways (Next Generation Science Standards, n.d.). Integrating this into a Unit of Inquiry centred on identity, culture and belief required some imagination. Fortunately, the space we were already operating in as a class, somewhere between certainty and uncertainty, explanation and possibility, offered the flexibility to make that connection.

The narrative took another turn. Late one night, Aya was visited by a mysterious old woman at her bedroom window. Was she real, or was she an illusion? And did the answer depend partly on who was looking, what they believed, and how they understood what they had seen? Students then recreated the illusion themselves, using Pepper’s Ghost as a scientific model to investigate how light enters the eye, how visual information is interpreted, and why the same image can produce different responses.

This evolved into a somewhat spooktacular scientific investigation built around yet another pair of opposites: spiritual belief or scientific process? Each student had their own reasons for choosing a side, while some found themselves somewhere in the space between. Nevertheless, it became a striking example of how narrative and imagination could transform an otherwise disconnected academic standard into something lived, experienced and remembered.

The precise wording of the science standard was hardly inspiring as student-facing language, and of course it was never intended to be. Yet it demonstrated something important: when imagination is given space to operate, even a disconnected or uninspiring learning objective can become meaningful and memorable. Pepper’s Ghost moved the conversation beyond the factual. The learning became conceptual, contentious and debatable, opening up the wider inquiry into Who We Are: what we believe, how we interpret what we see, and what we choose to remember. It gave students something to think about, argue about and remember.

Students investigating light and illusions with the Pepper's Ghost model.

*The students in this image have been replaced with AI alternatives for

anonymity. The scene and activity remains the same.

Now that we were operating within this in-between narrative world, and even within the spirit world of Aya’s story, the old woman was able to return, perhaps answering some questions while creating others. A second activity that captured the students’ imagination centred on Grandma’s onigiri recipe. Handed down to Aya within the spirit world, its meaning was deliberately left open to interpretation. Students connected with the story kinetically, mushing and moulding the rice in their hands as they followed a written recipe and set of instructions. Yet it was the conversation afterwards that became most intriguing. Students began sharing stories about their own grandmothers and family members, including some who were no longer with them. It was in that moment that I realised narrative-driven inquiry could become emotionally powerful in ways I had not anticipated. One student even shed a few tears, which, much to my relief, they quickly explained were “happy tears” driven by the memory and connection to their own family member.

Emotion seems to be at the heart of Cinematic Learning. The question then becomes: if emotion can drive engagement, discussion and inquiry, how do we create it intentionally?

One of the key components of inquiry-based learning is students’ ability to reflect on their own work and learning process (Murdoch, 2022). The challenge is how students can describe that learning as a journey without a language or structure to support them. Given that narrative had already become the contextual spine of the unit, it seemed natural to introduce a narrative language that might help students recognise stages, challenges, growth and reward within their own experience. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey offered an obvious starting point: a recurring narrative cycle that many of us already recognise, consciously or otherwise, through popular culture and perhaps through patterns within our own lives (Campbell, 2008).

Fortunately, Christopher Vogler had already done much of the work of simplifying Campbell’s model (Vogler, 2020) and I adapted it further with a primary classroom in mind. What emerged was a simple nine-stage learning journey that students could use to map their own experience. They begin in the Ordinary World, before encountering a Call to Adventure and then Crossing the Threshold into a world of inquiry. Along the way they identify their Mentors, encounter Tests & Allies, and eventually face an Ordeal, their greatest challenge. Resurrection represents emerging from that challenge as a stronger or more refined version of themselves, while the Elixir represents the knowledge, understanding or skill gained through the experience. Finally comes the Road Back Home: how will they use this new knowledge, take action, and carry something from the journey back into their everyday lives? On the student reflection sheet, Tests & Allies appears twice, simply to give students more space to record the different challenges, activities and people they encounter along the way.

An example of student reflection and metacognition using The Hero's Journey.

At this stage, Cinematic Learning was beginning to take shape as a model: narrative helped solve the challenge of curriculum coherence, emotional connection gave the learning experience greater meaning, and the Hero’s Journey provided students with a structure for reflecting on their own growth.

A secondary experimental strand, which I call The Soundtrack to Learning, explores whether music can extend that emotional connection beyond the classroom. By carefully designing music around key moments in the journey and releasing it digitally for students to revisit through a QR code, the hope is that remembering the music may help them remember the journey, and that remembering the journey may in turn support recall of the learning and meaning attached to it. This remains an early concept, but it illustrates the many possible pathways that Cinematic Learning is beginning to open.

Another of these pathways is to look more closely at the technical construction of the narrative itself. If emotion and identification matter, then the way a story is filmed, animated, edited and heard also matters. Cinematography, sound, pacing, editing and visual composition become more than production choices; they become tools for shaping how students experience the narrative and, potentially, how they engage with the learning attached to it.

The story of Aya in Who We Are was built around a Grade 4 Unit of Inquiry, which explored identity, culture and belief within the IB PYP transdisciplinary theme of Who We Are (International Baccalaureate, 2026). But if the narrative, characters, setting and symbolism could communicate ideas about identity, belief and culture, I began to wonder whether the cinematography and editing could do the same. While storyboarding and editing the sequence in which Aya approaches Grandma’s home in the darker spirit world, I found myself asking questions about time, space and, in particular, the role of the environment in creating meaning. That question led me into my own exploration of Japanese cinema, and especially the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hideo Nakata. Their films helped me identify a cinematic language that allowed me to express the themes of the unit visually in a deeper and more abstract way. Prof. Chika Kinoshita’s discussion of Kurosawa’s porous and ephemeral spaces also helped me think differently about the boundaries between Aya’s physical and spirit worlds, and about how environment itself can shape meaning (Kinoshita and Laird, 2021).

Who We Are (2026) - using space, framing and environment to blur the boundary between the physical and spirit worlds.

Everything within Aya’s environment plays a role in connecting the themes of the unit back to memory and to the idea that culture, rituals and beliefs can remain long after their physical origins have disappeared, but only if they continue to be preserved and remembered. This idea runs throughout the narrative: through Nobuhiro the Owl, the Crane, Grandma’s old house, the forest, the storm and even Time itself. Each becomes more than a character, place or event; each carries something from the past into Aya’s present. Eventually, these threads converge in something remarkably simple: Grandma’s onigiri recipe, a small ritual of memory that can be carried forward.

This technical dimension deserves a deeper exploration of its own. How cinematography, editing, sound and environmental design can carry cultural meaning within Cinematic Learning is something I intend to examine in more detail elsewhere.

Of course, using narrative to support learning is not new. Teachers have long used novels, stories, articles and film to stimulate imagination, discussion and inquiry.

Cinematic Learning makes a slightly different move. Rather than focusing solely on the imaginative experience of the learner, it also considers the imaginative potential of the educator. Emerging AI tools now make it increasingly possible for teachers to construct original characters, worlds, music and cinematic narratives around the particular requirements of a curriculum. This does not mean building a film around dozens of individual learning objectives. Instead, the narrative is designed around the larger thematic questions, concepts and ideas that give a unit its coherence, while specific standards and learning objectives can emerge through the inquiries and experiences that develop around it. The narrative does not simply sit alongside the curriculum; it provides a contextual spine through which the curriculum can be explored.

This brings me back to Egan. His work helped me see that story does not need to sit alongside curriculum as an engaging addition; it can provide a structure through which ideas are organised and understood (Egan, 1989). Cinematic Learning extends that possibility by allowing the educator to construct an original narrative around the conceptual questions of a particular unit.

Cinematic Learning is still developing. At its core, however, the model is becoming clearer: narrative provides a contextual spine for the curriculum, emotion gives the learning experience meaning, and reflection allows students to recognise their own growth within the journey. Emerging technologies, including AI, are opening new possibilities for educators to design original texts, environments and experiences around the conceptual needs of a unit. The aim is not to replace existing approaches to inquiry, storytelling or curriculum design, but to explore what becomes possible when they are brought together through cinematic thinking. This article only begins that exploration.

This article introduces Cinematic Learning as an emerging framework. Future pieces will explore its individual strands in greater depth, including narrative structure, metacognition, cinematic language, and the role of emotion in learning.

References

Bruner, J.S. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Campbell, J. (2008) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd edn. Novato, CA: New World Library.

Egan, K. (1989) Teaching as Story Telling: An Alternative Approach to Teaching and Curriculum in the Elementary School. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

International Baccalaureate (2026) How the PYP works. International Baccalaureate. Available at: https://ibo.org/programmes/primary-years-programme/how-the-pyp-works/ (Accessed: 15 August 2026). The page was last updated in February 2026. 

Kinoshita, C. and Laird, C. (2021) ‘Interview with Prof. Chika Kinoshita on Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Loft’, UBC Conversations with J Horror Scholars. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMoH3skWAX8 (Accessed: 15 August 2026). 

Murdoch, K. (2022) Getting Personal with Inquiry Learning: Guiding Learners’ Explorations of Personal Passions, Interests and Questions. Elevate Books EDU / Seastar Education.

Next Generation Science Standards (n.d.) ‘4-LS1-2 From Molecules to Organisms: Structures and Processes’. Next Generation Science Standards. Available at: https://www.nextgenscience.org/ (Accessed: 15 August 2026). 

Vogler, C. (2020) The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. 25th Anniversary edn. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions.