Digital Storytelling for Primary Heritage Learning: Early Sustainability Relevant Meaning-Making in an Industrial Heritage Case

Heritage education is increasingly expected to connect past evidence with questions of responsibility, environmental change, and sustainable futures, yet primary learners often encounter heritage through fragmented, visually driven exposure with limited support for interpretation beyond factual recognition. This mixed-methods study applies an SRT framework (Supply–Response–Transformation) to examine early, sustainability-relevant meaning-making in primary heritage learning supported by a short animation-based digital story, with an industrial heritage site serving as the case context. Evidence includes stakeholder interviews (n = 39), a student pre-test (n = 399), a post-viewing survey (n = 452), student drawings (n = 12), and classroom observations. Findings indicate that narrative-visual mediation aligns with students’ reported curiosity and comprehension-related cues under classroom conditions, and that post-viewing responses cluster around four classroom-observable outcome signals: valued historical understanding, responsibility and care, change–consequence–restoration reasoning, and personal and cultural positioning. This study interprets digital storytelling as a classroom-feasible mediation format through which meaning-making signals become observable in early meaning-making beyond factual recall. It provides an interpretable chain for judging the visibility and elaboration of early meaning-making signals under real classroom constraints.