Digital Stories as Freirean Codifications: Design Principles and Ethical and Political Considerations

• In Event: Codifications of Reality as Educational Tools for Critical Consciousness: Retheorizing Freire Through Praxis

Abstract

This analysis sets out design principles and ethical-political considerations in the development and deployment of autobiographical digital stories as codifications. It builds from the theories and practices of Paulo Freire and Myles Horton as well as from a critical reflection on a school and social change project situated in a low-income community comprised primarily of Mexican immigrant families.
Freire developed codifications – representations of everyday life that could ground analyses of its structures, conditioning forces, contradictions, and possibilities for limit-transcending action – in radical literacy programs, and he discussed them theoretically in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970; chapter 3), and concretely in Education for Critical Consciousness (1974). In the latter, Freire also included sketched copies of ten pictures by Francisco Brennand that were used to animate the dialogical literacy circles (see Brown, 1978, for reproductions of 8 or the 10 pictures); these pictures encoded the life of the population, and also the ontological, epistemological, and ethical principles grounding Freire’s theory of conscientization and liberation struggle. Freire and his research team also selected words that formed the basis of literacy instruction, and these words/codifications linked ordinary speech with the social, cultural, economic, and historical conditions of everyday life.
New digital technologies enable substantially different forms of encoding everyday life. One school and social change project based on Freirean principles developed autobiographical digital stories as codifications. Focus group findings from a participatory action research process were analyzed for themes, which provided prompts for the creation of short (350 word) autobiographical narratives in story workshops, which in turn became the basis for self-produced digital stories (3-4 minute movies). These stories proved to be potently evocative of deep dialogues that engaged participants emotionally and cognitively. A curriculum (set of questions) was developed for each story that was intended to elicit dialogue circle participants’ critical grasp of everyday life by connecting them with ontological truths (that every human being produces culture and history), with cultural, economic and political conditions (that their lives are both unique and shaped by larger structures that make their experiences social), and with ethical and political commitments (that their fates are interconnected and they have the power to change the limiting conditions of their lives through collective agency).
The deployment of autobiographical digital stories as codifications in a political project is not unproblematic. For example, there are dangers in regard to how the stories turn the storytellers into ‘objects’ for others to analyze, a danger intensified when storytellers are members of the community in which the codifications are used to conscienticize and organize people for political struggle. There are also questions about authorship; what is the significance of the stories being constrained by thematic prompts, and written in dialogical story workshops where feedback from other project members shapes the stories and editing is collaborative? Clearly, there are risks of exploitation of the storytellers.
Drawing on these theoretical considerations and the experience of using autobiographical digital stories in social justice work, this essay provides principles to guide future Freire-inspired projects.

Author

• Ronald David Glass, University of California - Santa Cruz