Subjects of Codifications: An Inquiry Into Digital Story Tellers’ Experience

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

Abstract

This study investigates digital stories as codifications in a school and community reform effort organized through a partnership among teachers, immigrant parents, community members, and university researchers. Located in a small city (population ~50,000) situated in a rich agricultural valley, characterized by a high level of poverty and unemployment, and a low level of formal schooling attainment, the reform effort (“The Project”) shares characteristics of community organizing for school reform such as capacity building and generative dialogues, but deviates in its structure, processes, and strategies since its design framework was based in the work of Paulo Freire and Myles Horton.
The researcher observed the Project in its fourth year, and utilized an interpretivist case study methodology including participant, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and a review of documentation pertaining to the Project’s history and current state. Analytic memos were written throughout the study and data were analyzed using the constant comparative method within grounded theory.
The study complicates ‘commonplace’ conceptions of community and parent involvement in schools and shifts the frame of school reform from a within-school institutional project to a community organizing effort that is interdependent with broader equity struggles. It examines how people learn about themselves through creating and using digital stories as codifications intended as tools for investigating their community and local schools. In order to make sense of the findings, Paulo Freire’s concepts of thematic investigation and critical literacy praxis were extended and modified with frameworks from community organizing and theoretical and methodological contributions from Chicana feminist and feminist perspectives.
Themes of building relationships and developing a shared vision emerged among Project participants while deconstructing the digital stories and developing the de-codifying curriculum. Relationship building moments occurred when individuals watching or talking about the stories recognized and connected through similarities or differences to their own experiences. The codifications elicited a form of listening that honored the difference of the Other, transforming stereotypes and building bridges across and among stakeholders (parents, teachers, youth, and community members). These relationship altering “click moments” emerged directly from and were articulated to the representation of the Other within the digital story; that is, the particular re-presentation of the Other incited the possibility for the self to change. In these moments, perceptions transform and solidarities develop; participants are “being born through the Other.” The theme of developing a shared vision surfaced when participants named the world through their collaborative investigation of their struggles and capacities. In story and dialogue circles, participants generated themes related to the codification and their everyday lives, building a critical understanding on which to act.
This study makes explicit the process of thematic investigation through codifications. It reveals how it is possible to build solidarities across differences through a deliberative learning process. Thus, it suggests a starting point for constructive reforms that avoid divisions between school agents and community. More significantly, it illustrates how the lives of low-income, racially, culturally and linguistically non-dominant communities can be codified and deployed in innovative ways to link school and community reform.

Author

• Linnea Kristina Beckett, University of California - Santa Cruz