First in Our Families: Digital Stories of Classed Boundaries in the First-Generation Experience

• In Event: Roundtable Session 53
  In Roundtable Session: Students Telling Stories About Social Mobility, Privilege, and Education

Abstract

This study examines the use of digital storytelling as a vehicle for identity construction and agency among first generation college students. For these students, becoming educated is entangled with social class mobility. The First in our Families project invites participants to create multimedia stories about “the frequently overlooked anxieties, conflicts, desires, deferences, ambivalences, and tensions within classed identities” (Reay, 2015, p. 10). The paper reports on analysis of 38 digital stories produced in workshops across the U.S. and follow-up interviews. The study suggests the potential of mediated, participatory research methods for articulating what has been silenced by the shame of marginalization, while also contributing to the literature on the class-based, structural obstacles to the success of first generation students.

Author

• Jane A. Van Galen, University of Washington - Bothell