Refugee Digital Storytelling in a Community Organization: Safe Space to Voice Contradicting Realities of Mobility

• In Event: Engaging Refugee Children and Youth in Informal Learning Environments Toward Transformative Learning

Abstract

Theoretical Framework: Youth mobility is on the rise. It has led to new questions about education, youth voice and identity. In light of mobility, school is only one among many other pedagogical sites youth are in contact with, identify with and that shapes their lives. Movement is also social and political, constrained for some who escape political repression or for whom “home” no longer exists. As argued by Dolby and Rizvi (2008), however, movement is not simply about moving from one place to another. Instead, the movement itself is an important and formative space for youth. To understand how that movement, motivated by exile and search for peace may be tangled up with the circulation of global culture and a continuous flow of modernity across the continent, accessible to most youth through media, movies, fashion and the Internet, is particularly interesting. Such encounters constitute youths’ identity work, yet are also supportive of youth voice and agency. A focus on movement also leads to the blurring of boundaries and the mixing of the local with the global through glocal identities (Bash, 2006).

Objectives: To better understand this complex dynamic, we explore a digital storytelling project within a participatory workshop and community organization, reaching out to refugee youth and families. We engaged with youth in the co-creation of digital stories of their migration history, their educational trajectory and offered youth tools to engage in a new reading of their realities as young refugee youth - a new reading grounded in movement (deBlock & Buckingham, 2007; Lambert, 2013).

Methods: We worked with five refugee youth from Mexico, who had sought political asylum in Canada (14 to 21 years of age). The digital stories were analyzed together in terms of their content and shifts in space-time and movement, an analysis further enriched through dialogue among the whole group, as we watched the productions together. We also analyzed how youth authored themselves through their choice of words, images, sound and speed in the video clips (Halverson, 2010; Rogers et al, 2010).

Results: Taken together, the data sources offer rich insights into the complex realities of refugee youth at a particular moment, within a culturally safe space, where they were encouraged to tell “their story.” The digital story became a tool to talk about a history they shared yet experienced in different ways. It led to a sense of agency and local empowerment. It was very much a story grounded in their movement, articulated through their authoring of selves.

Conclusion/Significance: Our study offers rich insights into transformative practice (Darcy, 2008), and ways we may engage in rigorous yet also public scholarship as this year’s meeting calls for, with youth in a culturally safe space. By situating our workshop within a community organization that is committed to youth agency, voice and empowerment, we could make visible youths’ worlds and lives with them, in ways still too often silenced in educational practices and educational scholarship.

Authors

• Audrey Lamothe-Lachaîne, Université de Montréal

• Jrene Rahm, University of Montreal