"There's Football Gabriel, and There's Gabriel, Gabriel": Negotiating Double-Consciousness During Digital Personal Storytelling for Public Consumption

• In Event: The Critical Role of Audience in Digital Writing

Abstract

A common aspect of digital storytelling involves sharing completed projects with a public audience. Thus, in practice, digital storytelling often renders the personal public. Peers are an author’s primary audience. While some studies have documented how youth authors account for audience (see, Hull & Katz, 2006; Nelson & Hull, 2008; Nelson, Hull, & Roche-Smith, 2008; Pahl, 2011 ), there is less attention to how youth intentionally compose with their peer audience in mind. To address this under-explored aspect of the increasingly common inclusion of digital storytelling in classrooms, this paper examines one student’s strategic negotiations of audience when composing a private story for public consumption. Our case study analysis is guided by the following question: How does Gabriel, an African American high school senior, anticipate and navigate peer audience when composing a digital autobiography that will be publically shared in his English classroom?

Authors

• Rebecca Beucher, Illinois State University

• Elizabeth M. Dutro, University of Colorado Boulder