Digital Storytelling with Teachers of Youth from Refugee Backgrounds: Honoring Assets, Life Journeys, and Relationships

• In Event: Unforgetting Newcomer Experiences, Knowledges, and Identities: Humanizing and Future-making Pedagogies across Canada and the U.S

Abstract

Digital storytelling (DST)—2–3-minute, first-person multimodal narratives integrating imagery, video, voice-over, text, and music (Lambert, 2013)—is a powerful form of media production in educational settings and beyond. DST fosters self-expression and emotional connection (Sarıca, 2023) by expanding semiotic resources through which people can share personal experience. DST has helped pre-service teachers reflect on difficult practicum moments (Radford & Aitken, 2014; Thompson Long & Hall, 2018), and in-service teachers reconnect with their purpose and professional identity through affective reflection (Khoo et al., 2024; Stenhouse & Schafer, 2019). Yet research has rarely examined how DST may support teachers of refugee-background youth in reflecting on their perceptions of this population’s education.

Although teachers strongly shape refugee-background students’ educational trajectories (Cummins, 2021), their perceptions remain underexamined (Herman Hill, 2015; Roxas, 2011). Some studies suggest teachers feel overwhelmed, underprepared, and constrained by systemic barriers (Alisic, 2012; Levi, 2019; Li & Que, 2024). These difficulties are heightened when working with students who are new to reading and writing, learning in an additional language, or have experienced interrupted schooling or trauma linked to war or forced migration (Henderson, 2017; Roxas, 2010; Taylor, 2008). Teachers’ deficit views that overlook refugee-background youth assets and resilience can further limit their educational possibilities (Shapiro & MacDonald, 2017).

Addressing this critical gap, this empirical qualitative case study (Yin, 2018) examines the perceptions of seven English as additional language teachers of refugee-background youth’s education in a large Western Canadian city through teachers’ digital stories. We engaged teachers in four days of professional development across four months, in which they developed DSTs about their experiences with refugee-background youth’s education. Data included teachers’ DSTs, workshop audio recordings, pre- and post-project interviews, and four focus groups. For our reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) using ATLAS.ti, we drew on a sociocultural multiliteracies approach to literacy (Kalantzis et al., 2016) and an identity investment lens, to examine DST’s capacity to affirm and extend the social and cultural capital that teachers currently possess and that which they desire to obtain (Darvin & Norton, 2023), as well as who they are, who they want to become, and the communities to which they hope to belong as teachers (Kanno & Norton, 2003).

Findings revealed three processes of affective reflection in teachers’ DSTs: (1) shifts in their perceptions of refugee-background youth from deficit- to asset-oriented (e.g., a teacher’s story of learning to build on her student’s assets rather than focus on his deficits); (2) meaningful relationships with youth (e.g., a teacher’s story of being mentored by his students to fast during Ramadan); and (3) similar life journeys (e.g., a teacher’s narrative of how her parents’ refugee experiences informed her practice). By centering teachers’ stories about their perceptions of refugee-background youth’s education, the study highlights DST as a humanizing literacy practice that helps teachers value their relationships with refugee-background learners and ensure these learners’ experiences, knowledge, and identities inform their educational trajectories and are never forgotten.

Authors

• Amir Michalovich, University of Manitoba

• Shawn Porteous, River East Transcona School Division