It Starts With a (Digital) Story: Agentive Inquiry Through Digital Storytelling

• In Event: Toward Critical Multimodality: Exploring Theory, Research, and Practice in Transformative Educational Spaces

Abstract

One teacher-researcher joins a staticky recording of her phone interview with her immigrant father with photographs of his life growing up in Mexico to reveal origins of her work with English Language Learners. Another, a writing instructor at a community college, takes viewers on a video tour of his work commute through California’s Central Valley to a campus deserted due to COVID-19. His steady voice overlays the landscape, asking us to consider connections between place, technology, and access for Latinx students.


This workshop session, led by composers of these digital stories and the instructor of their instructional technology course, will demonstrate how graduate students/practicing teachers in an English pedagogy program used digital storytelling as an entry point into academic inquiry. Workshop leaders will share their digital stories, composing practices, and pedagogical strategies, engaging participants in a conversation about the possibilities of embodied collaborative storytelling as forwarded by scholars promoting feminist (Calderón et al., 2012; Glenn, 2018) and critical race theory (Solórzano & Yosso, 2016) research methodologies.


Palmeri (2012), Shipka (2011), and others have challenged a preoccupation with multimodal compositions as a course product, arguing for use of multimodal invention activities throughout the research process. Responding to this critique, presentation leaders will position digital storytelling as a generative story-based research practice allowing teacher-researchers beginning an inquiry project to merge personal, scholarly, and teacherly identities toward greater agency and awareness of researcher positionality. They will demonstrate how digital story, emphasizing self-revelation, first-person voice, experimentation (Lambert, 2018), and collaboration, becomes a “democratising medium” (Trimboli, 2020) with potential to disrupt traditional western research paradigms grounded in hierarchies and false notions of value neutrality (Calderón et al. 2012; Glenn, 2018).


Presenter one will demonstrate how graduate students readying to embark on their capstone projects identified personal connections to a scholarly question through genre affordances of an embodied collaborative storytelling practice.


Presenter two will describe how her digital story, centered on her immigrant father, served as a means of exploring how her family history and life experiences shaped her values and professional path. She will advocate using digital storytelling to encourage agency among English language learners who frequently have unwanted identities imposed on them.


Presenter three will describe how his digital story engages with equity issues by focusing on often-ignored challenges his Latinx students face. His story, situated and embodied, counters “monovocal stories about the low educational achievement and attainment of students of color” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2016, p. 130).


Drawing on these models, workshop participants will consider: a) How their personal histories have informed their identities as educators and scholars; b) How research practices can reify dominant narratives while excluding some voices and stories; c) How they might use digital storytelling to engage their students in agentive inquiry. Together we will explore “the role that narratives of self—stories about who we have been in the past and who we want to become in the future—can play in construction of agentive identities” (Hull & Katz, 2006, p. 44).

Authors

• Sara Cooper, Murray State University

• Andrea Boyles, Murray State University

• Gregory Daniel Ramírez, Murray State University