Imagined Identities: Mediating “Self” and “Other” Through Transnational Digital Storytelling

• In Event: Digital Mediation and Language Learners: Imagined Identities and Placed Resources

Abstract

Objectives: In this paper we discuss a project that links youth in a community-based learning center located in low-income housing in the U.S., youth in a school located in a poverty-stricken area of Uganda, and youth in a rural village in western China through digital communications, with the dual goals of supporting (English) language and literacy development, and supporting global learning.
Perspective(s):There has been increasing attention within the field of education to globalization- a call for education to directly address and respond to a ‘21st century’ world, where people, ideas, knowledge and resources flow rapidly across national and international borders. Advocates of global education claim that education must be responsive to and inclusive of new and ever-changing constellations of ideas-people-resources-institutions, which call for new skills, understandings and dispositions, and new orientations to the self and other.
Media studies are coming to hone in on ethics and morality, and to study issues of identity as it is lived and performed in everyday life (Ong 2009). Ong, in fact, urges: “… the field of media and morality- and its polemic for moral responsibility of all those implicated in media work-- should begin with lived experience. At home. With the world. Through the media. I. And the Other. In communication”(2009: p. 451).
Methods: Data are analyzed through five guiding questions: Who are ‘we’? Who are ‘you’? How do we communicate who ‘we’ are to imagined others? How do we understand who ‘others’ are through their representations? (How) does this shape our understandings of ‘ourselves’?
Data sources consist of digital stories and other artifacts produced by the youth, messages in the chat space, and videorecordings of group meetings in each site. Approximately 12 youth participated in each site, collaboratively creating a digital story of their lives and communities and uploading it to the project’s dedicated website. Participants in other sites then watched and responded to it, via asynchronous chat spaces on the site.
Results: Youth were engaged collaboratively for all aspects of the project: they negotiated content and process for the digital stories (creating one story per site); watched the other sites’ story together; engaged in facilitated conversation about what they saw, noticed and thought; and negotiated and wrote chat responses together. This collaborative engagement scaffolded learning- the development of languages and literacies (including standard as well as multimodal and multimedia literacies), and understandings of global others-- in line with Vygotskian and other sociocultural theories of learning (Hawkins 2010; Rogoff 1990; Vygotsky 1978). It drew on what youth knew, brought and were invested in (knowledge and experience with their own lives and communities), and asked them to create representations multimodally (Stein 2008; Kress 2009) for an imagined other. After the initial of video creation, sharing and response, youth negotiated subsequent topics, activities and products to share. One key finding is the importance of the pedagogic work and scaffolding that must be done around projects designed for global learning, as youth come to new understandings of the global other and, in the process, of themselves.

Authors

• Kathleen Nicoletti, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Margaret R. Hawkins, University of Wisconsin - Madison