Documenting Self: “Behind the Scenes” of a Digital Storytelling Project

• In Event: Aesthetics of Multimodal Play: Exploring the Expressive Creativity of Court-Involved Youth

Abstract

“… what begins as a personal project for most participants turns into a highly social activity where language, race, class, gender, and experience merge, a place for imaging selves, constructing texts, acquiring new literacies, and evoking possibilities for social change.” (Jocson, 2008, p. 171)

Texts are produced, distributed, and received in new ways. Today, youth are able to leveraging the affordances of new technologies to produce an unprecedented range of texts for new and authentic audiences that incorporate multiple modes, participate across online and offline spaces, and transcend local and global boundaries (Maira & Soep, 2004; Nayak, 2003). Increasingly involved in their own self-tracking as participation within social media sites (such as Instagram and Facebook), many youth are engaging everyday in the practices of documenting the self. What would it mean to invite youth --who are often already documenting the self-- to be engaged as active documenters of their own learning experiences? How can we as educators link the practice of “documenting the self” to important cosmopolitan (Hansen, 2010) notions of “cultivating the self?”

Looking at footage captured for a “behind the scenes” bonus video that accompanied a larger digital storytelling project, this paper takes seriously the work of documenting that youth engaged in across multiple workshops to complete this project. In this paper, I focus my analysis around questions of knowing and unknowing based on both the final bonus video produced for a public screening of this project, as well as the unedited footage captured by youth participants which includes still images, candid videos, and audio recordings. Self-documenting their collaborative digital storytelling experiences, youth were not only actively participating in the project, they were also capturing --through multiple perspectives and modes-- the small moments of interactions, individual and group achievements and frustrations, side-conversations, and laughter that permeated our workshops during this project. Found within these moments were evidence of multiliterate and multimodal communicative practices that evolved organically within the space of their play.

For court-involved youth, who have often been the object of school failure narratives (Ferguson, 2000), the opportunity to engage in literacy learning that motivates and transforms is especially important. Engaging these youth as documenters of their own learning experiences invites them to participate as collaborators in their own education and as members in a learning community that values their unique perspectives, understandings, and creativity.

Author

• Kristine Rodriguez Kerr, Teachers College, Columbia University