Digital Storytelling as Method and Narrative Assemblage

• In Event: 16.019 - "We All Have Stories to Tell": Pedagogical Possibilities Toward Educational Justice Through Digital Storytelling

Abstract

In this paper, the author echoes the importance of digital storytelling as an opportunity for identity construction, art-making, and culturally relevant teaching and learning in the classroom (Bass & Halverson 2013; Robin, 2008; Vasudevan & DeJaynes, 2013). Specifically, digital storytelling is discussed as a narrative assemblage that has implications for curriculum design and pedagogy. Narrative assemblage calls attention to layers of meaning that come together through intertextuality, multimodality, and symbolic creativity (Author2, 2010, 2012). The author focuses on digital storytelling as a methodological tool not only for examining layers of meaning being conveyed by the producer (Hull & Nelson, 2005), but also for engaging in a retrospective analysis of the production process as a way to inform classroom practice (Author2, 2013). Students as members of a new media literacies course offered at a midwestern university had an opportunity to produce 2-3 minute personal digital stories. These students in their early 20s (with one student in the early 30s) from various racial and ethnic backgrounds had a range of experience with media production from beginner to intermediate; two out of the thirteen students had no previous experience. In this practitioner inquiry, the author drew from several data sources, including class session memos, student profile forms, digital story videos, and digital story reflection papers. Content analysis of the digital story videos and reflection papers indicate the affordances of digital storytelling to reflect, construct/reconstruct, recontextualize, reclaim, and represent meaningful experiences that had been deemed worthy of telling/retelling to an audience. Students selected topics such as biculturalism, self as becoming, feminism and freedom, family/friendship, and triumph through perseverance. To further understand digital storytelling as narrative assemblage, the author also utilized producer’s “commentary” as another dimension of retrospective analysis centered on the producer’s uptake. The commentary provided a more elaborate understanding of intertextuality, multimodality, and symbolic creativity embedded in each digital story video that, in turn, offered insight into students’ do-it-yourself media production processes. The latter was key to shaping the direction of the course, in particular toward the making of another media-based project (this time a social action video documentary). What emerged from digital storytelling as part of the course on new media literacies was the centrality of narrative assemblage in creating learning opportunities and opening up pedagogical possibilities in the university classroom. During the presentation, the author will share a digital story video to illustrate narrative assemblage in theory and practice. Implications for research will also be discussed.

Author

• Korina Jocson, University of Massachusetts - Amherst