Digital Storytelling: Giving Voice to Student Stories

One of my most memorable classes as an undergraduate student was the Intro to Anthropology class I took with a professor called Dr. Arensen. Having spent over half of his life in East Africa, Dr. A., as the students called him, had a wealth of knowledge and experiences to share and was an incredible story teller. Most of our lectures consisted of a story or series of stories that illustrated the aspect of culture we were learning about that day. Gender roles. Rites of passage. African Traditional Religion. Although I've forgotten a lot of what I've learned in my undergraduate college classes, I still remember vividly many of the stories Dr. A. told and the cultural lessons that accompanied them.

There is something incredibly compelling and memorable about storytelling as a medium of communication. This week, I learned about a tech tool that can be used to both capture stories and share them with a digital audience: Digital Storytelling. As defined by the Educause Learning Initiative, "digital storytelling is the practice of combining narrative with digital content including images, sound, and video to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component."

With its range of formats, digital storytelling holds endless possibilities for use both in and outside of the classroom. The University of Houston's Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling site suggests how this medium might be used in an ESL classroom for the purpose of vocabulary building, with the instructor creating a slideshow that presents an image of each new vocabulary term accompanied by both the written and spoken form of the word. This slideshow could be viewed individually by students for further practice, either on the classroom computers, or possibly, on their computers at home. Or, assuming the classroom were equipped with the appropriate technology, the instructor could have the students themselves participate in the process of creating a digital story, like Maria's. I imagine it could be a very empowering experience for students to be given the tools to to share stories about themselves, their families, the countries they come from, or their experience in the United States with their peers using the multiple modalities available in digital story telling.

Another aspect of digital storytelling that intrigues me is its potential for being used outside of the classroom to educate individuals about issues and causes. The nonprofit organization I work at, Jericho Road Ministries, has used digital storytelling with images and audio to give voice to some of the incredible individuals in our community who have come as refugees from countries like Burma, Congo, Somalia, and Bhutan, and to share these with the wider Buffalo community on the following blog. More recently, our medical branch has also launched an audio-documentary series on the website Causes.com, sharing the stories of patients and community members to advocate for healthcare reform. These stories, like Raleigh's below, are a much more compelling way of educating voters about the impact of healthcare legislation on individuals with the least access to medical care than a list of statistics about the inequities of the current healthcare system.

 

Similarly, the Center for Digital Storytelling works with various groups and organizations to raise awareness and educate individuals about issues such as discrimination, gender-based violence, volunteerism, and HIV/AIDS through the sharing of digital stories. As sharing stories connected to issues like these can be a sensitive matter, I appreciated that this site also included a page on Ethical Practice in Digital Storytelling. I think these issues of ethics are especially important to keep in mind when working with vulnerable populations and with those whose stories include traumatic or deeply personal experiences. This page suggested that digital storytelling may not be appropriate with individuals displaying symptoms of PTSD, which makes me think it should be used with caution with students who are refugees.

Confessions of a Microblogging Skeptic...

I admit, I was skeptical. Although I’ve heard a lot of people talking about using twitter, I’ve never had any desire to get one of my own. Twitter has always struck me as something that had the potential of taking up a lot of time while offering little substance in return. So it was a bit begrudgingly that I created my twitter account for this class. After all, I wondered, how much useful content can really be conveyed in tweets of 140 characters or less? 

Apparently a lot. Perhaps I just got lucky, but over the last week I’ve spent following a dozen educational microbloggers, I’ve come across a LOT of useful information – blog posts about classroom strategies, links to articles and videos about teaching , a webchat on working with ELLs, to just name a few. Yes, not everything that’s tweeted is relevant to the context in which I teach (a lot is not) but it only takes a few moments to glance through the unhelpful tweets to find ones that point to exactly the kind of resources I’m looking for. 

 

Not only can twitter be used for the purposes of personal professional development, educators are coming up with new ways to creatively use it with their students and in the classroom. In 28 Creative Ways Teachers are Using Twitter the authors suggest using twitter to make announcements, have students follow conferences, and keep a class discussion going even outside the walls of the classroom to just name three possible uses. 

One interesting video called Leveraging Twitter in Large Lecture Classes to Increase Participation describes how a tech tool like twitter can be especially useful with large class sizes in which there is often not enough time during class for every student to contribute something to the discussion in the traditional sense, and in which many students do not feel comfortable speaking out in front of the whole class. While I'm not sure my concerns about using twitter with younger students outweigh the benefits, I could see twitter being used effectively as a discussion boosting tool in the large classes in which so many college freshman find themselves.

Keeping up With the Smart Kids...

In the words of Alan Levine, of New Media Consortium, "It's really important to stay connected to people that are smarter than us because we can't know everything." To me, this simple statement sums up perfectly the value of using social media for networking in today's rapidly changing world. To stay current in one's field as a professional, whether that be an engineer, a business executive, or an educator, involves a lifelong pursuit of learning. And what better way to do this than to be intentionally connected to a community of other lifelong learners? Introducing... Ning, a social networking site created to help individuals connect with others who have similar professional interests.

Ning is like facebook or myspace, except that it allows individuals to create networks with a much narrower focus. One particular Ning network that caught my interest belonged to the National Council of Teachers of English. Not only was this network composed of close to 6,000 English teachers from across the US, it also contained a more specific focus group of educators interested in working with ESL students. Members of this network are able to start online discussions, post videos, ask questions, provide suggestions, and even chat with each other through this network.

I think of the relevance of a tech tool like this in the field of refugee adult education. As of yet, there is not all that much scholarly research on best practices in working with adult ELL's with limited educational and literacy background. The research that does exist on this narrow demographic of learners is very foundational and rarely goes into practical teaching strategies I encounter a need for on a day to day basis. How wonderful, then, to think about the possibility that there might exist a network of educators who are encountering many of the same challenges, asking many of the same questions, and coming up with solutions to many of the same issues I face in my Buffalo, New York classroom.

A Brief Introduction to Connectivism

According to George Siemens' learning theory of Connectivism, technology development over the last twenty years has drastically reorganized the way we live our lives, how we communicate with each other, and as a result, also the way we learn. Siemens points out that while today's most common learning theories, such as behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism define learning as something that occurs inside the individual, "these theories do not address learning that occurs outside of people (ie. learning that is stored and manipulated by technology). They also fail to describe how learning happens within organizations." In today's world of ever increasing technological development communication, dialogue, and interaction between learners more often than not occur through the medium of technology, rather than within the four walls of the traditional classroom. No longer does it make sense to think of today's learners in individualistic terms. Rather, today's "connected" learner can more accurately be thought of as a single thread within an intricately woven piece of fabric, or a tapestry. This tapestry is not a finished work but rather a "work in progress" that is constantly and continuously being added to and expanded.

Just as a beautiful tapestry is woven as many different pieces of thread coming from different directions become intertwined with each other, so learning also occurs as individuals from a variety of backgrounds cross paths, share ideas, and dialogue with each other. Just as some of the most beautiful and intricate tapestries are those woven from a huge diversity of colors and textures, so also diversity of perspectives, experiences, and ideas is key to the learning that occurs between individuals. The various pieces of thread in an intricate tapestry work together to bring out color and nuance in each other. In the same way, individuals not only gain knowledge from each other through dialogue, but also often gain a greater understanding of the knowledge they already possess. This is one of the key points Siemens makes in a youtube video entitled The Impact of Social Media on Learning. He also states that today's technology tools allow learning to occur in a way that's both effortless and very human. "If you think about it," Siemens says, "most of us enjoy dialogue, most of us enjoy conversation. We're social beings." Rather than reducing learning to something that occurs apart from this, connectivism claims that learning in today's rapidly changing world can hardly occur without it.