I have spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about how digital storytelling can be used as an instructional technique. At Media Commons we’ve taught quite a few digital storytelling workshops, and I’ve blogged about the topic. So I was excited to attend Kira Baker-Doyle’s presentation “Digital Stories as Counter-Texts: Multimodal Critical Literacy in Practice“. Kira is an Assistant Professor of Education at Penn State Berks. She is using digital storytelling with preservice teachers who are required to “critique a text, and then produce a counter-text using only digital media”. In some cases teachers analyzed children’s literature and then re-invisioned those stories, in a way attempting to improve on them based on their analysis.
Kira’s approach is well-grounded in educational theory, and I think she is effectively using this technique to get her students thinking about issues they will face in teaching in a modern, media-rich and technology-rich classroom. Analysis requires students to consider various theoretical frameworks relating to new literacies, critical literacies, storytelling, Friere’s theories on using literacy for empowerment, and various learning theories such as social learning and reader-response criticism. One area that particularly interested me was the idea of “transliteracy” or “the ability to read, write, and interact across a range of platforms, tools, and media”, specifically in the context of Kira’s application, the ability to consume and analyze textual stories and transform them into audio and moving images. I think that there’s significant learning that can happen in that particular mental process as it requires a fairly deep understanding of the material; you need to really understand the meaning of the content to translate each idea into a different mode of representation, or, as Kira states, to understand and use different symbol systems to communicate an idea.
In reflecting on the experience, she mentioned a few points that were key to the success of the project, many of which I agree with based on my own experience. Students required quite a bit of scaffolding, such as modeling, and providing periodic feedback throughout the entire process of analysis and constructing their media piece. Group work was essentially as different students brought different skill-sets to the process. Students were also able to engage in theater and writing practice to give them grounding for their storytelling. A detailed rubric was also provided to students.
I hope to do a more detailed case study of this project for the Media Commons website over the Summer, as I think many instructors will be interested in the work being done here.