Zoë Randall Teacher Leadership Digital Portfolio
Understandings
Their story, yours and mine -- it’s what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them —William Carlos Williams
We all have a story inside us. Indeed, our memories are stories that we need to share with others (Schank,1990). Our desire to tell and hear stories is innately human in that, as far as we know, humans are the only creatures capable of telling stories. As one of the oldest forms of human communication, storytelling has shaped our culture today. From the caves of Lascaux, to modern day literary classics, we all know stories from the past and some have made an impact on our lives. From learning the moral of a story, to diving into the lives of other characters, stories become a part of how we understand the world. Just as stories shape our culture, they also shape who we are to the world as we construct our own personal mythology (Schank, 1990). According to Schank, each time we communicate who we are to others, we construct a sense of ourselves. Our personal mythology is a set of experiences that we relate to others through conversations, storytelling, and writing about ourselves. Through stories we learn lessons, morals, values, histories, and experiences from a variety of authors to which we can relate to our own lives.
There are many ways to tell stories, many kinds of different stories, and many audiences for stories. In today’s world of new media, storytelling has expanded from a local experience to a global one. The interactivity of storytelling has shifted from real-time to anytime. The limits of storytelling are seemingly endless and now allow for more possibilities to view, make, and share stories.
What is Digital Storytelling?
Digital Storytelling is a process that blends the traditional practices of narrative storytelling with a new media approach that uses audiovisual elements that can be edited together as a movie using a computer. Many people have their own definitions of what it is, but most contemporary literature points to the founder of the Center for Digital Storytelling, Joe Lambert. Mr. Lambert and Dana Achtley, a performer who inspired his work, defined it as a “short, first-person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds.”(Lambert, www.storycenter.com). Achtley imbued a mixed-media approach to stage performance, involving personal photographs, memoirs and video footage, inspiring Lambert to produce a similar effect using digital media tools, such as a computer, scanner and a microphone. Written or oral stories could now be transformed into audio and image-rich short movies.
Digital storytelling has many applications in the classroom, library, business and community space for a variety of fields and disciplines (Lambert, 2006). What makes digital storytelling different from other storytelling methods is that it can put the personal experiences of a storyteller in front of a global audience, connecting that one individual with innumerable others through media. It also blends voice with images, constructing a more audiovisual experience for the viewer. The construction of a digital story requires the knowledge of media practices from editing video, to scanning photos, and recording voiceovers, making personal stories come to life. For this reason, many media specialists offer courses or workshops that seek to train students of digital storytelling to learn the visual language of filmmaking. Although it can be a complex process, anyone can learn with the guidance and expertise of someone who can teach multimedia skills such as sound recording and editing, archiving and scanning photographs, and video editing.
My research aims to focus on the construction of a digital story as a method for teaching students how to explore personal stories about themselves and others. The following section will seek to chronicle other research and experiences that I have found to be useful in understanding how students experience digital storytelling, specifically in the classroom.
Educational Benefits of Digital Storytelling
Digital storytelling has several uses in any K-12 context and beyond; yet what interests me most is how transformative it can be for the individuals who participate. It can have the power to bring communities together, increase student voice and motivation, engage struggling writers, empower students to produce multimedia content, and build 21st century learning skills.The digital storytelling experience and its benefits are well documented in a variety of digital storytelling projects.
Warren Hegg, Founder of the organization, Digital Clubhouse Network, states that the power of Stories of Service, a national veteran’s storytelling project, is it’s mission to connect kids to their communities through intergenerational-storytelling (2008). To illustrate this point, two girls in my 8th grade class worked together to produce the digital story of a WWII Pearl Harbor survivor. The story of Pearl Harbor came to life through hours of interviews and picture scanning with a veteran who experienced it first hand. Through the process, the students learned more about a historical event through the eyes of a survivor than they ever could from a history textbook. They forged a personal connection through several meetings and shared their final movie with him at the local Veteran’s Museum to honor his story and his service.
The power of these stories can be far-reaching. As the stories are passed on, they can transform our perceptions of the storyteller’s identity. I witnessed this transformation by a former student who produced a digital story about a WWII veteran. She remarked, “at first he was just my neighbor, but now he’s a hero from WWII.” Before the storytelling process began, these people didn’t really know one another. But, after the digital story was produced, the storyteller became the immortalized and the digital story producer, the immortalizer. Although the storyteller never admitted to being a hero, his digital story transformed his identity in the eyes of his producer.
The digital storytelling experience and its benefits are well documented in research on a variety of other digital storytelling projects . In the Place Project, providing students with the opportunity to tell stories about a place that was significant to them increased student voice and motivation (Banaszewski, 2005). Realizing that there are always special places in the hearts of children, Banasweski simply prompted students to describe that place in a story and make it digital through narration and visuals. He found that students saw a change in themselves as writers when motivated to tell a story about a special place and create a movie to visually represent the story. The project not only motivated students, but also built community by teaching students to trust one other through the sharing of their stories. Other researchers have found that by allowing students a chance to voice their stories in digital form, students were able to form stronger bonds with their teachers that empowered communication and led to increased motivation and engagement (Kahn, 1998). Telling a personal story and sharing it became a transformative experience not just for students, but personally and professionally for teachers as well. The transformation for one teacher in Edenvale, CA came from the realization that her students had powerful stories to share in an immigrant community that was struggling to survive.
Through the process of drafting and writing a script and producing a digital story for an audience, research has shown that students employ multiple literacies, and that struggling writers in particular benefit from the process (Sylvester, 2004). Sylvester describes that although multiple literacies such as visual literacy, computer literacy, and media literacy are all a part of digital storytelling, the process really begins with writing. She describes that students often struggle to see themselves as strong writers, but that there is an extra motivation for the student who knows that their writing will become part of a multimedia project. Accessing the stories that students have to tell through multiple approaches can help them communicate what they want to share. For struggling writers, having someone else type their oral account can make the story more vivid. Asking students to tell a visual story using photographs can help them organize the story in their minds. Bringing the written together with the visual helps bridge the gap for students who struggle with traditional storytelling methods.
Digital storytelling also engages students in the media making process as producers, rather than just consumers of digital media (Ohler, 2005). This is an important idea. When I wrote a grant for digital cameras in my classroom, I titled it, “Beyond YouTube: Kids Creating Content.” I realized how the Net-Generation of students could become mindless consumers of technology and media as YouTube and other video sites fill up with user content at an exponential rate. By giving students opportunities to see themselves as producers of meaningful content, such as in the case of personal digital stories, they can step beyond the sea of media watchers and rise above as media makers. The significance of this shifting paradigm shows that as technology becomes increasingly easy to manipulate, those who use the technology will have to become significantly more creative in its application. Anyone can drag and drop a photo in I-Movie, but not everyone will have the underlying skills to construct new meaning and ideas.
This brings into question for my own research, how relevant is digital storytelling to my students' futures? According to the 21st century partnership, today’s students need to develop skills in media literacy and media production. Research states that making digital stories builds 21st century skills, and that these are necessary for students to gain 21st century employment (Czarnecki, 2009). By combining digital skills, media literacy, and organizational skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving and communication, digital stories can help students learn skills to help them in society. However, I am more interested in exploring the personal implications and the transformative potential of digital storytelling for students. Through the process of creating stories that communicate messages and lessons from their lives, as well as the lives of others, the personal gain will be just as important as the digital skills they will acquire.
As I venture into the world of digital storytelling with 6th graders, my hope is that they will be able to take away new skills and blossoming experiences as I have seen evidenced in previous research and my own classroom. In my own study, I will be focusing on the impact digital storytelling can have on building a sense of identity, empathy, and community. This is what matters to me most. As a middle school teacher, I often witness the pangs of growing up, as students are struggling to understand who they are and learning how to fit into the crowd and how to stand out from it. Ultimately, I hope that students will find the links that connect them all, and learn to value each other for their individuality. Below I discuss how digital storytelling can play a role in nurturing students' sense of self, building empathy for others, and creating community.
Narrative and the Self in Digital Storytelling
How does one construct their identity using digital storytelling? Can it be an effective tool for students to dig deep into the heart of figuring out who they are? What is the role of invented stories in this process? Schank writes that, “Story invention, for children or adults, is the process of massaging reality” (1990, p.35). It doesn’t necessarily mean that the events in the story are untrue, but rather that the storyteller chooses how the events are told. Invented stories don’t come out of thin air, and how we interpret our stories says as much about us as the stories themselves. Particularly in middle school, invented stories may provide a safer way for students to explore who they are and to share this with others. I am trying to get at the notion of what stories kids want to share and why. How do students choose the stories they wish to tell and what do those stories say about them?
Ultimately, I want to help my students construct a sense of life story and identity. To do this, I plan to use the life road map activity in the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum, which states, “When ‘life road maps’ are used to focus on students’ own decisions, this strategy can help them reflect on key choices that have shaped their identities” (2011). The life road map activity engages students to reflect on their lives through the metaphor of a road map and then share these with other students. From birth, to their first pet, going to a new school, or the death of a family member, students choose symbols such as traffic lights, stop signs, detours or dead ends to identify these life events. I also plan on using the interview approaches of Storycorps, “an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives”(http://storycorps.org/about/). I hope that teaching students to interview each other will help them become comfortable sharing life stories with each other. The questions from Storycorps’ great questions list are open-ended and can lead to further discussion of an important life event. By asking questions like, “What was the happiest moment of your life? The saddest?” students will be opening up their emotions and memories to one other.
I’m not sure what will emerge as students explore their identity through digital storytelling, but as I look into more research on developing life stories, I am struck by what those stories tend to focus on. Particularly in the study of Emerging Identities, Matsuba and colleagues discuss when life stories emerge: “While adolescence may be the time when people have the cognitive and psychosocial abilities to assemble a life narrative, it is in childhood when early life experiences occur that shape the later emerging story”(2011, p. 134). As we dive into digital storytelling, it will be interesting to see if students choose stories from a recent time or from past childhood experiences. I will also be looking at whether students' stories focus on themselves, someone else in their families or someone in their communities. As I look to see what happens, I am excited to find out what stories 6th graders most want to tell, and what their choices communicate about their own perceptions of themselves.
Story as a bridge to Empathy
Another one of my goals is to examine how sharing our stories affects students' understandings of one another and our classroom culture. Will they feel more connected? Will they understand each other better? Will they be more empathetic? Empathy is one of those factors that I predict will be hard to gauge. R. Greenson states, “To empathize means to share, to experience the feelings of another person” (1960, p. 418). To me, empathy is the ability to connect with another person through the understanding of their life perspective. To walk in another person’s shoes is an experience I hope that sharing stories will enable.
Humans form empathy through their experiences and connecting to the experiences of others. Thus, story can have the power to create empathetic connections to one another through the sharing of one’s own experiences. Interestingly, there’s another side of this to consider. As I reviewed P.J. Manney’s article, “Empathy in the Time of Technology: How Storytelling is the Key to Empathy,” he states:
“There is a belief among some academics and storytellers that the non-visual story has a deeper psychological impact than the visual story, since the non-visual relies on each mind using its personal experience to build its imagination, making it a more intimate, relatable ‘vision’ with a greater impact on one’s empathy”(2008, p.4).
In an age where visuals bombard the senses everywhere and anytime, it is interesting to ponder the effects of storytelling in visual and non-visual forms. In the case of traditional literature, the mind’s imagination can often bring characters and situations to life more vividly than in the movie rendition, especially if the story has personal meaning to the reader.
I can see the argument that Manney brings up regarding the non-visual story and the visual story. However, I predict students will have greater insight into another person's experience by watching the digital story version. I think it will be interesting to observe how empathetic connections occur in the classroom as students move from sharing stories orally, to audibly, to visually wrapping it all together. I also wonder how to facilitate empathy with 6th grade students who are at a biological point of developing the adolescent ego? What happens when students can’t empathize? How could digital storytelling perhaps open the door for the possibility of empathic connections? Manney provides some advice related to these questions,
“Therefore, the only hope is for all of us to tell stories. Lots and lots of stories. Both our own stories and the stories of others. Both true and fictional stories. But most importantly, like the best storytellers, we must make these stories universal in their appeal. And make them from our heart. Then we must spread these stories as pervasively as possible in the multicultural sphere, using as many forms of media as possible, in the hopes of catching those who don’t share the same views unawares, so when they read or see or VR [virtually realize] that story, they might say to themselves, ‘You and I may not be alike, but now I understand you. And I think you’d understand me, too, if I told you my story’”(9).
This idea strikes a chord with me as I delve into researching my question. I hope that by telling stories from our hearts and sharing them, I will find that students come to a better understanding of each other through expressing themselves and finding connections to one another.
Building Community Through Storytelling
Stories are told to be shared. There are different views of audience and purpose, ranging from stories for oneself, stories for others, and stories as conversation (Schank, 1990). When I think about how a story can build a sense of community, I think back to my experience with Stories of Service. Before doing the Stories of Service project, students in my classroom did not really see a connection between themselves and the surrounding San Diego veterans community. After producing stories of veterans, students became activists and leaders in their communities, helping to represent members of their communities through facilitating storytelling sessions at veteran meetings and honoring them in parades.
After a simple search for digital storytelling projects, I am led to programs and community organizations, such as Stories of Service, the Public Broadcasting System’s Native American Circle of Stories project, The British Broadcasting Company Telling Lives Project, and the U.S. Navy Memorial’s Navy Veteran’s Digital Storytelling project. There are people all over the globe, finding ways of expressing and passing on the traditions of oral history using today’s technology. The possibilities of a limitless audience due to the Internet allow the community countless opportunities to gather and share stories. The Center for Digital Storytelling has several case studies that show the vast spread of digital storytelling from projects in the United States to collaborations with 33 countries. They have trained other centers to build digital storytelling programs that teach middle school students to explore the lives of other people in their communities. They have also created story gathering programs at local museums that invite the community to share their stories.
The implications of such projects are still being researched, but the collective voice of different groups is loud and clear. People are expressing their personal experiences and thus weaving together a new understanding of the world. Stories that come from official sources, such as news media corporations will no longer be the only sources of truth. Instead, these personal stories multiplied together make a community of storytellers who are able to shape their own truth and through the process of digital storytelling, make it official (Schank, 1990).
In my own digital storytelling project, I am hopeful that my students will experience a sense of community as a class and as a storytelling force in San Diego. I envision students becoming a part of their school community, sharing resources and experiences, learning together and helping one another succeed. As students produce digital stories of themselves and others, my hope is that they will become a community of storytelling producers who are skilled and trained to take digital storytelling anywhere they go, to produce their own realities. The stories can be exhibited in the greater community, and bring together not only family and friends of the producers, but also people from the community who could become future subjects of digital stories themselves.
We all have a story inside us. Indeed, our memories are stories that we need to share with others (Schank,1990). Our desire to tell and hear stories is innately human in that, as far as we know, humans are the only creatures capable of telling stories. As one of the oldest forms of human communication, storytelling has shaped our culture today. From the caves of Lascaux, to modern day literary classics, we all know stories from the past and some have made an impact on our lives. From learning the moral of a story, to diving into the lives of other characters, stories become a part of how we understand the world. Just as stories shape our culture, they also shape who we are to the world as we construct our own personal mythology (Schank, 1990). According to Schank, each time we communicate who we are to others, we construct a sense of ourselves. Our personal mythology is a set of experiences that we relate to others through conversations, storytelling, and writing about ourselves. Through stories we learn lessons, morals, values, histories, and experiences from a variety of authors to which we can relate to our own lives.
There are many ways to tell stories, many kinds of different stories, and many audiences for stories. In today’s world of new media, storytelling has expanded from a local experience to a global one. The interactivity of storytelling has shifted from real-time to anytime. The limits of storytelling are seemingly endless and now allow for more possibilities to view, make, and share stories.
What is Digital Storytelling?
Digital Storytelling is a process that blends the traditional practices of narrative storytelling with a new media approach that uses audiovisual elements that can be edited together as a movie using a computer. Many people have their own definitions of what it is, but most contemporary literature points to the founder of the Center for Digital Storytelling, Joe Lambert. Mr. Lambert and Dana Achtley, a performer who inspired his work, defined it as a “short, first-person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds.”(Lambert, www.storycenter.com). Achtley imbued a mixed-media approach to stage performance, involving personal photographs, memoirs and video footage, inspiring Lambert to produce a similar effect using digital media tools, such as a computer, scanner and a microphone. Written or oral stories could now be transformed into audio and image-rich short movies.
Digital storytelling has many applications in the classroom, library, business and community space for a variety of fields and disciplines (Lambert, 2006). What makes digital storytelling different from other storytelling methods is that it can put the personal experiences of a storyteller in front of a global audience, connecting that one individual with innumerable others through media. It also blends voice with images, constructing a more audiovisual experience for the viewer. The construction of a digital story requires the knowledge of media practices from editing video, to scanning photos, and recording voiceovers, making personal stories come to life. For this reason, many media specialists offer courses or workshops that seek to train students of digital storytelling to learn the visual language of filmmaking. Although it can be a complex process, anyone can learn with the guidance and expertise of someone who can teach multimedia skills such as sound recording and editing, archiving and scanning photographs, and video editing.
My research aims to focus on the construction of a digital story as a method for teaching students how to explore personal stories about themselves and others. The following section will seek to chronicle other research and experiences that I have found to be useful in understanding how students experience digital storytelling, specifically in the classroom.
Educational Benefits of Digital Storytelling
Digital storytelling has several uses in any K-12 context and beyond; yet what interests me most is how transformative it can be for the individuals who participate. It can have the power to bring communities together, increase student voice and motivation, engage struggling writers, empower students to produce multimedia content, and build 21st century learning skills.The digital storytelling experience and its benefits are well documented in a variety of digital storytelling projects.
Warren Hegg, Founder of the organization, Digital Clubhouse Network, states that the power of Stories of Service, a national veteran’s storytelling project, is it’s mission to connect kids to their communities through intergenerational-storytelling (2008). To illustrate this point, two girls in my 8th grade class worked together to produce the digital story of a WWII Pearl Harbor survivor. The story of Pearl Harbor came to life through hours of interviews and picture scanning with a veteran who experienced it first hand. Through the process, the students learned more about a historical event through the eyes of a survivor than they ever could from a history textbook. They forged a personal connection through several meetings and shared their final movie with him at the local Veteran’s Museum to honor his story and his service.
The power of these stories can be far-reaching. As the stories are passed on, they can transform our perceptions of the storyteller’s identity. I witnessed this transformation by a former student who produced a digital story about a WWII veteran. She remarked, “at first he was just my neighbor, but now he’s a hero from WWII.” Before the storytelling process began, these people didn’t really know one another. But, after the digital story was produced, the storyteller became the immortalized and the digital story producer, the immortalizer. Although the storyteller never admitted to being a hero, his digital story transformed his identity in the eyes of his producer.
The digital storytelling experience and its benefits are well documented in research on a variety of other digital storytelling projects . In the Place Project, providing students with the opportunity to tell stories about a place that was significant to them increased student voice and motivation (Banaszewski, 2005). Realizing that there are always special places in the hearts of children, Banasweski simply prompted students to describe that place in a story and make it digital through narration and visuals. He found that students saw a change in themselves as writers when motivated to tell a story about a special place and create a movie to visually represent the story. The project not only motivated students, but also built community by teaching students to trust one other through the sharing of their stories. Other researchers have found that by allowing students a chance to voice their stories in digital form, students were able to form stronger bonds with their teachers that empowered communication and led to increased motivation and engagement (Kahn, 1998). Telling a personal story and sharing it became a transformative experience not just for students, but personally and professionally for teachers as well. The transformation for one teacher in Edenvale, CA came from the realization that her students had powerful stories to share in an immigrant community that was struggling to survive.
Through the process of drafting and writing a script and producing a digital story for an audience, research has shown that students employ multiple literacies, and that struggling writers in particular benefit from the process (Sylvester, 2004). Sylvester describes that although multiple literacies such as visual literacy, computer literacy, and media literacy are all a part of digital storytelling, the process really begins with writing. She describes that students often struggle to see themselves as strong writers, but that there is an extra motivation for the student who knows that their writing will become part of a multimedia project. Accessing the stories that students have to tell through multiple approaches can help them communicate what they want to share. For struggling writers, having someone else type their oral account can make the story more vivid. Asking students to tell a visual story using photographs can help them organize the story in their minds. Bringing the written together with the visual helps bridge the gap for students who struggle with traditional storytelling methods.
Digital storytelling also engages students in the media making process as producers, rather than just consumers of digital media (Ohler, 2005). This is an important idea. When I wrote a grant for digital cameras in my classroom, I titled it, “Beyond YouTube: Kids Creating Content.” I realized how the Net-Generation of students could become mindless consumers of technology and media as YouTube and other video sites fill up with user content at an exponential rate. By giving students opportunities to see themselves as producers of meaningful content, such as in the case of personal digital stories, they can step beyond the sea of media watchers and rise above as media makers. The significance of this shifting paradigm shows that as technology becomes increasingly easy to manipulate, those who use the technology will have to become significantly more creative in its application. Anyone can drag and drop a photo in I-Movie, but not everyone will have the underlying skills to construct new meaning and ideas.
This brings into question for my own research, how relevant is digital storytelling to my students' futures? According to the 21st century partnership, today’s students need to develop skills in media literacy and media production. Research states that making digital stories builds 21st century skills, and that these are necessary for students to gain 21st century employment (Czarnecki, 2009). By combining digital skills, media literacy, and organizational skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving and communication, digital stories can help students learn skills to help them in society. However, I am more interested in exploring the personal implications and the transformative potential of digital storytelling for students. Through the process of creating stories that communicate messages and lessons from their lives, as well as the lives of others, the personal gain will be just as important as the digital skills they will acquire.
As I venture into the world of digital storytelling with 6th graders, my hope is that they will be able to take away new skills and blossoming experiences as I have seen evidenced in previous research and my own classroom. In my own study, I will be focusing on the impact digital storytelling can have on building a sense of identity, empathy, and community. This is what matters to me most. As a middle school teacher, I often witness the pangs of growing up, as students are struggling to understand who they are and learning how to fit into the crowd and how to stand out from it. Ultimately, I hope that students will find the links that connect them all, and learn to value each other for their individuality. Below I discuss how digital storytelling can play a role in nurturing students' sense of self, building empathy for others, and creating community.
Narrative and the Self in Digital Storytelling
How does one construct their identity using digital storytelling? Can it be an effective tool for students to dig deep into the heart of figuring out who they are? What is the role of invented stories in this process? Schank writes that, “Story invention, for children or adults, is the process of massaging reality” (1990, p.35). It doesn’t necessarily mean that the events in the story are untrue, but rather that the storyteller chooses how the events are told. Invented stories don’t come out of thin air, and how we interpret our stories says as much about us as the stories themselves. Particularly in middle school, invented stories may provide a safer way for students to explore who they are and to share this with others. I am trying to get at the notion of what stories kids want to share and why. How do students choose the stories they wish to tell and what do those stories say about them?
Ultimately, I want to help my students construct a sense of life story and identity. To do this, I plan to use the life road map activity in the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum, which states, “When ‘life road maps’ are used to focus on students’ own decisions, this strategy can help them reflect on key choices that have shaped their identities” (2011). The life road map activity engages students to reflect on their lives through the metaphor of a road map and then share these with other students. From birth, to their first pet, going to a new school, or the death of a family member, students choose symbols such as traffic lights, stop signs, detours or dead ends to identify these life events. I also plan on using the interview approaches of Storycorps, “an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives”(http://storycorps.org/about/). I hope that teaching students to interview each other will help them become comfortable sharing life stories with each other. The questions from Storycorps’ great questions list are open-ended and can lead to further discussion of an important life event. By asking questions like, “What was the happiest moment of your life? The saddest?” students will be opening up their emotions and memories to one other.
I’m not sure what will emerge as students explore their identity through digital storytelling, but as I look into more research on developing life stories, I am struck by what those stories tend to focus on. Particularly in the study of Emerging Identities, Matsuba and colleagues discuss when life stories emerge: “While adolescence may be the time when people have the cognitive and psychosocial abilities to assemble a life narrative, it is in childhood when early life experiences occur that shape the later emerging story”(2011, p. 134). As we dive into digital storytelling, it will be interesting to see if students choose stories from a recent time or from past childhood experiences. I will also be looking at whether students' stories focus on themselves, someone else in their families or someone in their communities. As I look to see what happens, I am excited to find out what stories 6th graders most want to tell, and what their choices communicate about their own perceptions of themselves.
Story as a bridge to Empathy
Another one of my goals is to examine how sharing our stories affects students' understandings of one another and our classroom culture. Will they feel more connected? Will they understand each other better? Will they be more empathetic? Empathy is one of those factors that I predict will be hard to gauge. R. Greenson states, “To empathize means to share, to experience the feelings of another person” (1960, p. 418). To me, empathy is the ability to connect with another person through the understanding of their life perspective. To walk in another person’s shoes is an experience I hope that sharing stories will enable.
Humans form empathy through their experiences and connecting to the experiences of others. Thus, story can have the power to create empathetic connections to one another through the sharing of one’s own experiences. Interestingly, there’s another side of this to consider. As I reviewed P.J. Manney’s article, “Empathy in the Time of Technology: How Storytelling is the Key to Empathy,” he states:
“There is a belief among some academics and storytellers that the non-visual story has a deeper psychological impact than the visual story, since the non-visual relies on each mind using its personal experience to build its imagination, making it a more intimate, relatable ‘vision’ with a greater impact on one’s empathy”(2008, p.4).
In an age where visuals bombard the senses everywhere and anytime, it is interesting to ponder the effects of storytelling in visual and non-visual forms. In the case of traditional literature, the mind’s imagination can often bring characters and situations to life more vividly than in the movie rendition, especially if the story has personal meaning to the reader.
I can see the argument that Manney brings up regarding the non-visual story and the visual story. However, I predict students will have greater insight into another person's experience by watching the digital story version. I think it will be interesting to observe how empathetic connections occur in the classroom as students move from sharing stories orally, to audibly, to visually wrapping it all together. I also wonder how to facilitate empathy with 6th grade students who are at a biological point of developing the adolescent ego? What happens when students can’t empathize? How could digital storytelling perhaps open the door for the possibility of empathic connections? Manney provides some advice related to these questions,
“Therefore, the only hope is for all of us to tell stories. Lots and lots of stories. Both our own stories and the stories of others. Both true and fictional stories. But most importantly, like the best storytellers, we must make these stories universal in their appeal. And make them from our heart. Then we must spread these stories as pervasively as possible in the multicultural sphere, using as many forms of media as possible, in the hopes of catching those who don’t share the same views unawares, so when they read or see or VR [virtually realize] that story, they might say to themselves, ‘You and I may not be alike, but now I understand you. And I think you’d understand me, too, if I told you my story’”(9).
This idea strikes a chord with me as I delve into researching my question. I hope that by telling stories from our hearts and sharing them, I will find that students come to a better understanding of each other through expressing themselves and finding connections to one another.
Building Community Through Storytelling
Stories are told to be shared. There are different views of audience and purpose, ranging from stories for oneself, stories for others, and stories as conversation (Schank, 1990). When I think about how a story can build a sense of community, I think back to my experience with Stories of Service. Before doing the Stories of Service project, students in my classroom did not really see a connection between themselves and the surrounding San Diego veterans community. After producing stories of veterans, students became activists and leaders in their communities, helping to represent members of their communities through facilitating storytelling sessions at veteran meetings and honoring them in parades.
After a simple search for digital storytelling projects, I am led to programs and community organizations, such as Stories of Service, the Public Broadcasting System’s Native American Circle of Stories project, The British Broadcasting Company Telling Lives Project, and the U.S. Navy Memorial’s Navy Veteran’s Digital Storytelling project. There are people all over the globe, finding ways of expressing and passing on the traditions of oral history using today’s technology. The possibilities of a limitless audience due to the Internet allow the community countless opportunities to gather and share stories. The Center for Digital Storytelling has several case studies that show the vast spread of digital storytelling from projects in the United States to collaborations with 33 countries. They have trained other centers to build digital storytelling programs that teach middle school students to explore the lives of other people in their communities. They have also created story gathering programs at local museums that invite the community to share their stories.
The implications of such projects are still being researched, but the collective voice of different groups is loud and clear. People are expressing their personal experiences and thus weaving together a new understanding of the world. Stories that come from official sources, such as news media corporations will no longer be the only sources of truth. Instead, these personal stories multiplied together make a community of storytellers who are able to shape their own truth and through the process of digital storytelling, make it official (Schank, 1990).
In my own digital storytelling project, I am hopeful that my students will experience a sense of community as a class and as a storytelling force in San Diego. I envision students becoming a part of their school community, sharing resources and experiences, learning together and helping one another succeed. As students produce digital stories of themselves and others, my hope is that they will become a community of storytelling producers who are skilled and trained to take digital storytelling anywhere they go, to produce their own realities. The stories can be exhibited in the greater community, and bring together not only family and friends of the producers, but also people from the community who could become future subjects of digital stories themselves.
