Delineating the New Pedagogy for Digital Storytelling

Dana Huff’s 2017 article, “Telling the Story of America: Digital Storytelling Projects in American Literature,” and Megan Fulwiler and Kim Middleton’s 2012 article, “After Digital Storytelling: Video Composing in the New Media Age,” both discuss the benefits of using digital storytelling in the classroom and how it can be done. Huff uses digital storytelling as a way for her students to better relate with the material of her American literature class: “I wanted my students to see themselves in the literature we read” (33). To do so, she closely followed the model set up by StoryCenter (previously known as The Center for Digital Storytelling, which is how Fulwiler and Middleton refer to it) to help give her students the rudimentary tools to build storytelling videos of their own. StoryCenter helpfully provides her students with step-by-step workshops that helpfully gives them structure for their early digital storytelling work.

Differently, Fulwiler and Middleton discuss the use of digital storytelling in their two-week Personal Essay Filmmaking course. Although they recognize the importance of StoryCenter’s contribution to proliferating digital storytelling, they find critical flaws in StoryCenter’s linear model of “write/film/edit” (42). This linearity, Fulwiler and Middleton assert, significantly ignores two processes involved in digital storytelling: first, the recursivity of composition and second, the way in which multi-media compositions require storytellers to carefully and seamlessly blend different modes (audio/visual/textual/etc.) to create meanings for audiences. They identify these forgotten processes respectively as “new recursivity” and “compositing.” The educators argue that StoryCenter’s linear model, which begins with writing before any filming or editing, “can too easily neglect the meaning-making potential of images and sounds by reducing them to mere 'translations' of written script” (42). Fulwiler and Middleton's suggestion of emphasizing the new recursivity and compositing involved with digital storytelling seeks to do-away with these "translations."

Therefore, while both articles are arguing for the use of digital storytelling, Fulwiler and Middleton seem to argue for a better understanding of how we should incorporate the mode in our classrooms. To that end, I agree: both new recursivity and compositing are processes that an instructor should highlight if she/he includes digital storytelling in the class. And digital storytelling seems to me to be an exciting avenue for creating new compositions. One particular work of digital storytelling that I’m looking forward to incorporating in my ENGL 210 class this semester is Teju Cole’s “A Piece of the Wall,” which is an essay told entirely through Twitter. A picture is of the beginning is below, but here’s a link if you want more: https://twitter.com/apieceofthewall?lang=en.

 

In just around 250 tweets (and re-tweets) between multiple accounts (the narrator and different speakers), Cole built a straight-to-twitter non-fiction essay on immigration. It's difficult to say how exactly reading a serious essay on Twitter affects everyone as a reader, but it seems clear to me that Cole's decision to use the medium is one way of making his work reach different and wider audiences. There are copies of the essay as a single document, but I’m excited to ask my students to read through the tweets and see how they feel it affected them.

In addition to more traditional storytelling models, I have also seen digital technology used by poets in exciting ways. Last year, one of the graduating MFA poets built a poem-generator program that was filled with thousands of words and grammatical phrases—the generator would randomize the parts of speech and produce poems, which the poet would then rethink and revise. Although I’m not sure if there were many poems that were kept in full, he found the process both fun and helpful in that it forced him to rethink how he was constructing his sentences. If anything, it forced me to think about the role of a writer: the words and phrase were the poets, and the program was also made by the poet, but would a poem written exclusively by the program really be his poem? This, of course, is a completely different area from the digital storytelling discussed in the articles, but I think it's significant to consider how digital technology already has more avenues for storytelling than simply videos.

One interesting thing that came up for me while I was reading is how digital storytelling builds on and highlights for us the processes we already know and take for granted in other, more traditional forms of storytelling. This highlighting seems to be a central aspect to Fulwiler and Middleton’s discussion of ‘new recursivity’. As clearly shown in its name, new recursivity builds upon previous research that “made the case that writing was not a linear progressive path but a multiply recursive set of cognitive processes” (Fulwiler & Middleton 41). New recursivity takes into account the way new media and its multi-modality affect us differently in the composition process, but it essentially builds on our understanding of traditional composition as a multi-recursive process. Therefore, Fulwiler and Middleton remind us that digital storytelling needs to be considered as recursive as other forms of composition.

Similarly, Huff reminds us of the importance of references and of legal usage of sources is by mentioning her students’ search for music and pictures for their digital storytelling videos. For both music and pictures, Huff  taught her students how to search for public domain and Creative Commons license pieces so they could legally incorporate the audio/visuals into their work. Although the two processes are clearly different, this search for legal-to-use music, videos, and pictures forces me to think of citations. This is because we need to teach them for essentially the same reasons: so our students know how to legally and responsibly use resources. Like with new recursivity, the stress on legal usage shows how processes with digital storytelling build on processes we use elsewhere in composition. This building-on strikes me as important to note because it highlights how new media compositions are not simply a new mode, but it’s a mode that directly connects to and expands on our understanding of composition in general. Resultantly, we as instructors already have some of the tools to teach something as new as digital storytelling because we teach parts of it already. Are there other aspects of digital storytelling that remind you of parts of composition you already teach/have taught?

Yet, while I see digital storytelling as an exciting possibility, I’m a little wary of how it will fit in the classroom because of how much time is required for students to become literate within the new modes. In other words, I’m worried that putting digital storytelling in a class might take more time than it’s worth—which I think is a concern I find other teachers considering when it comes to incorporating certain technologies. Will digital storytelling benefit my class enough to necessitate teaching audio and video editing softwares? Although I do not think this concern is enough for me to not consider using digital storytelling, it is enough for me to find that Fulwiler and Middleton’s critique of StoryCenter’s model a bit harsh. This is because StoryCenter, as Huff describes it, offers a streamlined option for including digital storytelling in a class where it might not otherwise fit neatly (like American literature). I think in order to incorporate digital storytelling into certain English courses, it might be necessary to teach some of the skills required to create a digital story in a streamlined way. Which leads me to some of my questions for the class: How do you feel about fitting a digital storytelling section into your curriculum? Are there classes that might better adapt to digital storytelling than others? How much time do you think you should spend teaching certain digital storytelling skills if you were to include a digital storytelling unit in your curriculum?