Posted on by David

Tasked with searching for theoretical frameworks which could provide a reference grid for our project, I have selected two more general concepts dealing with minority groups and marginalized individuals/communities and a study focussing on digital storytelling and providing a set of useful design principles.

Empowerment and Participation

Both concepts are dealing with minority groups and marginalized individuals or communities. Their focus is on the specific experiences and contexts of these groups and raising the awareness of power relationships between representatives of the dominant cultural paradigms and representatives of the marginalized communities. For our project I identified the following potentially relevant implications:

  1. Empower individuals/communities that are normally excluded from the dominant public sphere.
  2. Create a participatory, collaborative relationship between the facilitating professionals/institutions and the participating individuals/communities.
  3. Develop skills to tell and own a story, foster self-confidence, self-sufficiency and pride of accomplishment.
  4. Differentiate between two audiences with very dissimilar contexts.
  5. Enable learners to participate in the all steps of designing, creating and presenting their own digital stories.
  6. Allow learners to retain ownership of their product (their story).

A learning design for student-generated digital storytelling

Four findings of the study are relevant for our project (Kearney, 2011):

  1. The pedagogical framework should take into account the environment and individual needs of the learners as well as the background and preferences of the teacher/mediator.
  2. The pedagogical framework should provide guidelines and allow for flexibility but must avoid being prescriptive.
  3. The learning design should create opportunities for sharing, discussing and reflecting peer experiences and storytelling artefacts at all stages of the production process.
  4. The learning design should be flexible enough for key learning experiences to happen spontaneously and cannot be captured in every detail.

Reusing artefacts

Reusing artefacts would be a design principle which reflects most of the statements above. Learners (both teachers and refugees/immigrants) should be encouraged and supported to review and reuse artefacts created by their peers. By reusing elements like storyboards, scripts, images, audio, etc. for their own stories, experiences expressed by these artefacts are transferred to other participants’ backgrounds and experiences.

Reusing peer artefacts facilitates the sharing of knowledge and supports the development of a knowledge-building community which could even be defined as a separate project objective, as a collective product of the individual stories and the process of their creation.

Reusing artefacts should be encouraged and facilitated at several stages of the story creation process in order to build up the necessary mind-set and skills to learn from peer experiences and learning processes. If possible, artefacts of prior courses should be used to introduce learners to the topic.

References

Conceptualise

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