This was the work that got me to have a “screening” of the digital presentations in my own classes.
Fletcher, Christopher and Carolina Cambre. “Digital Storytelling and Implicated Scholarship in the Classroom.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 43.1 (Winter 2009): 109-30. Web. 7 May 2012.
Ethnographic anthropology class with participant observation and creation of digital storytelling is the background for this paper.
“As a pedagogical tool, digital storytelling offers a unique learning experience for students” (Fletcher and Cambre 109).
“Digital storytelling is a simple method of using widely available image editing software to blend together digitized still photographs and narratives to create short, evocative, and informative multimedia pieces. Their task is to create original pieces that address theoretical and topical issues pertinent to the discipline” (Fletcher and Cambre 110).
“We celebrate the final products with a showing of the work they have produced” (Fletcher and Cambre 110).
“new forms of competition and an ethos of ‘excellence’ that mark the neo-liberal and postmodern transformation of post-secondary education (Readings 1996)” (Fletcher and Cambre 111).
“What place does the undergraduate and graduate student body have in the contemporary research-intensive university? How can students become engaged in the full spectrum of what a university does today?” (Fletcher and Cambre 111).
“Our analysis shows that working in narrative and visual modes generates a complex intellectual engagement that is at once creative, socially oriented, and pedagogical” (Fletcher and Cambre 111).
“An evolving understanding of students as both constrained and emboldened by their social positions serves to underscore the necessity for the development of pedagogy directed towards students as social actors… implicated scholarship … positioning students, academics, research, teaching, and learning within the social dynamic they inhabit” (Fletcher and Cambre 111).
“situates the intellectual as a social actor within any social system he or she may be attempting to describe” (Fletcher and Cambre 112). –participant observer
“Most university students have spent their lives immersed in a visually oriented social context and have sophisticated levels of technical and socio-visual skills” (Fletcher and Cambre 112).
“We may well wonder whether the visual competenices of our students go unacknowledged and untapped in their university experience” (Fletcher and Cambre 113).
“Visuality … has an important… role to play in the relationship between learning, knowledge production, and transmission in the university” (Fletcher and Cambre 113).
“digital storytelling does not represent a categorically new form. Rather it emerges from a diverse lineage of cultural production, among which we include home video, photoessays, Bandes Desinées, and photovoice” (Fletcher and Cambre 115).
“emergency of digital storytelling … point[s] to a renewed concern with the authentic and the local as counterpoints to the generic and banal renderings of the global” (Fletcher and Cambre 115). Not always.
“[D]igital storytelling as a pedagogical tool brings the creator/student and the viewer together in a dialogue around the nature of representation, meaning, and authority embedded in imagery and narrative” (Fletcher and Cambre 115).
“All the participants in the study supported the thesis that working with digital stories engenders an educational experience different from a traditional text-and-term paper approach. In particular, students employed the tropes of ‘opening up’ and ‘looking outward’ to describe their experience of undertaking the assignment”
(Fletcher and Cambre 119).
“The sense that the university experience is inward looking, socially hermetic, and disconnected from larger social realities was prominent in the studetns’ descriptions of their learning experience” (Fletcher and Cambre 119).
“public screening” (Fletcher and Cambre 120).
“Students conceptualized this quality of digital stories, a quality enabled by their visuality, as shareability between themselves and a broader non-academic community” (Fletcher and Cambre 120).
“The experience of producing something with utility beyond the students’ immediate concerns with coursework was a rewarding and perhaps unnerving experience for some” (Fletcher and Cambre 121).
“Like storytelling generally, the digital story calls on the intersubjective process of collective meaning making” (Fletcher and Cambre 122).
“The overview of student experiences of learning points to the difference between inscribed (textual) [meaning written] and incorporated (embodied) forms of knowledge (Stoller 1997)” (Fletcher and Cambre 123).
“In adopting a pedagogical ideology that foregrounds the potential for learning through sharing and action, we are drawing on Charest’s notion of the implicated academic…” (Fletcher and Cambre 125).
“‘Even if their films are technically inferior to the work of professionals, they will have had the irreplaceable quality of real contact between the person filming and those being filmed’ (1975, 88)” (Rouch qtd in Fletcher and Cambre 126).
“potentials of visual pedagogical tools for fostering student engagements with disciplinary knowledge and social awareness” (Fletcher and Cambre 126).
“The digital story presents a fruitful avenue for realizing the power of narrative and imagery in attending to the significance of people’s lives” (Fletcher and Cambre 127).
“One way an implicated scholarship contributes is by providing a lens and a position to work within the complexity that may otherwise frustrate and constrain the observer” (Fletcher and Cambre 127).