Thirteen Years Later, Tapping K-12 Teaching to Share Digital Storytelling Practices with Fellow Academics

It is always an honor to be asked to speak in front of fellow scholars. I am, however, always intimidated by working with my peers to present on a topic that is of interest to them (especially when there's such intelligence in the room). Last spring, I was approached by a group to see if I'd be willing to present on digital storytelling and I said, "Sure, but I'm no expert."

Yes, I do it often in my undergraduate and graduate courses, but it's sort of like note-taking. It's part for the course, so I don't think about teaching how to do them, or why I do them. They are simply a way to communicate information visually and aurally.

It's simply pedagogy.

My thinking: I began teaching the 'new writing' in Kentucky in 2002 (that's a reference from a book that came out in 2009 where I wrote about technological changes in the English classroom), and what I thought was going to be a future dissertation. I jumped ship, however. I moved to ethnography, storytelling, and the young refugee-background youth I loved working with. I figured digital literacy studies would make me a dinosaur as soon as I finished - it moves that fast. I was afraid of committing to a scholarly project that might be outdated quickly.

Still, Brian Vance, DJ Dawg-bite, was with me through the last years of Brown School, digital writing and presentations, and helped me to see the best way to support the reluctant writer and to help him achieve excellence. He coined the phrase, "Listen, Blockhead. I always have writer's block. Unblock me," Which I did (and he sent this photo of his current phase as a blockhead, electrician, and proud dad. I use it whenever I talk about digital storytelling). Simply stated, to help him as a writer, I learned the power of blocking out ideas (which led to comics, digital stories, and visual literacies).

Today, a team and I have 30 people signed up to listen to us on a panel about how to use digital storytelling as an instructional tool. I will discuss how I use it to help me cover a lot of material quickly by assigning 6-minutes videos to my students to share information on material I won't have time to cover (the other things they need to know beyond a semester).

I have years and years and years of this stuff collected. But like breathing, I don't think of it, until someone asks me to name what it is I'm doing. Today, I will try that.

That is why it is so strange to me that anyone would sign up for a workshop on this (I mean, I have had K-8 schools with 600+ students produce 600+ digital stories. It seems weird to me that such work is innovative, but that's what our team is billed as) (I can be an innovative nincompoop...such a great word, like sputum - a word used in yesterday's Coronavirus readings).

Okay, I'm off to do this work. And, as always, I owe so much to the kids of Kentucky. Who knew they were doing work in the 2000s that would be seen as progressive today?

I guess they were more advanced that I already knew they were!

Psst: Technology is just a tool. It is like a pencil, a keyboard, and notebook. Technology is a gimmick. What we really need to be after is content and GREAT communication skills. If they boo me for saying this today, oh well. I tried.