{"id":11425,"date":"2022-02-04T18:59:41","date_gmt":"2022-02-04T18:59:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/citejournal.org\/\/\/"},"modified":"2022-05-24T18:52:38","modified_gmt":"2022-05-24T18:52:38","slug":"an-inquiry-into-the-possibilities-of-collaborative-digital-storytelling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citejournal.org\/volume-22\/issue-1-22\/english-language-arts\/an-inquiry-into-the-possibilities-of-collaborative-digital-storytelling","title":{"rendered":"An Inquiry Into the Possibilities of Collaborative Digital Storytelling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The use of case studies in teacher education in the United States has been a popular practice since the early 1980s. As Darling-Hammond and Hammerness (2002) described, the practice of encoding classroom observations in writing can support preservice teachers in reflecting within frames of research and theory. Further, the act of documenting observations makes the experience available to a community of peers, bridging the gap between personal situated knowledge and sharable, generalizable knowledge. At this same time, video-based case study analysis emerged with a focus on the use of video for reflective analysis in teacher education (Sch\u00f6n, 1987).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More recently, collaborative narrative inquiry has emerged as a practice to further support teachers in their efforts to document, reflect, and share their classroom experiences. Lachuk et al. (2019) described the importance of collaborative narrative inquiry in preparing teachers who build trusting relationships with their students and families, by consistently interrogating the relationship between their values and their teaching practices to make courageous instructional decisions that emphasize morality and justice. They further articulated the important role that collaborative narrative inquiry played in their own efforts to prepare preservice teachers to practice instructional integrity in the classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Learning about students\u2019 lives to build trusting relationships with families that support relevant pedagogy is not new. Moll et al. (1992) engaged in extensive qualitative research with working-class Mexican students, families, and their teachers living on the United States border to learn about the cultural and community assets that students brought with them to school. Their theory of funds of knowledge reframed perceptions of students from underresourced communities as at a disadvantage because they are economically poor to engaged students who enjoy a wealth of high-quality experiences at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Similarly, Ladson-Billings (1995) inquired into the successes of African American students at a time when many viewed these same students through an at-risk lens. Her theory of culturally relevant pedagogy grew from research with classroom teachers who experienced pedagogical success with their African American students. She has since called for a shift from culturally relevant pedagogy to culturally sustaining pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2004), with the recognition that culture is ever changing. Both funds of knowledge and culturally sustaining pedagogy stem from research with educators who were deeply embedded in the communities in which their students lived. Learning about students\u2019 lives outside of the classroom is no easy task for preservice teachers who are often new to the school communities in which they will be teaching, especially with young children whose language skills are emerging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a teacher educator working to prepare preservice teachers with the types of knowledge and dispositions articulated by the research just described, I embraced collaborative narrative inquiry as a response to traditional case studies (Darling-Hammond & Hammerness, 2002). When written by my preservice teachers, traditional case studies most often took on the discourse that Fine (1994) described as writing about <\/em>students as other, <\/em>thus securing privilege. In response, I invited preservice teachers to engage in collaborative narrative inquiry through the process of digital storytelling (Hull & Katz, 2006; Lambert, 2010), which allows for the inclusion of student voice in the inquiry process, as well as different forms of representation through the affordance of digital media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This article describes my exploration into the possibilities of incorporating collaborative digital storytelling into preservice teacher education in an effort to support preservice teachers in learning about their students\u2019 rich insights and perspectives on teaching and learning, as well as to inquire into ways in which their teaching practice can support the literacy learning of diverse youth who are engaged in multimodal literacies that move across spaces of home, community, and school. Specifically, I draw on data gathered in an elementary literacy methods course taught at a public university in the northeastern United States to explore the possibilities of a digital storytelling collaboration between undergraduate preservice teachers and elementary students in a public school setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In what follows, I describe what emerged though data analysis grounded in a conceptual framework based within research on collaborative inquiry and multimodality to discover the learning that materialized and the nature of the relationships that were fostered through the process of collaborative digital storytelling. I conclude with a discussion of how literacy researchers and practitioners might build on similar projects to keep record of the ways that diverse students are experiencing teaching and learning in the literacy classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research on technology integration for preservice teachers has focused on the beliefs and technological expertise of the current generation of preservice teachers, many of whom have grown up with interactive digital technologies to prepare them to integrate technology into their classroom (Lei, 2009). However, as Lewis (2007) argued, technology integration demands, not only that teachers become proficient in the use of interactive technologies for teaching and learning, but that they acquire new orientations to time, space, performance, and design in schools: \u201cPopular technologies are to be used and shared out-of-school. To do so in school challenges the materiality of what it means to be a teacher, in their minds\u201d (p. 235). The project described in this article worked to create a new way of thinking about incorporating digital technologies into elementary schools to allow preservice teachers to rethink their identities as teachers in diverse public school classrooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hull and Katz (2006) discovered how digital stories crafted in a supportive environment provided powerful opportunities for forming and giving voice to agentive selves. Further, they articulated how digital stories give rise to conceptions of self that shed light on how and why we humans learn as we develop a sense of who we want to be. The telling of self-narratives created for an audience allows authors to make meaning of their experiences, which can change their thoughts and feeling in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These stories, regardless of the imagined audience when designed, have the potential to change the thoughts and feelings of those who view them as well (Lambert, 2010). In this research, allowing preservice teachers to craft digital stories collaboratively with students from social and cultural backgrounds that might be different from their own had the potential to reframe their views of students away from a deficit lens (e.g., Lareau, 2003; Rogers, 2003).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consistent with these findings that designing digital stories in out-of-school settings provides space for agentive possibilities for identity construction (Hull & Katz, 2006; Lambert, 2010), embedding digital storytelling into preservice education courses has been shown to foster environments that allow preservice teachers to see themselves as stakeholders in their own learning (Lohnes Watulak, 2018). Further, Shelton et al. (2017) argued, \u201cWhen embedded in relevant course content, creating a digital story can be a way for teachers to experience constructing deeper knowledge through inquiry\u201d (p. 59).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Drawing on the work of Delgado (1995), Vasudevan (2006) described how storytelling in qualitative research can offer insights into multiple ways of knowing, which disrupt grand narratives of students from nondominant backgrounds, such as \u201cat risk\u201d and \u201cunderperforming.\u201d She further argued, \u201cNot only do we need different stories, but we also need to seek out and construct stories in different ways\u201d (p. 208).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The research described here drew on these successes of incorporating digital storytelling into preservice teacher education to inquire into the possibilities of preservice teachers and students working together to design collaborative digital stories. In this way, I worked to realize the call to provide opportunities for different types of stories to be told in public school settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much research supports collaborative inquiry in preservice teacher education amongst teacher education faculty (Johnson Lachuk et al., 2019) and as part of collaborative school-university partnerships (Harlow, 2014). Johnson Lachuk et al. described the critical nature of collaborative narrative inquiry for preservice teachers to interrogate their beliefs and practices through intentional conversations as they prepare to work in culturally diverse classrooms. The collaborative digital stories in this research were designed as opportunities for preservice teachers and their students to engage in intentional conversations about their beliefs and experiences as they learned in the classroom together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Galletta and Jones (2010) engaged in a research collaboration with undergraduate preservice teachers and secondary students through a university-public school partnership, where they sought to create a project in which preservice teachers\u2019 and students\u2019 funds of knowledge were equally valued. To do this they engaged the preservice and secondary students in a filmmaking project, exploring resources and experiences in their community. Their findings revealed both the power that collaborative digital filmmaking can have for youth to become agents of change through the inquiry process, as well as many of the challenges in navigating relationships between preservice teachers and secondary students living in poverty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The project described in this article builds on the body of collaborative narrative inquiry research by creating a space for collaboration between preservice teachers and elementary students as they learned together in the literacy classroom. Here, the imperative of collaborative narrative inquiry and the call for different types of storytelling intersects with the possibilities of multimodal composing, wherein new digital technologies can be used to create not only new kinds of texts but also, as Vasudevan (2006) described, \u201cnew kinds of spaces for storytelling and story-listening\u201d (p. 208). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Digital storytelling offers possibilities for alternate subject positions to emerge when the right of storytelling is reclaimed by the storied. In the research presented in this article, there are layers to what constituted whose story was being documented, as preservice teachers were positioned as both student and teacher, and elementary students were positioned as both student and collaborator and, in some instances, teachers themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The affordances of digital media for storytelling allow for what Hull and Nelson (2005) described as the expressive power of multimodality. They described multimodal composing as not simply increasing the meaning-making potential of a text by adding images, sounds, and written language but instead drew on the concept of braiding (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) to illuminate how a multimodal text can \u201ccreate a different system of signification, one that transcends the collective contribution of its constituent parts\u201d (p. 225).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bringing a multimodal lens to this research can shed light on the meaning making of preservice teachers and their students in relation to the collaborative digital stories they constructed. A multimodal theoretical lens considers how combining different modes within a text allows for meaning to be made in different ways (Kress, 2003), while illuminating how meaning making is experienced across multiple modes as not separate but as combined. This field of study also recognizes the potential of modes other than written language to have powerful meaning-making possibilities, despite traditional understandings that written language has the greatest potential for meaning making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Analyzing texts through a multimodal lens links social practices with representations (Pahl & Rowsell, 2006). Thus, I drew on Kress\u2019 (2003) multimodal theory in analyzing the digital texts that centered this research to illuminate how the teaching and learning experiences in which preservice teachers engaged as they constructed their collaborative digital stories were situated within a much wider communicational landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Specifically, Kress\u2019 (2003) framework required the consideration, not only of how any text is shaped by its material form, but how that form is shaped by the discourses that circulate the spaces in which the text was produced. Such an analytic framework is essential for understanding how the discourses that surrounded teaching and learning in this study shaped and were shaped by the types of learning experiences that preservice teachers and their students engaged in throughout this study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In what follows I describe the evolution of the preservice literacy methods course and the accompanying elementary collaborative reading program, where preservice teachers and their students engaged in collaborative digital storytelling as a way to make meaning of their shared learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This research project was grounded in my efforts to support preservice teachers enrolled in an undergraduate literacy methods course, as well as my efforts to support children at a local public elementary school where the preservice teachers engaged in fieldwork. As such, I took up Cochran-Smith and Lytle\u2019s (2009) notion of inquiry as stance, <\/em>which recognizes the capacity of practitioners widely conceived (e.g., school administrators, classroom teachers, teacher educators, and preservice teachers) to work collaboratively in an effort to reform education in democratizing ways.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Inquiry as stance recognizes practitioners as generators of knowledge who use data gathered at sites of professional practice to inform pedagogical practices that create improved educational opportunities for students. To work from and with an inquiry stance<\/p>\n\n\n\n involves a continual process of making current arrangements problematic; questioning the ways knowledge and practice are constructed, evaluated, and used, and; assuming that part of the work by practitioners individually and collectively is to participate in educational and social change. (Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 120)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In designing this research I acknowledge the blurred lines between inquiry and practice, and as such, I worked to make visible the ways in which data collection and analysis were informed by tenets of practitioner research as well as the conceptual framework that guided this work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Data for this research were gathered across two sites, in an undergraduate literacy methods course taught at a public university in the northeastern United States and at Sunrise Elementary School. (All names, including the school and those of participants and their students, are pseudonyms.) Sunrise is located in a neighborhood surrounded by public housing and, at the time of this research, enrolled 400 students, 49% of whom were African American, 42% of whom were Latino, and 32% of whom received special education services. To understand the context in which data were collected for this research, this section describes the evolution of the digital storytelling project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As with many elementary literacy methods courses across the United States, the course in which participants for this research were enrolled has a fieldwork component where preservice teachers spend time in a school practicing what they learn through course readings and lectures. Five years ago, I partnered with administrators at Sunrise who were not only willing to allow the preservice teachers enrolled in my literacy course to work with their students but offered a resource room filled with thousands of books organized in leveled libraries for preservice teachers to use with their students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Due to the high rate of Sunrise students in foster care and transitional housing, the school employed a counselor dedicated to supporting families who need additional resources. Recognizing an opportunity to move beyond thinking about the school as a site for field placement, I worked with the administration, teachers, and counselor to develop a program that allowed for Sunrise teachers to send students for 1 hour a week during the school day to the resource room to work one on one with a preservice teacher. Students at Sunrise are now familiar with the program, and many request to be chosen to participate, as it is known as a fun place to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the first 2 years of the program, preservice teachers documented their own and their students\u2019 learning in writing through a multistep case study project (Darling-Hammond & Hammerness, 2002). As I read through the projects at the end of each term, I noted that they did not seem to capture the dynamic nature of the work that I observed each week. As such, I began to encourage them to use multimedia (e.g., audio and video recording and photographs of student work). Drawing on the work of Lambert (2010), the written case study project evolved into a digital storytelling presentation. For the last three semesters we included the elementary students as cocreators of the collaborative digital stories, in a move toward acknowledging the shared space of learning for all of us (professor, preservice teachers, and elementary students) in our reading program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The research presented in this article is drawn from the most recent cohort to participate in the collaborative reading program. Nineteen second-grade Sunrise elementary students, who were demographically representative of the school, were randomly paired with a preservice teacher. Each week preservice teachers met with their student in the resource room to practice assessment and teaching strategies based within a balanced literacy model (Fountas & Pinnell, 2001) used throughout the school district. During this time, I as the instructor circulated the room to provide support to preservice teachers as they engaged in their fieldwork teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The collaborative digital storytelling project described in this article began prior to the first day of fieldwork with a discussion of the following description of the project:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout your fieldwork hours, you and your student will design a digital story that showcases what each of you learned throughout your fieldwork journey over the semester. The story should highlight what you each learned about learning to read and teaching reading including strengths you noticed and areas of growth you would like to pursue moving forward. You and your student are free to make design choices including structure, format, and digital media tools you use to design your story. There is not a requirement for stories to include photographs, video, or voice recordings of students as some students may not feel comfortable with being photographed or recorded. Your completed story can be no longer than 6 minutes. On the last days of our course, you will present your digital story with the classroom community and reflect on what you learned through the process of teaching your student and creating your digital story. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Grounded in the work of Moll et.al., (1992), preservice teachers engaged in activities prior to fieldwork to support them in learning about their students\u2019 cultural backgrounds and everyday experiences at home, in an attempt to make visible their power and privilege in these interactions. These activities were also designed to support preservice teachers in planning to work with students in culturally relevant and sustaining ways (Ladson-Billings, 2004). Specifically preservice teachers were taught strategies for engaging in critical conversations with their students about learning (Jones, 2006). Further, preservice teachers read about, discussed, and engaged in activities around digital storytelling literature, from which they learned about digital storytelling as a form of digital media creation foregrounding meaning making, collaboration, and amplifying marginalized narratives (Lambert, 2010; Robin, 2016).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Preservice teachers were also provided time to practice using various technologies that could be used for their digital stories (e.g., iMovie and Powtoon) during course lectures and were given opportunities to share new technologies for digital storytelling with each other. On the first day of fieldwork, preservice teachers engaged their student in a conversation about the work they would be doing, which included sharing that together they would be documenting their experience in a digital story. They also solicited feedback from their student about how they might want to go about capturing their learning together.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This study centered 19 preservice teachers from the most recent cohort of the collaborative reading program, 18 of whom identified as female and one who identified as male. As part of their coursework, preservice teachers engaged in an identity self-study. In an effort to provide a safe space to reflect upon their own cultural backgrounds, preservice teachers were provided an opportunity to share the outcomes of their self-study but were not required to do so. An analysis of preservice teachers who shared their self-study narratives showed the group to be culturally diverse and included participants who identified their own cultural backgrounds as Asian-American, European-American, Italian American, Muslim, and Latina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My positionality in this inquiry was that of a practitioner-researcher. As I collected data on a program which I both designed and taught, I acknowledge that the data generated in this study represent what Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) described as \u201clocal knowledge of practice\u201d that can both influence the local context in which this work took place and be useful in other local contexts globally. I further recognize that this work was shaped by my role as a university professor working with university students who were completing a course for a grade. Thus, the data collected and analyzed here must be understood within this context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Data were collected over one 15-week term to address the research questions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Data included 19 finally produced collaborative digital stories collected from preservice teachers designed with their second-grade students. Additional data include my own reflective fieldnotes written after each reading program session, and lesson plans and teaching reflections written by each preservice teacher. Participants were invited to allow for their materials to be included as data for this study after grades for the course were posted, to minimize preservice teachers opting into the study as necessary for their success in the course. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To address the research questions, data analysis began with multimodal analysis of the collaborative digital stories. As discussed in the theoretical framework, Kress\u2019 (2003) multimodal theory leads to the consideration of three distinct aspects that make up any text, the discourse, <\/em>the genre, <\/em>and the mode. <\/em>Thus, I examined each collaborative digital story for each of these three aspects to discover how meanings were conveyed across multiple modes. Specifically, I viewed each story multiple times guided by the following analytic questions derived from Kress\u2019 framework:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Codes that emerged through this analysis were mapped onto additional data sources, including lesson plans and teaching reflections. Three text types, Clinical Academic, Personal Narrative Journey, <\/em>and Superhero Readers <\/em>emerged as categories, which are outlined in Table 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Table 1.<\/strong> Summary of Data Analysis<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nDigital Storytelling in Preservice Teacher Education<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Collaborative Digital Storytelling as Inquiry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Research Methodology<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Project Context<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Collaborative Digital Storytelling Project<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Participants<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Researcher Positionality<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Data Collection and Analysis<\/h3>\n\n\n\n