Digital stories are powerful instructional tools that allow students to communicate complex concepts and emotions through both linguistic and nonlinguistic modes. A digital story is a 3-6 minute multimodal video through which students can engage in critical reflection about their experiences, participate actively in the learning process, and give voice to their identities.
This course will lay a foundation for understanding how stories shape communities, identities, memories, and perspectives on our lives. It will provide opportunities for the theoretical analysis of self-representation and composing narratives on behalf of ourselves and others with a focus on our linguistic and cultural heritage, critical incidents and experiences as they are preserved and performed through narrative within digital stories. Students will be required to call on their own intellectual, emotional, and imaginative processes and to develop their own skills in reflection, interviewing, oral history collection, and the use of relevant digital storytelling tools.
The first part of the course is devoted to the methodological inquiry discussion of relevant concepts and frameworks in the analysis of personal stories of critical incidents and experiences told in digital stories by individuals and communities. Students are offered narrative and autoethnography tools to explore mentioned stories, especially in relation to ethnicity, race, gender, and class with application in the assembly of non-fiction digital stories. The second part is devoted to guiding students either in creating their own digital stories as self-representation of who they are or on behalf of others (i.e. their communities, family members). Students will be encouraged to produce digital stories in languages other than English. Bilingual and multilingual productions are welcomed too (with the possibility of adding one credit module to the course).