It Starts with a (Digital) Story

One teacher-researcher joins a staticky recording of her phone interview with her immigrant father with photographs of his life growing up in Mexico to reveal the origins of her work with English language learners. Another, a writing instructor at a community college, takes viewers on a video tour of his work commute through California’s Central Valley to a campus deserted due to COVID-19. His steady voice overlays the landscape, asking us to consider the connection between place, technology, and access for Latinx students. This chapter, written by the composers of these stories and the instructor of their instructional technology course, demonstrates how graduate students and practicing teachers in an English pedagogy program used digital storytelling as a point of entry into academic inquiry, thus practicing embodied collaborative storytelling forwarded by scholars promoting feminist (Calderón et al., 2012; Glenn, 2018; Royster & Kirsch, 2012) and critical race theory (Solórzano & Yosso, 2016) research methodologies.

Jason Palmeri (2012), Jodi Shipka (2011), and others have challenged a preoccupation with multimodal compositions as a course product, arguing for the use of multimodal invention activities at various stages of the research process. Responding to this critique, this chapter positions digital storytelling as a generative story-based research practice allowing teacher researchers beginning an inquiry project to merge personal, scholarly, and teacherly identities toward greater agency and awareness of researcher positionality. Incorporating screenshots of student digital stories, this multimodal chapter demonstrates how digital story, through an emphasis on self-revelation, first-person voice, experimentation (Lambert, 2018), and collaboration, becomes a “democratizing medium” (Trimboli, 2020) with potential to disrupt traditional Western research paradigms grounded in hierarchies and false notions of value neutrality (Calderón et al., 2012; Glenn, 2018).

Sara Cooper draws on student digital stories and statements of goals and choices (Shipka, 2011) to demonstrate how graduate students readying to embark on their final capstone projects identified personal connections to a scholarly question through the genre affordances of an embodied collaborative storytelling practice.

Andrea Boyles describes how her digital story, centered on her immigrant father, served as a means of exploring how her family history and life experiences shaped her values and professional path. She advocates using digital storytelling to encourage agency among English language learners who frequently have unwanted identities imposed on them by others.

Gregory Ramírez describes how his digital story engages with issues of educational equity and access by focusing on the often-ignored challenges faced by his Latinx students.

His story, situated and embodied, exists as a form of “counter-storytelling” that counteracts “monovocal stories about the low educational achievement and attainment of students of color” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2016, p. 130). He situates multimodal composition as a collaborative practice that can promote equity in the face of the digital divide.

Engaging in teacher-research and autoethnography, the authors analyze digital composing practices to illustrate “the role that narratives of self—stories about who we have been in the past and who we want to become in the future— can play in construction of agentive identities” (Hull & Katz, 2006, p. 44).