Teaching digital storytelling: Inspiring voices through online narratives.

Abstract

In the scholarship of information literacy instruction, authors are increasingly reframing information literacy as a metaliteracy, with the focus on not just the analytical and evaluative skills of learners, but also on the metacognitive, collaborative, and participatory aspects of learners’ engagement with information. Thomas P. Mackey, along with various coauthors and coeditors, has been at the forefront of the work being done on metaliteracy, and Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices Through Online Narratives, which Mackey co-edited with Empire State University colleague Sheila Marie Aird, is the newest offering to address metaliteracy in the classroom. Focusing specifically on digital storytelling as a pedagogical tool for engaging learners, promoting metaliterate learning, and helping learners develop their own voices and agency, the book offers both theory and practical suggestions to instructors wishing to incorporate this approach in their teaching. According to Mackey and Aird, the volume is intended to inspire new curriculum and revisions to existing curriculum and to garner support for digital storytelling initiatives broadly. Presenting case studies primarily from the United States and South Africa, the nine essays included in the volume argue that digital storytelling is perhaps uniquely able to encourage metaliterate learning when it is taught effectively. Each essay is grounded in theories of information literacy, metaliteracy, and a review of relevant literature but also presents real-world examples of how digital storytelling is being utilized in a variety of settings. The themes of participation and collaboration in digital storytelling endeavors are strongly present throughout the collection, but some essays, such as Muchativugwa Liberty Hove’s piece on autoethnography, also examine digital storytelling artifacts as objects of study themselves. In this way, the book is able to provide suggestions to instructors wishing to incorporate digital storytelling projects in their syllabi, but it also suggests ways to frame digital storytelling and analyze the products of these efforts. As the title suggests, the narratives created in digital storytelling projects are necessarily online, and some of the essays, such as the one by Aird and Mackey, do indeed discuss projects created for online learning environments, but others, such as Kimmika LH Williams-Witherspoon’s chapter on poetic ethnography, illustrate how students conducting in-person field research can use digital storytelling to create and disseminate affecting, innovative works that amplify diverse voices and engage wider audiences within the community.