Guiding questions
- Why is it considered worthwhile to explore the potential of multilingual digital storytelling (MDST) for language and literacy learning in schools?
- Does the integrated and inclusive model for MDST seem appropriate and what obstacles could there be in seeking to implement it?
- What are the implications for pedagogy and teacher professional development?
Stories take us into our own and other worlds. They appeal to people of all ages and across all cultures. They enable us to better understand the familiar, but also to make connections to the unknown. They engage our minds, but also our hearts. They can illuminate, but also challenge. And when we become authors of stories, we take a significant further step. We resist being defined by others and declare the legitimacy of a personal way of seeing and making sense of reality. Part of that way of seeing is conveyed in the language through which we choose to communicate and represent ourselves. When stories are created in different languages or combinations of languages, they often carry greater cultural authenticity. They also embody and give positive expression to plurilingual repertoires within individuals and societies providing a deeper literacy experience and a basis for greater intercultural respect and understanding.
When storytelling becomes digital we find ourselves presented with new possibilities, but also new parameters to work within. In story books, print dominates. Within the digital medium account needs to be taken of image, voice, sound effects and music. We need to understand the different affordances of each modality and how they combine most effectively within an integrated design of meaning. The digital medium is intrinsically interactive and fluid, transcending boundaries of space and time and facilitating shifts between different languages. This makes it ideally suited to cooperative, critical and process oriented ways of working. It also enables online presentation to a potentially worldwide audience thereby injecting excitement and a sense of purpose which can support the creative construction process.
What this book is about is young people creating digital stories in a range of languages and combinations of languages and sharing those stories with peers, teachers, family and friends as well as any others who are connected to the Internet and may be interested in or simply stumble across their work. As researchers and teacher educators, we were keen to consider the impact of MDST on studentsā language learning in the contexts of foreign/community languages, 1 as well as of English mother tongue and English as an Additional Language (EAL). 2 We also wanted to see what scope it provided for studentsā creative and critical development not least through working in a multimodal digital environment. Another area of interest was the intercultural dimension and the extent to which MDST gave students insights into heritage but also challenged stereotypical views and enabled students to make sense of culture in their own terms. At a more personal level we wanted to see how it affected student engagement, self-awareness and confidence.
The way that we, as teacher educators, came to be involved in MDST also has a story behind it and in this introductory chapter we want to share that story with you before going on to tell you what the rest of the book is about. We, the editors of this book and writers of this chapter, are specialists in English/EAL and Languages (foreign and community) employed in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. For some years we have been concerned about trends in language and literacy education in the UK particularly in the light of massive social and cultural change and the need to prepare young people for a very different world to the one in which their parents grew up.
We decided to investigate our concerns further through open discussion within a focus group made up of secondary pre-service student teachers of English, Languages (foreign and community), Art and Design and Geography at a point where they had spent time working in two mainstream placement schools. Drawing on an article contrasting monocultural and intercultural orientations to language, literacy and learning (Anderson and Obied/Macleroy, 2011), the purpose of the focus group was to gain a clearer picture, first, of the extent to which schools support the development of studentsā plurilingual and intercultural skills and, second, of the extent to which digital literacy including critical perspectives are supported across the curriculum.
In spite of differences in policy and practice across schools a number of strands emerged clearly in the data. First, whilst subscribing to inclusive practice, schools were strongly reinforcing hierarchical perceptions of language. This was reflected in attitudes towards non-standard varieties of English and in the choice of foreign languages offered for study. Whilst schools had a high numbers of bilingual learners, curriculum content and pedagogy was predominantly monolingual and monocultural in orientation with little if any attention paid to valuing and nurturing studentsā home languages or to including them in literacy-based work. There were no established partnerships or links with local complementary schools. 3 With regard to the intercultural dimension some good practice was identified, but it was felt that this could be greatly enhanced through cross-curricular collaboration, for example between Geography and Languages departments. While there was also some good practice in use of digital media, this was patchy and often lacking a critical dimension. There was a need to develop better understandings of how online learning out-of-school can complement in-school learning. It was strongly felt that the performativity culture in schools was undermining opportunities for more innovative and creative work which would be both more engaging and more attuned to the modern world.
Presentation and discussion of findings from the focus group at the New Literacies Conference at the University of Sheffield in the same year confirmed our belief that this was an important area to pursue and that the collaboration we had formed as English/EAL and Languages specialists would provide a valuable basis for us to do this. We went back to look at the way understandings of literacy had been reviewed and reshaped by the new London Group taking account of increasing diversity and interdependence in societies across the globe, on the one hand, and new means of multimodal, online communication on the other. Surveying the research literature since the multiliteracies model was conceived, it was striking that whilst research into multimodal communication and its place within an expanded semiotic landscape was receiving considerable attention, there was relative neglect of the multilingual strand and its significance within new designs of meaning. This may be explained in part by the fact that most research in this area has been carried out in English dominant countries. A further factor may be the way in which the school curriculum as well as academic study and research has tended towards compartmentalisation, discouraging interdisciplinary dialogue. It should also be remembered that historically, in English-speaking countries, the term literacy has tended to mean a one-dimensional, print-based view of literacy in English and a sidelining of links to broader multilingual and multimodal dimensions.
The challenge then was how to bring these things together in a way that would fit with our own vision and beliefs and with the priorities of teachers and schools. Earlier research by Anderson (2001) involving a multilingual web publishing project with secondary students of Urdu and Bengali had shown the potential of this kind of work to engage students of community languages and lend a greater sense of purpose to their learning. With the development of Web 2.0 technology, the increasing use of digital media in everyday life and the growth in international e-learning partnerships, it was clear that opportunities for web authoring were growing rapidly including in the area of digital storytelling.
Moreover, it was possible to find interesting examples of digital storytelling initiatives on the web. We quickly located the California-based Center for Digital Storytelling and the Capture Wales project, developed through a partnership formed between BBC Wales and Cardiff University. In both cases digital storytelling had been seen as a valuable extension to community arts practice. An initiative of particular interest due to its urban education focus was the City Voices, City Visions project developed at the Graduate School of Education, University of Buffalo, New York in collaboration with Buffalo Public Schools. We felt that the approach adopted in this digital video project had much in common with our own aspirations and beliefs. It was introduced in a number of subjects across the curriculum including foreign languages (French, Spanish) and English as a second language. Pedagogically it was based on a process approach which was āstudent-centred, inquiry-based, project-orientedā (Miller and Borowicz, 2005). Moreover, it involved students, teachers and researchers working and learning together.
This increased our confidence in the view that MDST provided a valuable focus and practical means of addressing the concerns we felt about the persistence of a monocultural view of literacy in education. What exactly did we mean by this though and how did our interpretation fit with the emancipatory arts- and community-based philosophy at the roots of the digital storytelling movement? In Table 1.1 we have sought to capture the multiple resonances and interconnections that the term āmultilingual digital storytellingā has for us and its positioning within a broader context of intercultural communication.
MDST provides a means of nurturing and reflecting multiliteracies in practice. It recognises the power of storytelling and the space stories offer both for self-representation and for engaging with otherness. It draws on affordances of the digital medium for multimodal composition and for collaborative and dialogic ways of working and sharing across boundaries of home, school and community. And it values and supports multilingual repertoires, recognising that every language is a distinct medium in itself with its own expressive resources, its own palette of colours, its own sounds and rhythms, all shaped by and representing history, culture, values and beliefs. Challenging monocultural perspectives on the curriculum it fosters the understanding, skills and confidence required to build harmonious, syncretic, multilingual identities and to participate actively as global citizens.
As our thinking evolved with regard to the Critical Connections project, upon which this book is based, we realised how it could offer a natural focus for the integrated and inclusive approach to language and literacy learning to which we are committed. We envisaged working with teachers of foreign and community languages as well as EAL and English as mother tongue and we saw the potential of involving mainstream and complementary schools in and around London as well as overseas. Initial conversations held with potential participants, a number of whom we had worked with previously, indicated a high level of interest in participating in a project in this area and this encouraged us to put in a funding proposal to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, a body which had done much to support work in the complementary sector and the building of links between mainstream and complementary schools.
The process of putting together the project funding proposal led us to interrogate more deeply the rationale and principles guiding our approach. Central to this is the notion of ācritical connectionsā which forms part of the title we gave to the project. We wanted to facilitate connections between the different areas of language teaching referred to above as well as more broadly across the curriculum; between traditional, print-based and digital literacies, between different cultural and personal perspectives embedded within stories; between mainstream and complementary schools in and around London and schools overseas; between learning in contexts of school, home and community as well as online. With the emphasis on connections goes criticality, because this is what is required to develop higher levels of student engagement and learning. Criticality is achieved in a number of ways, but most fundamentally by encouraging learner agency, dialogue, peer collaboration and review, and open-ended as well as more focussed questioning. In order to further extend learner ownership and voice within the project it was decided to incorporate a student co-researcher strand which would run in parallel to our research and contribute to overall findings. We expected schools involved in the project to become part of a community of practice involving closer and more authentic engagement with different cultural perspectives through being grounded in real relationships.
Intertwined with criticality goes the democratic and universalised view of creativity espoused by the groundbreaking All Our Futures report (NACCCE, 1999) and the space provided by MDST for reimagining culture and reconstructing and affirming plurilingual identities. Confronting monolingual ideologies and hierarchical positioning of different languages, MDST aims to give young people a voice and equip them with the skills and the confidence required for active citizenship. One way in which this is achieved is through recognising the funds of knowledge in the home and community and showing how this can amplify and support learning that takes place in the context of mainstream schooling.
Figure 1.1 seeks to capture the multidimensional, integrated and inclusive nature of MDST and the broad educational vision that it represents. In this it is consistent with an ecological view of learning which recognises the range of intersecting social, cultural and psychologi...
