Читать книгу Appraising Digital Storytelling across Educational Contexts - AA.VV - Страница 8

2

Digital storytelling at a crossroads. Historical context for an ever-emerging genre

Joe lamBert

Center for Digital Storytelling

Abstract

This article reflects on the four phases of dissemination of the pedagogical approach used by the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) and discusses the role of the Story Circle within this model, which facilitates the process of creating stories. The Center for Digital Storytelling’s Creative Phase (1993-1996) involved the organisation of workshops all over the United States to expand their method. The Literacy Phase (1997-2001) consolidated this expansion and provided the public with a system that could be mimicked by creative educators who wanted to work with DS, while the Methodological Phase (2002-2004) ratified the CDS as a global authority on the method for teaching digital storytelling. Finally, during the Ethos Phase (2005-2013), the CDS re-defined their objectives and approach to digital storytelling, reaffirming its compromise towards the extension of democracy and the participation and inclusion of marginalized communities, and marginalized individuals within those communities.

Keywords: Center for Digital Storytelling, creativity, literacy, methodology, ethos, story circle

1 Introduction

Digital Storytelling sits at a historical crossroads. From the standpoint of the work of the Center for Digital Storytelling (StoryCenter), and from the community of practitioners that have gathered under the Digital Storytelling banner in the last 20 years, we are being forced to define new meaning and purpose for our work. Many of us are coming to admit that much of what has been achieved to date has less meaning and relevance for individuals and communities now well into the 21^st Century.

What was once novelty, and a host of new theoretical and practical problems for those interested in contemporary communication, has become so central to the social media world, the role of the facilitative support has moved less and less to the digital, and more and more to the purely narrative and design concerns of this communicative genre. Put simply, the “digital” now makes little difference. The story becomes the high technology. Getting people to increase the depth and emotional power for their storytelling, to make them effective and memorable storytellers at all levels of literacy, becomes a continuing challenge for all practitioners. For researchers, framing the dialogue about efficacy in method, and theoretical contexts for generalizing approaches to pedagogy and support systems for engaging storytellers, will less and less focus on the core media production literacies - the ability to record voices, to take still and moving images with a digital device, to use an editing software, upload and distribute –many of these skills are part of common smart phone usage by 3 billion people, and available to 56% of the planet’s population (ref. <http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-2013-mobile-growth-statistics/>).

The focus instead will be on idea and concept, structure and design, for a broad population to be challenged to achieve multimodal fluency. Seen from a historical perspective, this is the end of “digital” era of storytelling. Digital means nothing when analog has essentially ceased to exist. The following represents a historical review from the perspective of myself as an active facilitating practitioner and informal theorist.

2 Four waves of development: digital storytelling seen from a historical perspective

At StoryCenter, we have watched four broad phases of dissemination of our methods. Those phases could be described as the Creative Phase (1993-1996), The Literacy Phase (1997-2001), the Methodological Phase (2002-2004), and the Ethos Phase (2005-2013). In each phase, the distribution of our methods expanded for a few years, and eventually we recognized that the energy of the given phase ran its course. The wave grew, and broke, following a common pattern of loose network distributions.

Digital storytelling at a crossroaDs In reviewing each phase, it is useful to assume that these assessments are not based on quantitative research. They are grounded in the direct experiences my colleagues and I have had as frontline observers of patterns of development of our work. As such, they should be taken with an appropriate ‘grain of salt’ as we say in the United States. What is to be gained by this analysis is as much a statement of evidence to be researched, the beginning of a story, as it is a conclusive ending.

2.1. CREATIVE PHASE (1993-1996)

The digital media tsunami of the early 1990’s took the San Francisco Bay Area by some surprise, as it did the rest of the world. As a working professional in non-profit theater, I was well aware of the Desktop Publishing craze of the 1980s. The development of multimedia had its roots in the technologies of desktop imaging driven by the printer, but it was clear by the late eighties, the use of computers as multimedia devices for distributing electronic communication was going to change information consumption forever. In the hopes of some of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, PC’s were going to challenge the television and the radio in the electronic entertainment market, and much money was to be made developing multimedia titles, and tools to create them.

Ironically, what drove the development of our particular methods in Digital Storytelling, was as much the creative potential of the various new digital tools for the television, recording, and film industries as it was the tools of interactive multimedia. Relative to the enormously rapid growth of internet communication, digital video was slow in coming, from the first experiments at Apple Computer in the second half of the 1980s, until digital essentially replaced all analog video editing systems by the early 2000s. It was not until 1992, with the successful creation of 30 fps, 60 field video cards, full screen, full motion digital video that could successfully compete with analog standards of the day, that digital video could be taken seriously. It was precisely in that era that the initial workshops in Digital Storytelling took place at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

What we and others recognized was a dramatic drop in both complexity, and the need for a specific kind of technical rigor, for the creation of video. Analog video could be done by anyone, as could the splicing of 16mm or 8 mm film before it, as long as one had access to the equipment, and a mindset of technical procedural endurance. Analog video was hard to do, and mistakes were time consuming. The promise of digital is that it made video editing a drag and drop event, teachable to extreme novices, and if you made a mistake, it was relatively simple to correct. It was clear to those of us who first experimented with these tools you could “play” at editing, and with photographic manipulation, and gain great fluency, rather than entrain yourself in painstaking technical procedures first, and then gain fluency and a sense of play.

And while many thousands of digital media training centers were set up to approach digital video as a highly technical field, more or less the same as the analog world that the toolset was designed from; the Center for Digital Storytelling was somewhat unique in suggesting that these very state-of-the-arts tools were about greatly expanding the literacy of people as media creators. Digital video meant everyone could become a television producer. And as we said in that period, we want to use the tools of digital video, of television, to kill television, to turn us from passive consumers, to active creators and makers of our own media.

Our work caught attention by local, regional and national media as a new form of community arts practice. It was seen as artist-driven, and artist conceived, but not necessarily replicable. The unique skills of Dana Atchley, the multimedia artist whose show, Next Exit, informed the ideas of the family photo, or photo archive-focused aesthetics of the initial digital storytelling workshops, and my particular skills as a community-based educator/ artist suggested that success in an intensive Digital Storytelling workshop effort, required many pre-existing skills. This was undoubtedly true. But our attitude, which was that the promise of digital media production was increasing ease, decreasing cost, and endless fun, intrigued many people, and we found ourselves asked to train others in our process. Of course we had no formal process at the time. People heard about our helping people make a particular kind of Home Movie story, and people mimicked our approach in a few centers around the US, but the work was mainly distributed by Dana and I getting a few workshop teaching assignments around the US and Canada. The early distribution was narrow and limited to less than a dozen contexts in the first three years. But that would change quickly.

2.2. THE LITERACY PHASE (1997-2001)

Of course the cost of the tools set meant it was still an elite few that would get a chance to explore digital video, and this form of Digital Storytelling. But it was evident to us there was a market for our methods, and we spent the first two years of our work, articulating those methods. In 1996, with the writing of the Digital Storytelling Cookbook, we had a curriculum that could be mimicked by creative educators working with the countless number of new media labs. Because we emphasized story concept work leading a simplified approach to technical training, the approach drew the interest of the more humanist side of educational technology trainers and educators.

In 1997 we met a group of educators connected with the College Writing Program at UC Berkeley. The program was directed by Professor Glynda Hull. Her interests were how this approach to writing for short digital videos might provide a new vehicle for writing literacy, in general, and for having writing lead a multi-modal approach to communication. By 1998, we were invited to move our center in San Francisco, to UC Berkeley at the School of Education where Dr. Hull was based. This move, along with our efforts in creating an ongoing community-based model, the Digital Clubhouse Network, forced us to define our work in greater detail, and begin a much more active process of entrainment of people to replicate our processes in educational and community contexts. The Cookbook became a teaching text, and we developed the first Train-the-Trainer materials to assist educators in developing their own curriculum.

From UC Berkeley, the work of CDS found support in innumerable educational contexts, Digital Storytelling becoming for many educators, a core technical and creative literacy. In our own arguments, we positioned Digital Stories as a form as the half way point between Powerpoint lecture slides, and full production video projects. As the demand for strategies for using computer technologies in the classroom exploded in the late nineties, the adoption of our methods, aided by the free distribution of our Cookbook and frequent appearances at Educational Technology conferences.

But for the most part, the idea of our first person story approach was lost in translation. Digital Stories, and Digital Storytelling, facing the challenge of scholastic demands and a general resistance to the idea of first person storytelling as appropriate for classroom contexts, meant that in many K-12 contexts, digital stories became illustrated essays, essentially taking the style of impersonal analytical exposition with pictures. In the end, this adaptation became useful for much broader distribution, and we can say at the US level, by the end of 2001, it would be difficult to find a university or school district ICT professional in the US, that had not at least heard of Digital Storytelling, and many had already experimented with the form as an active part of new ICT standards for their students.

At the same time as the general growth in education, we were also able to sustain close ties with the hardware, software and internet industries that were reaching their peak boom period in the late nineties. Many of these companies had found Digital Storytelling as a wonderful approach to encourage academic institutions to buy their products. Through partnerships with Hewlett Packard, Apple, and various internet-based design and publishing companies, our work was given a more global platform, and significant press. This also increased interest and distribution for the concepts of our work, and training opportunities inside and outside the United States.

The model of training people in a method, and distributing the resources and intellectual property of the approach as open source, has a predictable large surge followed by saturation model. Educators began to train other educators in our approach, and the clients began to choose much more inexpensive peer trainings over our contract trainings in the education market. In addition, the dot-com bust and recession of 2001-2002 affected our corporate partners directly, but soon after the crisis cut into education funding across the US, and specifically in California. CDS lost significant business. It was not clear whether the organization would survive in this period.

2.3. THE METHODOLOGICAL PHASE (2002-2004)

As the demands increased for our work in the late nineties, CDS began to have several large scale implementations that forced us to further define our methods and professionalize our training of facilitators in those methods. One of our partners, the Institute for the Future in Silicon Valley, asked us in 1998 to write a white paper about Digital Storytelling for distribution to their mostly large enterprise and government audiences. The core of that work, as well as the work we had done on updating and improving the Digital Storytelling cookbook, became the basis for the first edition of Digital Storytelling, Capturing Lives, Creating Community. Written during the dog days of 2002, the book was meant to position CDS as a global authority on the method.

As a result of the publication, and the efforts to organize the short lived, Digital Storytelling Association, Digital Storytelling began to find interest on the international level. During the 2001 year, we developed two major international entrainments, with the British Broadcasting Corporation in Wales, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. In both cases, the professionals we were passing our methods to were already extremely experienced media production, media arts, and writing professionals. In 2002, we also were asked by Proseed in Tokyo, to fully move the method into the Japanese language in a prolonged process of clarification and cultural translation. In 2003-2004, I also found myself living in Italy for a year, and extending our connection to various networks in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and other parts of Europe. These efforts, and the international feedback emerging from these efforts, started another large wave of interest in our work, and the beginning of the first major refinements and adaptations in the form.

In the BBC case, the demands of a professional broadcast organization to sustain high quality results, and a general sense of existing ownership of public creative engagement as a core BBC value, had the BBC, under the leadership of University of Cardiff Photography and New Media professor Daniel Meadows, diverge somewhat from the CDS model. Where CDS had, and continues to have, a consistent encouragement of difficult or painful subjects, the BBC wanted to ensure that the general public that attended their workshops felt no obligation, or more to the point, felt no direct encouragement, to write about loss or emotionally sensitive issues.

One could say this created a demand for methodological clarity, and the beginning of a shifting ethos for the work of our Center, and the definitional focus for the Digital Storytelling movement as a whole. In education, CDS was also pushed to clarify the methodological definition, rubrics of assessment, and aesthetic criteria, so that educators could use the CDS model within the mainstream educational enterprise. As mentioned above, it was clear that we were already being outcompeted in education in the United States by peer-led implementations and trainings in both K-12 and Higher Education. This experience, essentially the necessity of differentiation and specialization within the markets to which our organization was subject, forced us to chose between a more general approach, emphasizing the broad media literacy and ICT potential of a more broadly defined, and content neutral, method; or using a specifically affective approach to digital storytelling as a tool for emotional health and well being. We chose the latter.

2.4. THE ETHOS PHASE (2005-2013)

In January of 2005, Amy Hill joined the staff of the Center for Digital Storytelling as the Director of SilenceSpeaks.org. In bringing the five year old project to CDS, which had been housed at another CDS-spin-off, Third World Majority, Amy brought a public health and social work perspective to the practice. The focus of Silence Speaks was gender-based violence awareness and prevention. Hill had been a working professional in Domestic Violence prevention for 15 years at that point, and was also entrained as a documentary filmmaker. Her approach to the work had been built around the ethical and therapeutic concerns of violence survivors, and the professional social workers that supported them.

Our center had already begun to suggest that the personal story focus was more than a reflection of preference growing out of the “electronic family album” of Atchley/Lambert’s initial approach. The framing of our curriculum and methods to building community connection and memory, was well suited to Hill’s approach of focusing on new approaches to participatory media in the service of public health concerns. Our work quickly branched out into new sectors including foster care, substance abuse and recovery, post-trauma narratives in international development, and work with veteran communities.

In language and in training emphasis, the methods of the work became increasingly explicit about the security and safety of participants. We put additional emphasis on the publication of stories toward tangible outcomes in community organizing efforts and advocacy. At the same time we were more thorough in establishing the basis of participant preparation, support, follow-up and the ways in which stories should be contextualized in publication. All of these efforts allowed us to secure significant interest and support from the public health sectors.

Along with colleagues like Pip Hardy and Tony Summers of Patient Voices in the UK, Natasha Freidus of Creative Narrations in the US, and Jennifer LaFontaine of Central Neighborhood House in Toronto, along with academics around many countries and many other community-based partners, we began to define the ethical core of the Digital Storytelling practice.

As we advanced in this more recent phase, we could also see our conversations in education becoming more connected to the use of Digital Storytelling in the processes of creative self-definition, emotional intelligence and social and emotional learning. These ascendant trends in educational reform in the United States and other countries connected well with our perspective that story work was not a separate media or arts practice to be an ancillary part of a curriculum, but a core component of well being and whole thinking for a 21^st Century student. This work to make our Ethics-based methods central to the large educational project remains to be done.

3 The story circle and the storied culture

Any of us know from watching our children, our friends, and ourselves, in our daily behavior, that on average we spend a small fraction of our time creating media, as opposed to consuming media. The sector of the population of self-described creative makers is still quite limited. Even if the main goal of the Digital Storytelling movement is to give one experience of creative media production to a larger number of people, it would be a noble effort. Much work remains to be done.

However, as suggested above, the value statement for the work is shifting. Digital literacy is not the barrier to creativity, rather we are still working to change the way people feel about their sense of authorship and agency as creators, as people with ideas, thoughts, opinions, stories, that matter to others. This remains the aspect of this work that is closely tied with extending democracy, and assuring participation and inclusion of marginalized communities, and marginalized individuals within those communities. Everyone’s story counts, and the way any individual gets to control the articulation, production and distribution of their story assures a more complete participatory role in the project of building democratic societies.

Story is not a procedure. And good storytelling is more about good thinking than purely formal concerns. Providing people with the context for critical reflection is the first step. Amateur authors and storytellers need moments where what they can assess what they believe to be communicating through the interpretation of a given experience in a story fragment, and what is actually being understood by their intended audience. The story circle component of the CDS model is a highly precise model of group facilitation, at the same time it is a natural and fluid human activity. Our argument is that the emphasis on story sharing and story development needs to lead the technical processes. Stories should have time to be worked, to be explored, to be re-worked, and evolved.

How do we make the story circle process as common as the use of discussion groups and seminar sessions? How do we invest all kinds of organizations with the simple idea that one process of stopping, deeply listening to each others’ stories, creates as much connection and productivity with a group of students and professionals being asked to collaborate as numerous planning sessions.

Providing those contexts in primary and secondary educational environments is difficult. Providing this kind of “bring-your-soul-to-work” days at all professional contexts, creating Storied Organizations, is even more challenging. But these processes are happening. More and more organizations recognize the power of story work as part of their success. This is where the story development process has room to grow.

As suggested in the initial introduction, the Digital part of Digital Storytelling is losing meaning. Our culture is fully immersed in digital expressions. The nature of story, and the use of reflective storytelling, of group story circles in all aspects of our exchanges in organizations and educational environments, is still an emergent trend. Digital storytelling, and countless other similar projects, has invited thousands of communities to gather around the expression of lived experience, and the space created between our telling, and our witnessing and listening, to each other.

Where the stories will find digital expression, in forms familiar as in the StoryCenter-model 2-4 minute movies, they may remain Digital Stories and continue to be recognized a form of Digital Storytelling. But it is equally possible they will become something new, with a vastly different sense of meaning –Reflecticons, Narratitas, or Histoires-Essentiels. The point being, if they follow the pattern of need and interest in the style of group informed reductions to the heart of the story, they will have a similar power for storytellers, and for audiences.

The work will continue.