“Digital Narratives” Project for Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Fellowship 2022-2023, University of Michigan
English performs a dominant (Daniel & Zybina, 2019) and colonial (Alim & Paris, 2017) force in multilingual classrooms across the world. Given English’s global supremacy, I offer a transformative pedagogy and decolonial approach across contexts in language classrooms that promote the use of all students’ repertoires beyond monolingual prescriptive. To support transformative pedagogy, decolonial approach, and multilingualism in language classrooms, I created this project to encourage students to draw upon their full linguistic repertoires and assets.
My research project “Digital Narratives” examines digital stories created by multilingual writers. Digital storytelling has been proved to be a useful classroom tool (Robin, 2008), facilitating students’ creative and communicative skills and teaching them how to share their opinions while writing narratives (Robin, 2016). My work emphasizes the importance of digital storytelling for multilingual writers as a way to construct their digital identities. I argue that digital storytelling is a great tool to use in a multilingual writing classroom since it encourages the use of various modes and promotes multimodal learning, thus supporting a necessary decolonial intervention. In addition, digital storytelling helps ESL and multilingual learners develop their voices (Hanauer, 2015) and provides space for their critical thinking. “Digital Narratives” project highlights the benefits of digital storytelling use in the classroom as a way to help students build their voices and shape their multilingual identities. The project results are drawn from the study conducted with non-native English-speaking participants which emphasizes the importance of integrating the transformative pedagogy to promoting multicultural understanding in multilingual and ESL classrooms. I facilitate an online workshop with Liza, Ekaterina, and other participants to teach them how to create digital stories and explained the purpose of the project. One of the participants, Dr. Moroz, shared her previously created digital story. I suggest integrating digital storytelling into transformative pedagogy, decolonial approach, and research. Finally, my project “Digital Narratives” raises awareness about multilingual writing practices in digital space which promotes digital diversity and multiculturalism. Several examples of students’ digital narratives are included below.
Liza
A medical school student, residing in Moscow, Russia, Liza speaks three languages: Russian, English, and Chinese. She has been learning English for 9 years and uses both English and Russian in her everyday life. Her digital narrative focuses on her medical education journey and demonstrates the response to decolonial intervention using multiple languages and modes of communication in her story. Speaking English as an additional language, Liza engages in transformative practices by integrating translanguaging (Vogel & Garcia, 2017; Wei, 2018) into her digital story along with multiple visuals that fulfill her narrative. Liza felt encouraged to participate in the project and was enthusiastic throughout the workshop.
Ekaterina
Ekaterina is a multilingual student living in Russia. She speaks Russian and is learning English and French as additional languages. Ekaterina enjoys reading in different languages and composes her digital story about her favorite books. She includes a short description mixing various languages and modalities, which makes her story unique. While telling her story in English, she manages to integrate various modalities in her writing to emphasize her multilingual identity. Although Ekaterina makes her narrative less personal, she expresses her feeling towards the stories she was reading and represents decolonial interventions through the use of diverse modalities and full linguistic repertoires. Ekaterina underlined the importance of an online workshop in creation of your story as well as enjoyed the opportunity to use various modalities in her narrative.
Oksana
Dr. Oksana Moroz willingly shared her digital story to support transformative pedagogy in language classrooms. Her story demonstrates a strong connection to her culture and language while describing her digital literacy journey. A Mama Ph.D. at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a native Ukrainian, Dr. Moroz speaks Ukrainian, English, Polish, Russian, and French. She implements her identity into a digital story by integrating multiple languages and modalities. Her narrative emphasizes the necessity of introducing decolonial approaches in the classroom to shape students’ multilingual identities, thus supporting their diverse linguistic repertoires.
References
Amin, N. (1997). Race and the identity of the nonnative ESL teacher. TESOL Quarterly, 31(3), 580-583.
Daniel, S. M., & Zybina, M. (2019). Resettled Refugee Teens’ Perspectives: Identifying a Need to Centralize Youths’ “Funds of Strategies” in Future Efforts to Enact Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. The Urban Review, 51(3), 345–368.
Hanauer, D. I. (2015). Measuring voice in poetry written by second language learners. Written Communication, 32(1), 66-86. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0741088314563023
Li, W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9-30. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx044.
Robin, B. R. (2008). Digital storytelling: A powerful technology tool for the 21st century classroom. Theory into Practice, 47(3), 220–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405840802153916
Robin, B. R. (2016). The educational uses of digital storytelling. Digital Education Review, 30.
Vogel, S., & García, O. (2017). Translanguaging. In G. W. Noblit (Eds.), Oxford research encyclopedias (pp. 2–21). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.181
