Digital Storytelling in Teacher Education: Creating Transformations through Narrative.

Abstract

Stories are important resources in the repertoire of the teacher. Storytelling is a powerful way in which to communicate experiences and to explore ideas. Using stories, the teacher takes her students on journeys of discovery that introduce them to new vistas of lived experience. In this article, we describe how we have used digital storytelling to teach the core values in our field of special education—an approach that honors cultural diversity and empowers students to reflect on and share their experiences. Digital storytelling makes use of a wide variety of techniques including standard storytelling, audioand videorecording, multimedia publication, and shared “mediated” events. In our university-level courses, students watch digital stories as well as create them. We employ a student-directed, inquiry-based approach to digital storytelling that makes the process of storytelling as important as the resulting digital story. Our approach to digital storytelling continues to evolve as new media and technologies emerge that enable new forms of sharing, dissemination, communication, and publication. In this article, we will describe how we have used digital storytelling for inquiry-based learning in university level courses, K–12 schools, and community settings.