“Impossible Is Nothing”: Expressing Difficult Knowledge Through Digital Storytelling

Abstract

Abstract The study focuses on a digital storytelling project conducted in a school district's transition program, in which adolescent refugee and immigrant English learners were invited to share aspects of their identities and social worlds through a range of modes. In this article, the authors look closely at one student's digital story through a multimodal analysis of three slides. The findings show how engaging with nonlinguistic modes provided enhanced opportunities for the student to explore and make visible complex and abstract facets of his life and identity, particularly as they relate to difficult past experiences.