Towards the development of digital storytelling practices for use in resource-poor environments, ...

961© Unisa Press ISSN 1011-3487 SAJHE 28(3A)2014 pp 0–0

Towards the development of digital storytelling practices for use in resource-poor environments, across disciplines and with students from diverse backgrounds

D. Gachago*e-mail: [email protected]

E. Ivala*V. Barnes*P. Gill*J. Felix-Minnaar*J. Morkel*N. Vajat**Cape Peninsula University of TechnologyCape Town, South Africa

AbstractDigital storytelling has entered higher education as a pedagogical tool for enhancing students’ digital literacies in digitally saturated contexts. Increasing access to freely available software programs for video production and the ubiquity of mobile technologies have made digital storytelling viable in resource-poor environments. This article reports on an on-going project at a university of technology in South Africa employing both quantitative and qualitative research approaches, with the aim of understanding students’ perceptions of context-specific digital storytelling practices across various disciplines and student backgrounds. Bourdieu’s (1986) notions of field, habitus and capital as well as Yosso’s (2005, 70) idea of ‘community cultural wealth’ were applied to understand students’ perceptions of practices of digital storytelling that emerged from this project. The authors argue that complex technology projects, such as digital storytelling, are potentially viable in poorly-resourced environments, across disciplines and with students with diverse digital literacies and backgrounds, provided that: (1) technical barriers are lowered to the minimum and technologies are adopted that are freely available, owned by or easily accessible to students; (2) that the appropriate model is chosen based on these students’ social and cultural capital; and (3) that the community cultural wealth of students is considered in curriculum delivery.

Keywords: community cultural wealth, digital stories, digital storytelling practices, mobile technologies, resource-poor environments, social and cultural capital

IntroductIonThe digital divide continues to persist in South African higher education (Brown and Czerniewicz 2010; Czerniewicz and Brown 2006; Czerniewicz, Williams

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and Brown 2009) with students entering higher education institutions (HEIs) possessing a wide range of digital literacy skills. Socioeconomic status still impacts strongly on students’ schooling experience and their access to technologies. Higher education practitioners are struggling to find ways of integrating information and communications technologies (ICTs) into the curriculum in ways that will not only benefit students who already possess digital literacies, but also allow students with lower digital literacy skills to develop these in ways that are meaningful (Chigona and Chetty 2012). Digital storytelling, which originates from the informal education sector, has attracted increased interest in higher education as a tool for fostering, for example, student engagement, critical reflection, authentic learning and acquisition of a wide range of digital literacies (Barrett 2006). However, most of these studies on digital storytelling are based in digitally saturated contexts and use software programs and technologies that are not always accessible to students in resource-poor environments.

One argument against the introduction of digital storytelling in higher education in resource-poor environments in particular, is the complexity of the process, accompanied by the difficulty of supporting students with diverse digital literacies and varied access to technologies (Clarke and Thomas 2012). This article aims to counter this argument and to contribute to the small but growing field of knowledge on the use of digital storytelling in resource-poor environments (Lundby 2009). It will do so by sharing experiences of differently placed students involved in producing digital stories across four disciplines (Architectural Technology, Industrial Design, Nursing and Food Technology), at a university of technology (a resource-poor institution) in South Africa. We suggest that the increasing availability of free or open software programs for digital video production, and the rise of mobile applications, makes digital storytelling more viable in less resourced environments. Furthermore, we will show that when designing digital storytelling practices that speak to students’ strengths and mediate their weaknesses, student engagement in this process will be high, independent of their initial social and cultural background. We apply Bourdieu’s (1986) notions of field, habitus and capital, as well as Yosso’s (2005, 70) idea of ‘community cultural wealth’ in order to understand students’ perceptions of digital storytelling and to evaluate and develop practices of digital storytelling which could be used for integrating digital storytelling into curriculum delivery in resource-poor environments and across disciplines and diverse student backgrounds. The article introduces relevant literature in the emergent field of digital storytelling in marginalised contexts, then briefly discusses the work of Bourdieu and Yosso. The article also presents detailed descriptions of the various practices of digital storytelling applied in the study, followed by the sections on methodology and findings, which are discussed in relation to the theoretical underpinnings. The conclusion and recommendations complete the article.

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Towards the development of digital storytelling practices...

DigitAl storytelling in resource-poor conteXts

New and freely available software programs have made it easier for everybody to not only consume digital media, but create their own (Burgess 2006). Digital stories, as an example of such ‘self-made’ digital media, are short movie clips, created with off-the-shelf equipment and software, that combine text, images, videos, music and narration (Lundby 2008).

Although originating from informal education contexts, digital storytelling has recently entered the field of higher education. Digital storytelling is seen as a useful tool to facilitate student engagement; reflection for deep learning; project-based learning; and effective integration of technology into teaching (Barrett 2006). Digital storytelling has proved particularly useful to impart what authors such as Robin (2008) call ‘digital literacy’ or ‘21st century literacy’, including academic literacy, technology literacy, visual literacy and information literacy. A typical digital storytelling process entails the following steps: research; brainstorming; concept development; scriptwriting; storyboarding; image sourcing or video taking; movie editing; publishing the movie; and, finally, screening the movie.

Our understanding of digital literacies is based on the New Literacy Studies notion of digital literacies as social practices, as opposed to skills (Mills 2010). Digital storytelling allows for a more embedded process of acquiring digital literacies, whereby students engage with a variety of technology tools as and when required, so that they are using (and learning) tools to achieve a real purpose, rather than as skills that can be ‘checked off’ as completed. This in turn allows students to learn with as opposed to from technologies (Olney, Herrington and Verenikina 2009).

Digital storytelling has been used for producing stories with a personal content, emphasising first person narration and the voice of the individual student, often following the workshop model developed by the Center for Digital Storytelling in California (Lambert 2010). However, it can also be adopted for more content-based digital stories (Clarke and Thomas 2012). As a replacement for traditional essay assignments, content-based digital stories have proved to be a particularly suitable approach for teaching students from non-traditional educational backgrounds, that is, students for whom academic literacy and plagiarism (Barnes, Gachago and Ivala 2012) are a challenge, due to linguistic or cultural reasons (Clarke and Thomas 2012). It is also suitable for those who have disengaged from classroom learning and struggle with more traditional assignments (Gumble 2012).

Most research on digital storytelling is based in digitally-saturated contexts: as Lundy (2009, 176) argues, ‘digital storytelling has not reached “around the world”: digital divides persist’. There are, however, examples of studies of digital storytelling in resource-poor environments for development, including: Reitmaier, Bidwell and Marsden’s (2010, 2012) ethnographic studies on developing mobile digital storytelling applications for rural South African and Kenyan communities; Tacchi’s (2009) study on using digital storytelling for participatory development in rural communities in Southeast Asia; and Clarke’s (2009) study of Project Aracati, aimed at amassing and disseminating digital stories from marginalised youth in Brazil. In

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education, a number of studies have been carried out at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology on: using digital stories to explore issues of diversity in a pre-service teachers’ classroom (Condy, Chigona, Gachago and Ivala 2012); perceptions of pre-service student teachers on uptake of digital storytelling for classroom use (Chigona, Condy, Gachago and Ivala 2012); and digital storytelling and student engagement (Ivala, Chigona, Gachago and Condy 2012). These studies are the first indicators that digital storytelling may be viable in resource-poor and marginalised contexts and communities as long as they recognise local social networks, social practices and cultural contexts and providing they are adapted accordingly (Tacchi 2009).

theoreticAl FrAmeworK

Bourdieu’s (1986) notions of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capitals and Yosso’s (2005, 70) more nuanced idea of ‘community cultural wealth’ were used as a theoretical lens for this study. Bourdieu argues that the low academic and social achievement of disadvantaged students, such as Black-American learners, is due to these learners’ lack of economic, cultural and social capital required for social mobility. Economic capital refers to capital that can be converted directly into monetary terms. Cultural capital comes in four forms, namely: the embodied, ‘long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body’ (Bourdieu 1986, 241), such as digital literacies and knowledge; the objectified, in the form of cultural goods, such as access to technology; the institutionalised, such as educational qualifications; and the symbolic, which refers to recognition or reputation linked to cultural capital. Social capital refers to resources one has access to through belonging to a group, and through having connections and networks one can draw from.

The argument that some Black-American learners lack the economic, cultural and social capital required for social mobility has been heavily critiqued for being overly deterministic and for perpetuating ideas of the dominant group in society (Lareau and McNamara Horvath 1999) as well as for its assumptions that students of colour come to the classroom with social and cultural deficits (Yosso 2005). Critical race theorists, such as Solorzano, Delgado Bernal and Yosso, challenge the notion that students are simply acted upon by structures and they foreground, instead, students’ agency, demonstrating ‘how individuals negotiate and struggle with structures that create meaning of their own from these interactions’ (Solorzano and Delgado Bernal 2001, 315). In similar fashion, Yosso (2005, 75) argues that appropriating racialised assumptions and generalisations about communities of colour leads to filling up ‘supposedly passive students with forms of cultural knowledge deemed valuable by dominant society’. Lareau and McNamara Horvath (1999) posit that all individuals possess social capital to invest in a certain field or context, such as higher education – drawing from another important concept of Bourdieu (1986). However, such fields and contexts may not value the social and cultural capital that students bring to the classroom. For example, Lareau and McNamara Horvath (1999) maintain that in most studies in education, the presumed value of capital is based on the dominant

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ideology in the broader culture. These authors stress the importance of developing strategies for a more nuanced and socially inclusive view of social and cultural capital by HEIs.

In addition, Yosso (2005, 70) proposes the concept of ‘community cultural wealth’, which emphasises valuing capitals that are useful to people of colour, even though they may not be valued at the institution of schooling. This community cultural wealth can be manifest in at least six forms of capital, namely:

• aspirational (the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the future, even in the face of real and perceived barriers)

• navigational (the ability to manoeuvre through social institutions not created with communities of colour in mind/racially hostile university campuses)

• social (access to networks of people and community resources)• linguistic (validating learners’ social and intellectual skills that are acquired

by conversing in more than one language, often spontaneously switching and hybridising the languages used)

• familial (those cultural knowledges nurtured among kin that carry a sense of community history, memory and cultural intuition) and

• resistant (knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behaviour that challenges inequality) (Yosso 2005, 77–80).

Of particular importance for this digital storytelling study is a learner’s affinity to the tradition of storytelling in communities of colour.

Lareau and McNamara Horvath (1999, 39) add another dimension to this discussion: they argue that one also needs to differentiate between possession and activation of the various capitals; ‘People who have social and cultural capital may choose to activate capital or not, and they vary in the skill with which they activate it.’ They stress that social or cultural capital will only be of value in a specific context if it is activated. How one decides whether or not to activate one’s kinds of capital is a matter of ‘habitus’, an understanding of practice as determined by an interplay of social structures and individual agency. The ‘practice is generative of a historically-constructed habitus that is the product of the choices that have been made for and by social agents over time’ (Kvasny 2005, n.p.). Habitus can change, while access to specific forms of objectified cultural capital, such as mobile phones, can have far reaching effects for individuals in terms of appropriating and maximising different forms of capital (Czerniewicz and Brown 2012).

methoDology

This study aimed to understand students’ perceptions of digital storytelling in four different disciplines as well as evaluating and developing practices of digital


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storytelling for integrating digital storytelling into curriculum delivery in a resource-poor environment and across disciplines and diverse student backgrounds. Diversity, for example, was defined in terms of, among others, access to computers, preparedness, courses and disciplines of study, levels of study and digital literacies. The sample for the study was the 2012 student population, totalling 212, enrolled in the four courses informing the study (see Table 1).

The study followed a quantitative and qualitative research design. A survey tool comprised a range of Likert-type questions, with response categories ranging from 1 = Strongly agree to 5 = Strongly disagree, was administered to the students across all four courses. The survey contained nine questions on various aspects of the digital storytelling process, such as students’: preparedness for the project; perceptions of support; access to technologies during the project; enjoyment of the project; and satisfaction with the final product. Table 2 shows students’ response rates to the survey questions, which ranged from 55 per cent to 100 per cent. Additionally, focus group interviews were conducted at the end of the four courses with students from the participating courses.

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Table 1: Course information and student demographicsC

ours

e na

me

Leve

l of

stud

yN

o. o

f st

uden

tsG

ende

rA

geRa

ce

FM

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er

2122

–30

Ove

r 30

Blac

kC

olou

red

Indi

anW

hite

ND

Arc

hite

ctur

al

Tech

nolo

gy

(Arc

hTec

h)

Firs

t yea

r EC

P26

39%

61%

96%

4%0%

54%

42%

4%0%

ND

Nur

sing

(N

ursi

ng)

Firs

t yea

r EC

P46

89%

11%

11%

46%

43%

54%

46%

00

%

ND

3-d

imen

sion

al

Des

ign

(Des

ign)

Firs

t yea

r re

gula

r46

44%

56%

72%

24%

4%2%

15%

083

%

ND

Foo

d Te

chno

logy

(F

oodT

ech)

Seco

nd y

ear

regu

lar

9169

%31

%32

%60

%8%

79%

16%

1%23

%

ND

= N

atio

nal D

iplo

ma


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table 2: Students’ response rates to the survey questions by course

Course name Number of students

Number of completed surveys

Response rate (%)

ND Interior Design and Architectural Technology

27 27 100

ND Nursing 46 41 89ND 3-dimensional Design 46 43 93ND Food Technology 91 45 55Total 212 156 74

ND = National Diploma

The quantitative data was analysed using the statistical package NCSS 8. Descriptive statistics in the form of frequencies and means were calculated and two inferential statistical tests were performed:

• a one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to test for significant differences in responses across all courses;

• the Tukey-Kramer Multiple Comparison test to ascertain which course’s values differed significantly (at p = 0.05) from each other.

Following the approach of qualitative data analysis outlined by Miles and Huberman (1994), the interviews were transcribed, searched and organised around emergent themes. Data analysis was done inductively, including detailed reading of the raw data to derive concepts and themes, through interpretations made from the raw data by an evaluator or researcher; thus allowing themes to emerge from the data rather than from prior assumptions, theories or hypotheses (Thomas 2006).

Ethical clearance was obtained through the Faculty of Education and Social Sciences at the institution, and the faculties where the projects were implemented gave permission to conduct the research. Informed consent was sought from the students, who signed release forms for their digital stories to be shown or published online. The students were also assured of anonymity in presentation of the data.

conteXt oF the stuDy

The article draws on a project at a University of Technology in South Africa where digital storytelling was introduced to develop digital literacies in students at various levels of study and across disciplines. The disciplines included in this study were: first-year Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP, see definition below) in Interior Design and Architectural Technology (hereafter ArchTech); second-year ECP in Nursing; first-year regular (non-ECP) class in the National Diploma in 3-D Design (hereafter Design); and second-year regular National Diploma in Food Technology (hereafter FoodTech; see tables 3–6). It is important to note that this institution attracts learners from a variety of backgrounds: for example, a typical student in

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the Design course is male, white and under the age of 21, while a Nursing student would typically be a mature (aged over 30 years), black female (see Table 1). This information impacts strongly on factors, such as students’: preparedness for higher education; conceptual development; approaches to learning; academic language proficiency; and digital literacy skills (Scott, Yeld and Hendry 2007). Over the last ten years, the institution introduced ECP targeted at underprepared students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The ECP assists students in developing academic foundations by offering instruction in small classes over an extended period of time and with more dedicated support, in order to ensure their success.

The different courses that featured in the study adopted a variety of digital storytelling practices, ranging from a focus on subject content/personal narratives to individual/group projects. They also differed in terms of level of support, such as with script writing or training in software programs for developing digital stories, and access to technologies to respond to students’ diverse digital literacies and access to technologies. Taking the two examples mentioned above, Design and Nursing, the course designs differed: while the highly digital literate Design students were set the task to develop digital stories independently, with minimal support and with a need to source equipment through their own networks of friends and family, the less digitally literate Nursing students were supported in a highly structured workshop model and provided with access to technologies and tools needed for the development of their stories. The following section will provide short descriptions of the digital storytelling practices adopted by these courses. (To see examples of the stories created by students visit www.youtube.com/user/cputstories.)

Table 3: Digital storytelling in Interior Design and Architectural Technology

Task brief Development of a digital story on the topic of sustainability, how it affects a student’s community and the student’s role in terms of sustainability in their future profession.

Target group/ participants

First year ECP students.

Purpose Development of students’ understanding of concepts related to sustainability, transfer of academic content into community, development of digital literacy skills (personal story).

Method Individual projects, highly structured process (carried out in five one-day workshops), support by lecturing team.

Outcome Wide variety (in terms of content) and quality (ranging from very basic to technologically sophisticated ones, in which students made creative use of images, narration and sound). Most stories included a mix of students’ personal images, taken with their mobile phones during their trip to the local botanical garden, in their community and images sourced from the Internet.

Examples Sun by Angela Biko:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6LoHFcOnPg&list=PLe5oHsfRWAnTgiHhMeK35B9-Az-pYMMCu


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Access to equipment

Ample support and access to the technologies needed for production (e.g. computer labs, recording software, and microphones) were provided to students to enable them to create individual stories.

Successes Strong student voice came through, contextualising and personalising the concept of sustainability, highly creative and personalised.

Challenges Varied level of quality of stories.

Table 4: Digital storytelling in Nursing

Task brief Development of a digital story on the topic of caring for patients with disabilities, integrating academic content and students’ experiences in their communities.

Target group/participants

First year ECP students.

Purpose Development of students’ understanding of concepts related to care for disabled patients, transfer of academic content into community, development of digital literacy skills, boosting of confidence (personal story).

Method Group projects, highly structured process, support by lecturing team, six-week project.

Outcome Basic digital stories, combining image sources on the Internet and students’ personal images. Strong narrative focus.

Examples Caring for the anxious patient:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3UoReCh8I&list=PLe5oHsfRWAnTyR0OpUfP4LWmyz8auFpYa

Access to equipment

Ample support and access to the technologies needed for production (e.g. computer labs, recording software, and microphones) were provided to enable students to create individual stories.

Successes Strong student voice, contextualising and personalising the concept of caring for patients with disabilities. Pride of students during screening of stories, where mainstream students were invited. Integration of personal narratives with academic content.

Challenges The final movies were of low quality compared to other courses. Images taken by mobile phones were often blurred; images sourced from the Internet sometimes contradicted or did not illustrate the narrative, pointing to the low media and visual literacy levels. The tight time frame led to inadequate quality assurance of the production and problems arose (e.g. the sound in some of the stories was inaudible).

Table 5: Digital storytelling in Food Technology

Task brief Development of a digital story on specific foods.


Second year mainstream students.

Purpose Improve familiarity with Western-based food production contexts in order to help students become familiar with the chemistry of a range of unfamiliar kitchen recipes (content based story).

Method Group projects, unstructured process, limited support by lecturers, eight-week project.

Outcome Mixed findings but rather poor quality. Students seem to have followed similar concepts, predominantly filming process of food production.

Examples N/A

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Access to equipment

Although they had similar freedoms as Design students in choosing tools and software for producing their stories, they relied mainly on their own mobile phones for taking pictures, recording sound and taking videos.

Successes Mixed findings. Difficulties integrating narrative with chemical process.

Challenges High reliance on mobile technology affected quality of the outcome, which was often problematic in terms of audio, images and videos.

Table 6: Digital storytelling in Industrial Design

Task brief Development of a digital story on the topic of timber.


First year mainstream students.

Purpose Development of students’ understanding of concepts related to timber, development of digital literacy skills, avoiding plagiarism due to lack of academic literacies in students.

Method Group projects, highly unstructured process, limited support by lecturers, eight-week project (content based story).

Outcome Highly creative and diverse digital movies. Students chose multiple media to communicate the information – actors, scale models, interviews, diagrams, 3D or clay modelling, animations.

Examples Anatomy of trees:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXOQGtvijCA&list=PLe5oHsfRWAnRINt_SYRb6QsHP6W_UptqM

Access to equipment

In the production process, students had complete freedom of choice with regard to digital programs, cameras, and other tools and technologies used. Drawing on a network of friends, families and peers, students developed interactive and technically sophisticated movies with professional equipment and software programs, with minimal support from lecturers.

Successes This project created a highly competitive atmosphere in the classroom, with students trying to outdo their peers in terms of creativity and humour, fuelled by the final screening of the movies, which included an award for best movie, best special effects, and best actor/ actress.

Challenges By focusing on creativity and design the results was less focus on content. However, students had to submit notes on the content which were distributed in class.

FinDings AnD Discussion

This section first discusses the students’ backgrounds, then their perceptions of the digital storytelling practices adopted in the different courses, and lastly their feedback on their enjoyment and satisfaction with the digital storytelling project. In this process the researchers intend to challenge the cultural and social capital deficit model for one that is more appreciative of the strengths and different cultural capitals students bring to higher education.

Students’ backgroundsThe students who participated in the study occupied varied positions relative to socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Such backgrounds, in a country like South


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Africa, are directly linked with quality of schooling and, consequently, academic preparedness as they enter an HEI (Scott, Yeld and Hendry 2007). Three of the survey questions focused on the impact of students’ backgrounds on their perceived level of preparedness for the digital storytelling project. Analysis of the findings showed significant differences across the three questions (see Figure 1).

Nursing students, who were predominantly black (54%) and coloured (46%), defined themselves as significantly less computer literate than the rest of the group (p < 0.05) (Figure 1). They expressed feelings of fear and a lack of confidence in their ability to undertake the project, as is evident in the following quote from one black student:

... the whole time I had no idea what I was going to do because I didn’t know this digital story. I asked myself: how are we going to do this because we don’t have an idea.

The Design (83% white and 15% coloured) and ArchTech (54% black and 42% coloured) students demonstrated significantly less fear and better computer skills before the project. The following quote by a highly privileged and digitally literate black ArchTech student reveals the ease and familiarity with technologies some of these students drew on:

I used iMovie and I never really used it before but it’s similar to PhotoStory ... it’s got nice transitions ... you could use text sliding which I incorporated and I enjoyed that and also with the music you are able to fade out your music and see your track and add in new music and transitions. So I enjoyed it – I thought PhotoStory was very limiting.

The above differences in students’ responses, which show a clear deficit in terms of cultural capital in courses with a high percentage of students of colour, could be argued to reflect the legacy of apartheid (Scott, Yeld and Hendry 2007). Apartheid privileged whites economically, and economic capital can translate to cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986). The difference in cultural capital may also be accounted for by the different courses in which students had enrolled. For example, most of the students in the ArchTech class were students of colour, but they may have had more confidence than Nursing students since the former tend to use ICTs more than Nursing students in their curriculum delivery, regardless of racial background. Furthermore, it is vital to note that acquiring cultural capital, although possible, is far more difficult at a later stage in life (Nursing students were more mature in age), because, following Bourdieu’s (1986, 245) thoughts, cultural capital ‘always remains marked by its earliest conditions of acquisition’.

It was also revealed that students from the different courses with different economic and cultural capital varied in how they went about their habitus, in this case the development of the digital story. Some students’ – in particular Design and in some instances ArchTech students – use of technologies exemplified what Bourdieu would call a ‘taste of luxury’ or freedom in experimenting with different

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software programs to produce their stories. Others, such as the Nursing students, represented the ‘tastes for necessity’ (Ball et al. 2002 cited in Czerniewicz and Brown 2012), focusing on developing basic stories with tools suggested by facilitators and technologies accessible to them.

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Figure 1: Student attitudes towards digital storytelling and computer skills before the implementation of digital storytelling

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p = .000003* p = .000000*p = .000570*

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I was scared before starting the project

I had no knowledge about digital stories

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Figure 1: Students’ attitudes towards digital storytelling and computer skills before the implementation of digital storytelling

Students’ perceptions of digital storytelling practices adopted in the different coursesDifferent ways of implementing digital storytelling were piloted for the institution in order to respond to students’ diverse backgrounds in terms of their access to computers; educational preparedness; courses and disciplines of study; levels of study; and digital literacies. Four practices of digital storytelling emerged, namely: highly structured (ArchTech); limited structured (Nursing); low unstructured (FoodTech); and highly unstructured practices (Design). Tables 3–6 provide details on the digital storytelling practices students employed in the different courses, including elements or aspects of each practice. These practices differed significantly from each other in terms of the amount of support provided; the time provided for production; and access to equipment and software (Figure 2).


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The findings showed that students participating in Nursing or ArchTech courses felt highly supported, as the following comment by a black ArchTech student shows:

You guys really carried us throughout the process, from the initiation when we had to do our story development; you guys really gave us personal attention to what our story was about. So I think from the onset we, we were nurtured hey?

A majority of the Design and FoodTech students reported that lecturers and facilitators were less supportive in the production process of their stories:

Just to review the outcome really, [lecturer and facilitator role] so very little input actually on how we were able to or going to approach our subject matter (White Design).

As a result of minimal support from lecturers and the facilitators, students relied more on their peers for support, as indicated below:

[A]n essay you just have to apply your thoughts and your knowledge but for something like this it needed [lots of other] skills and experience, creativity yes so ... we really needed to help each other for this one (Black FoodTech).

The minimal support enabled students from different cultural backgrounds to expand their social capital by drawing from each other’s expertise (peer learning). It encouraged what Kalantzis and Cope (1993) call ‘new civility’, where differences are accepted as the norm and used as a productive resource.

In terms of access to technologies, again different approaches were used in the different courses, from scheduled weekly sessions in a computer lab (ArchTech) to relying completely on students’ own resources and working spaces (Design). FoodTech students, who had access to a lab, but no scheduled time for the production, had to compete with other students for computer places, and had less objectified cultural capital to draw from compared to, for example, Design students. The highly independent model used for the Design course could be said to have allowed students to bring their prior knowledge and experiences, economic, cultural, familial and social capital to enrich the classroom activities, thus bringing the different life worlds of students and university together to enrich teaching and learning. This is in line with The New London Group’s (1996, 72) argument that

to be relevant, learning processes need to recruit, rather than attempt to ignore and erase the different subjectivities, interests, intentions, and purposes that students bring to learning, and that curriculum needs to mesh with different subjectivities, and with their attendant languages, discourses, and registers, and use these as a resource for learning.

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Nursing students encountered a number of challenges (eg, poor quality pictures) in the production of their stories, which highlights the limitations of mobile technology for digital storytelling. One main challenge referred to was limited access to the Internet both on and off campus, which affected their ability, for example, to research their topics or source appropriate images for their stories. This may have led to a feeling of isolation and disempowerment, as the following quote from a black student highlights:

Many of us we don’t have Internet at home ... it was actually difficult – now you go home and you have to do something which you need the Internet for and when you come back you may have a little or you have no information ... then it feels like you didn’t do anything. You couldn’t contribute to your group work. And when you come to college then there’s also something wrong with PCs ... the people who don’t know computers ... for sure sometimes [we feel] as if we are isolated.

These findings emphasise the fact that there is still highly inequitable access to economic, cultural and social capital among students at HEIs. Such deficiencies highlight the need to offer adequate support and access to facilities to students with lower digital literacies and limited access to computers, without erasing or ignoring different subjectivities, in order to avoid feelings of isolation, vulnerability and disempowerment. Furthermore, Clarke (2009, 151) suggests that what is needed in resource-poor environments, where students possess different levels of digital literacies, is a ‘high degree of versatility, adaptability, and flexibility in the format and practice of creating the stories’. This may mean that where time, resources or circumstances prevent participants from completing all the steps of producing a digital story by themselves, facilitators can step in, as long as participants have the ‘final say’ on the focus and writing of the story, artistic process, editing and distribution of the digital movie (Lambert 2009, 89).

While these findings seem to support Bourdieu’s notion of cultural and social predetermination, when exploring how students went about developing their stories, we found evidence of what Yosso (2005) calls ‘community cultural wealth’. For example, students reported how they drew on their rich life experiences and linguistic capital. Some of this linguistic capital can be attributed to the rich oral storytelling tradition students have experienced, as this coloured Nursing student explained:

Some of the information [is] the things that we see in our communities and in our families and ... from the Internet ... we used our computers to combine everything.

Also evident was the students’ creativity and resourcefulness in going about telling their stories. One coloured Nursing student explained how she used YouTube videos to understand the experiences of a deaf patient:

We just watched a lot of clips on how deaf people were taught – we watched a few clips of just the actions and with no sound. You know just how you experience a world without sound.


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To appropriate YouTube videos, part of students’ social life, as a cognitive tool for formal learning, the students drew from what Burgess (2006, 210) defines as her ‘vernacular literacies – skills and competencies that cannot simply be reduced to cultural capital or an ‘‘artistic’’ education, but that instead exploit competencies built up through everyday experience, especially experience [acquired] as a mass media consumer’.

Students also established their own strengths and learnt to work towards them, as shown in the following student’s quote:

When we first found out who our group members were we immediately came together and started brainstorming ideas of what we could do and then from there we said: ‘Okay guys what’s your strengths and what are your weaknesses?’ and then according to that we like said: ‘Okay you can do this, you can do that’, and whenever problems came up we said: ‘Okay look if you can’t do that I will do that and then you can do this instead’ and I think overall that helped. So everybody did their parts and helped out when they couldn’t like help out with other stuff ... we were asking each other questions the whole time to draw from each other’s strengths instead of just going out and anyone trying to be a leader (White Design).

What these quotes show, is that instead of focusing on what students either had or lacked in terms of digital literacies, they were encouraged to make maximum use of the objectified cultural capital closest to them, such as their mobile phones, to engage in digital practices that were familiar, such as watching YouTube videos. The intention was to make learning meaningful and authentic and to draw from their own and their groups’ collectives strengths.

Students’ enjoyment, satisfaction and confidence regarding digital storiesWe argue that an important aspect of learning is student satisfaction. We also suggest that if digital storytelling is an improvement over traditional methods of teaching, then students should have reported having enjoyed the format and felt confident to engage in a similar project in the future, independent of their initial level of digital literacies or perceived preparedness to engage with this digital storytelling process. Analysis of the three questions around enjoyment of the digital storytelling process and satisfaction with the final output showed that, although participants started from varied positions of digital literacies and access to technologies, there was no significant difference in students’ enjoyment of, satisfaction with and confidence in engaging in a similar project in the future (Figure 3). Nursing students, who reported the lowest levels of digital literacies, and as one could argue, produced the least polished digital movies, demonstrated the highest levels of enjoyment and satisfaction, as shown in the following quote by a coloured student:

I was not confident that we can make it but today I feel that we can make it and I am looking forward to doing it again.

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Figure 2: Students' perceptions on the amount of support, time and access to equipment required for the production of their stories

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We were given adequate support to create our digital story

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Figure 2: Students’ perceptions on the amount of support, time and access to equipment required for the production of their stories

This points to the symbolic capital that the Nursing students have acquired through the acquisition and activation of their cultural capital. They felt a sense of pride and that they were being recognised during the screening of the stories, during which, in many instances, not only students and facilitators from their ECP course were present, but also regular students, colleagues and School Management. The findings also showed that Nursing students’ aspirational capital (Yosso 2005) was activated, as the following quote by a black Nursing student shows:

So it’s really interesting because ... We were just coming for being nurses. We didn’t know that we can do something else except being a nurse.

This supports previous studies’ findings, namely, that the process of digital storytelling may be more important to students than the actual product, which echoes Tacchi’s (2009, 171) reflection on digital storytelling in marginalised communities in Southeast Asia: ‘What set digital storytelling apart are really the process and the purpose.’

The highly digitally literate Design and ArchTech students were most critical of their work, expressing their awareness of room for improvement in their own stories after they had watched other students’ work (social capital). This, once again,


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shows evidence of Bourdieu’s notion of a ‘taste for luxury’ as opposed to a ‘taste for necessity’ that drove the less digitally literate Nursing students. This ‘luxury’ of wanting to improve his movie is evident in the following quote from a black student:

The moment I saw it coming I started seeing mistakes, oh I could have done that better. I could have done that better because I saw especially when I saw other people’s videos, I started seeing: oh I could have improved that and that ... but ja I was proud, but not very proud. 26

Figure 3: Students' enjoyment of the process of production and satisfaction with digital stories produced

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I enjoyed creating our digital story

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Figure 3: Students’ enjoyment of the process of production and satisfaction with digital stories produced

conclusion AnD recommenDAtions

The article has reported on an on-going project at a university of technology in South Africa aimed at understanding students’ perceptions of digital storytelling. This has been implemented in courses in order to develop students’ digital literacies while evaluating and developing context-specific practices for integrating digital storytelling into teaching and learning across disciplines and diverse student backgrounds. Bourdieu’s notions of field, habitus and capital and Yosso’s idea of community cultural wealth were applied when analysing students’ perceptions and

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the emerging practices of digital storytelling. The findings revealed four practices of digital storytelling, which varied in terms of the focus of the stories, structure, support and access to technologies, namely: highly structured; limited in structure; low unstructured; and highly unstructured in response to diverse students’ needs and strengths.

Two practices, applied in the case of the ArchTech and Nursing students, which were highly structured and limited in structure respectively, focused primarily on oral performance and personal narratives. On the other hand, the practices applied for the Design and FoodTech students, which were highly unstructured and low unstructured, followed a route of less support and less structure to develop group-based digital narratives on subject content.

The findings show that the different practices used in the various courses and disciplines led to equally high student engagement and satisfaction. We argue that the practices of digital storytelling developed in the current study, while producing stories of varied quality, enabled differently positioned students to grow their digital literacies and confidence in their abilities to engage with complex digital technologies; it also helped them to recognise that differences are the norm at the university as well as productive resources in the classroom, thus activating students’ social, cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1986).

Examining the data through Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth framework helped to reveal the students’ social and cultural resources which they could activate for the project, such as the rich storytelling tradition some of the students bring to the institution. While these might not be valued by the dominant culture at the university, they can help students to create compelling digital stories. Digital storytelling encouraged students to use accessible and familiar technologies, skills and practices acquired through every day experience (Burgess 2006). Students drew from their own creativity and resourcefulness, and were asked not to only rely on resources available in the institution, but to use their own life experiences as well as the media and tools they use in everyday social lives (Clarke 2009). This allowed students to use their community cultural wealth within the academic context and to transfer this back into their communities, enabling the various literacies required for production of digital stories to cross the divide between formal and informal learning (Burgess 2006), as shown in this quote by a coloured Nursing student:

I was interested ... just moving with the thing. It can be used like for 21st birthday parties ... maybe at weddings – how they met – something short but it can also tell a story.

Although the study was restricted by its small sample size; its implementation in a selected number of courses and disciplines; and its focus on one institution, we argue that digital storytelling is potentially viable in poorly-resourced environments, across disciplines and among students with diverse digital literacies and backgrounds, provided that: (1) technical barriers are lowered to the minimum and technologies are


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adopted that are freely available, owned by or easily accessible to students; (2) the appropriate model is chosen based on these students’ social and cultural capital; and (3) the community cultural wealth of students is considered in curriculum delivery. We argue that under these conditions, digital storytelling can enable university teaching to move towards valuing the community cultural wealth which students bring to the classroom and to recognise different experiences emanating from students’ diverse standards of formal and informal education in the process of constructing knowledge.

We also suggest that the objectified cultural capital in the form of mobile phones with their ability to take pictures and videos has proven a highly useful resource for students’ digital storytelling practices in the project. Due to the ubiquitous nature of mobile phone use among students in resource-poor environments, we recommend that an investigation be conducted into the potential of developing a complete mobile solution for producing digital stories, since this will reduce the need for access to institutional technologies, such as computer labs (as done in studies by Reitmaier et al. 2010, 2012). This solution should ensure that mobile phones are used to allow for more equity in the production of high quality digital stories.

Further implementation, assessment and evaluation of the four practices that emerged from the study will be carried out over the next two years, with the aim of developing models for integrating digital storytelling into curriculum delivery in resource-poor environments, across disciplines and with students from diverse backgrounds.

AcKnowleDgements

We would like to acknowledge the institution’s Research in Innovation in Teaching and Learning grant that funded the study and to thank all the lecturers and students who participated. This article was first presented at the HELTASA 2012 Conference and benefited from the ensuing discussion with the audience.

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