| Abstract: |
Objectives
This study explores digital storytelling as a dynamic teaching medium and reports on 31 pre-teacher education students’ reviews of their peers’ digital stories in a high school setting. Using the seven elements of digital storytelling (Dreon, Kerper, & Landis, 2011, p. 5), we explore how pre-teacher education program candidates use reflection to review their classmates’ digital stories. The foundational elements of our research are digital stories and students’ reflective practices of peer reviewing.
Theoretical Perspectives
For our study, we used the social constructivist theory (Vygotsky, 1978) that locates learning as a socially-constructed practice in which individuals actively take part as meaning makers and knowledge contributors. Students were collaboratively learning from one another as the authors of digital stories presenting their life experiences through multimodal texts, and as critics who thoughtfully considered their peers’ stories as they were presented for critique. Social constructivist theory aided us as a conceptual foundation, and as the study evolved and we began analyzing students’ critiques and responses, an experiential theory of response guided us in understanding how students were “able to identify or empathize with speakers” (Beach, 1993, pp. 60-61).
Methods/Data Sources
We focused on students’ digital stories and peer reviews from two cohorts from two academic years: 2018-19 and 2019-20, using the digital storytelling planning guides that students had previously used as evaluative tools for their classmates’ stories and had already uploaded into our Canvas course as data. We used simple color coding to first identify the seven elements of digital storytelling (Dreon, Kerper, & Landis, 2011) in the data (i.e., digital storytelling guides and peer response papers) and from these, divided the work of coding among ourselves, separating the two years of student cohorts. The 2018-2019 cohort contained 16 cases of digital stories; the 2019-2020 cohort contained 15 cases of digital stories. From the coded words and phrases that emerged and were connected to the overall categories of the seven elements of digital storytelling, initially, we used in vivo codes, or codes of students’ (authors’ and peer reviewers’) direct language, and then used second-layer coding of focused codes to summarize and then interpret the in vivo codes. Similar themes among peer reviews were then used to create categories for findings.
Findings
Themes of authenticity, understanding, and other feelings, as well as audience connection, audience engagement, reflection, and story flow, and the audience wanting more were emerging themes from students’ evaluations of their classmates’ digital stories.
Significance
Digital storytelling and digital peer reviewing are crucial to secondary classrooms because they open a space for conversations about students’ lives that are not often heard, much less understood or appreciated. Teachers are just now realizing how critical it is to know their students more personally because of the social issues that are heavily embedded in students’ lives, such as finding one’s identity as an LGBTQ+ youth or experiencing childhood abuse (Author 5, 2020). Stories are crucial to provide testimony to differing circumstances and life experiences. Listening to and witnessing others’ stories allow us to understand experiences, perspectives, and identities that are different from our own.
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