Arts and Humanities in Higher
Education
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Digital Storytelling as a Signature Pedagogy for the New Humanities
Rina Benmayor
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 2008 7: 188
DOI: 10.1177/1474022208088648
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Digital Storytelling as a Signature
Pedagogy for the New Humanities
r i na b e n may o r
California State University Monterey Bay, USA
a b s t rac t
This essay argues that digital storytelling is a hybrid, multimedia narrative form
that enables critical and creative theorizing. As an assets-based social pedagogy,
digital storytelling constructs a safe and empowering space for cross-cultural
collaboration and learning. As illustration, the essay analyzes in detail one student
story, using as primary evidence the story script, visual images from the digital
story, and excerpts from a recorded interview with the author. It concludes that
the process of digital story making and theorizing empowers and transforms
students intellectually, creatively and culturally. Thus, digital storytelling can be
seen as a signature pedagogy for the new Humanities in the 21st century.
k e y w o r d s assets-based pedagogy, creative theorizing, critical theorizing, digital
storytelling, empowerment, hybridity, identity, New Humanities, theorizing in the flesh,
transformation
introduction
Wh e n i f i r s t s aw a d i g i ta l s t o ry back in 19961 I was captivated
by its pedagogical potential. It seemed a perfect medium to engage students
in my life stories class in their own autobiographical process, through the
audio-visual language of contemporary culture. I did not expect, however,
that integrating digital storytelling in my curriculum would become so transformative. It has certainly changed my pedagogy, and it has yielded personal,
intellectual, and social benefits for students that were unexpected. I believe
that digital storytelling is a signature pedagogy of the ‘New Humanities’,
engaging an interdisciplinary integration of critical thought and creative
practice.2 Digital stories are, as Randy Bass and Matthias Oppermann (2005)
suggest, at the crossroads of the creative and the analytical. Both product and
process in digital storytelling empower students to find their voice and to
speak out, especially those marginalized by racism, educational disadvantage
or language (Benmayor, forthcoming). This article explores how students
Arts & Humanities in Higher Education
Copyright © 20 08, sage publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore ISSN 1474-0222
vol 7(2) 188–204 doi: 10.1177/1474022208 088648
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engage in telling stories creatively through multimedia, how they develop
intellectual discourse and critique, and how they construct a cross-cultural
community for empowerment in my classroom.
At California State University Monterey Bay, where 30 per cent of the
student body is of Chicano/a or Mexicano/a origin, I teach an upper-division
course entitled Latina Life Stories. The class always has a diverse composition:
along with Latinas and Latinos, it attracts other women of color, white women,
and men of all ethnicities. In this class we read autobiographical narratives –
testimonios – of US Latinas from multiple ethnic and national origins: Chicanas,
Puertorriqueñas, Cubanas, Dominicanas, Centroamericanas, Sudamericanas
and mujeres of other Hispanic origins and mixed heritages. Testimonio (Latina
Feminist Group, 2001: 13) is a genre of witness testimony that emerges from
Latin American movements of resistance, where the person bearing witness
tells their story with the intention of raising political awareness about their
struggle. After reading these life stories, students produce their own identity
stories or testimonios – not in writing, but digitally by creating a short digital
narrative using desktop video-editing software. The class gives students the
opportunity to become authors in their own right, inscribing their own
historical, cultural and generational identities and life experiences in a digital
narrative format. I then incorporate their digital stories into the class syllabus
in subsequent semesters.
Along with producing their stories, I also ask students to theorize them.
Several decades of testimonial and life story writing by women of color in the
USA (Bell-Scott, 1994; hooks, 1984; Latina Feminist Group, 2001; Moraga and
Anzaldúa, 1983) have demonstrated the intentional power of storytelling in
challenging inadequate socio-cultural theories and ultimately creating and
proposing new theories. In her influential essay, ‘La Güera’, Moraga (1983: 34)
refers to learning from women about ‘racism, as experienced in the flesh, as
revealed in the flesh of their writing’, suggesting that theory-making also
resides in the flesh. While I do not ask my students to articulate new theory, I
have seen the multimedia process enhance their understanding of what it
means to theorize their own identities ‘from the flesh’. That is, to use their
‘situated knowledge’ – through speaking about, reflecting on, and analyzing
their lived experience – to produce new social/cultural/historical understandings. I conceptualize digital storytelling and theorizing, then, as an active
learning process that engages the cultural assets, experiences and funds of
knowledge that students bring to the classroom. It is also a self-reflexive and
recursive process that helps students to make important intellectual (theorizing) and personally transformative moves, which is why students often refer to
the digital story and the class as ‘therapy’. How then does digital storytelling
enhance students’ capacities to make these intellectual and life-relevant moves?
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My syllabus for Latina Life Stories scaffolds the process, providing bridges
between creative and intellectual production. First, I ask students to read and
discuss the autobiographical theorizing writings of Latinas. Students recognize
themselves and their own lived experiences in these readings and begin to
share their own life stories in class. After several weeks of rich discussion and
‘story-circle’ activity, we then move to the digital story assignment. It consists
of choosing a significant moment, person, or event in the student’s life that
has helped shape their identity. Often the idea of the story comes out of short
‘memory writes’ that we do at the beginning of each class session. Secondly,
I ask students to write a story in one and a half pages, double spaced. The
story must make a dramatic point, be meaningful to the author and to others,
and connect the individual to a social world of experience and meaning.
Because these are very personal stories, hearing the author’s voice is central
to the story’s power. The next step is for students to record the story in their
own voice, with appropriate feeling and dramatic inflection. They move from
the comfort of the distanced written voice to the embodiment and performance of meaning in the recording booth. Following that, students construct
a visual narrative. This is a complex assignment, involving selection, scanning,
and preparation of appropriate images in photo-editing software. The visual
narrative must support the narration, but also stand on its own aesthetically
and as a coherent visual text. Finally, students choose a musical background if
they feel this enhances the project. The music must be appropriate to the
mood and tone of the story, and culturally specific when possible. All these
creative moves alchemize into a final three-minute digital movie. At the
conclusion of this process, I ask students to engage in an intellectual reflection that theorizes the story and the process of making it. They are asked to
examine how their story (both the narrative and visual texts) fits into larger
concepts, theories and cultural logics we read in the class, and to explain what
understanding or insight they draw about their own identities and lives (see
the Appendix to this article for the assignment in full). How do their stories
relate to the ones they have read? Are there communities of meaning? Are
there new meanings emerging that are personally significant or that express
the perspectives of their generation?
c r i t i ca l t h e o r i z i n g
To illustrate the transformative nature of creative authoring and ‘theorizing
from the flesh’, I have chosen one representative example: Lilly CabreraMurillo’s story, ‘Dancing into Mi Cultura’. Limited here by print, I represent
the story Lilly produced through her digital story script, her written reflections, and transcription of segments of a video interview conducted with her
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two years after she took the class. I also include a few still shots from the
digital story to convey some sense of her visual text.
Lilly’s story is about her struggles with identity both outside and within
her own ethnic community, and how she ultimately finds a way to draw
strength from her heritage. Here is the script of her three-minute movie.
Dancing into Mi Cultura
I attended a private elementary school with only two or three other Latinos in my grade.
I never connected with them the way I did with my family. For many years, school was
a place where I went to learn, where I developed a passion for reading. A place where
I hid my heritage within the folds of my uniform, a space between visits with my cousins
during the holidays and summers.
We made trips to El Centro and Calexico, burning in the 120-degree heat, refueling
the fire that seemed to falter in the cold winters in Salinas. My brother and I received
much of our cultural upbringing from summers and holidays with Nana, Tata, ninas
[madrinas], ninos [padrinos], tías and tíos. My summer school consisted of Tía Doris
pulling out her 45s, giving me lessons on Oldies But Goodies. Field trips were to cousins’
quinceañeras where Tio Ramón played trumpet in the band. Saturdays, we’d pile into Nina
Marta and Nino Beto’s seven passenger van, all twelve of us, so no one would miss the
trip to the show. The warmth and security I felt during the summers carried me for
many years. They were my foundation and kept my sense of culture alive.
In high school I attended public school. I thought it would give me a chance to
connect with other brownies like me. Instead, I was shunned. I didn’t get all the jokes.
I had a funny accent when I spoke Spanish. I had a limited vocabulary. I was Pocha,
westernized and spoiled. I didn’t share in their experience.
Then I found my passion – danza! The guitarras and zapateados took me back in time,
calling my heart, reaching the crying mestiza who had long been neglected, pulling my
soul from it’s hiding place where it patiently awaited this moment to be rediscovered,
free from the shackles of Eurocentric history lessons taught in school. The sounds
and sights invited me to another world and sent my heart reeling. I had a place in the
choreography of the history being played out on stage. I could feel my grandpa I never
met, a musician who gave up his dream to follow the trail of agriculture into California.
I could feel my grandma who worked in those fields to keep her family out of poverty
after grandpa died. I could feel my Nana and Tata as they danced the night away. I allowed
myself to be possessed, allowed the spirits of my ancestors to heal their backs, broken
from agricultural labor, straighten their curve, lift their faces shining with pride, remove
bandages from fingers blistered from picking produce, replace them with the hem of a
skirt. Take tired feet and mold them into shoes that moved by instinct. The music and
movements reverberate throughout my being, mestiza blood flowing through a heart,
beating with the base and percussion of my feet. (Cabrera, 2004b)
Lilly’s reflections give us insight into her theorizing process and the kinds of
perceptions that digital storytelling can generate. Here’s how she begins her
theorizing essay.
My Digital Story is concerned with the progress of my Chicanisma through the relationships of culture, education, society, and family. Family has been a foundation for my
personal traditions and a source of support in pursuing my cultural heritage. School
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provided me an education that kept my academic self separate from my cultural being.
It was also a source of rejection from peers of the dominant culture and of similar
cultures . . . I had to find a way to claim an identity that embraced a rich Mexican
heritage as well as a fourth generation citizen experience . . . I was finally given a chance
to rewrite a history that had been erased and hidden in Eurocentric textbooks. (Cabrera,
2004a: 1)
Lilly frames her essay as a reflection on the process of coming to an
integrated identity consciousness. She begins with the recognition of her
cultural assets (family, cultural heritage discovered through dance) juxtaposed
with painful experiences of cultural and class dislocations. Rather than simply
recounting her experience, she brings to the fore conceptual language from
the class readings to make sense of her feelings. She attributes her new
awareness to her own agency (‘I had to find . . .’) and to digital authorship (‘I
was finally given a chance to rewrite a history . . .’).
Another way in which Lilly theorizes is by parsing key phrases from her
story, contextualizing and explaining them. In this example, Lilly chooses the
following line, referring to her expectation of finding her community in
public school: ‘I thought it would give me a chance to connect with other
brownies like me’. She then explains:
I had some wild conception that all persons of a culture would embrace one another
because of the similarity of skin color . . . Obviously, I wasn’t taking into account the
diverse experiences of all the different kinds of Latinas. Because of my educational and
middle-class privilege, I held a space I couldn’t identify. (Cabrera, 2004a: 4–5)
She rereads her memories of marginalization in light of new conceptual
understandings of internal difference and class privilege, thus theorizing her
cultural bind.
The assignment then prompts students to connect their story to the
readings. To interpret and explain her conflicted identity, Lilly zeroes in on
Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1986) concept of ‘new mestiza consciousness’. Anzaldúa,
one of the most influential Chicana writers and cultural theorists, offers a
different and empowering framing of the ‘hybrid’ cultural experience for
Chicanas. She re-theorizes the traditional Mexican concept of mestizaje (racial
and cultural mixing) to propose a ‘new mestiza consciousness’ in which
La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations . . . toward a more whole
perspective, one that includes rather than excludes . . . She has a plural personality,
operates in a pluralistic mode – nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly,
nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns
the ambivalence into something else. (Anzaldúa, 1986: 101)
Anzaldúa theorizes the concept of borderlands as a geographical, cultural and
historical space where dominant and subordinated cultures intersect. This
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intersectionality is a theoretical response to second-wave feminism’s singular
focus on gender. Intersectionality views class and race as key forces in explaining differential oppression and identity.
The passage and concept resonate intensely for Lilly, and the irony does
not escape her:
It now seems ironic that the name that I’ve found to identify my experience is a
consciousness that requires me to embrace a comfort in ambiguity. La conciencia de la
mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness, defined this ‘cultural collision’ for me and the claim
to empowerment that it provides. (Cabrera, 2004a: 8)
Lilly renders a sophisticated analysis of her new awareness by breaking free
from the restrictions of what Anzaldúa calls a binary (either/or) way of
thinking that constructed Chicanas as neither American nor Mexican. Instead
of situating herself as marginalized from both her own culture and that of
the mainstream, she now constructs the physical or psychological ‘in-between’
space of borderlands as her own center of identity. She now claims a hybrid
identity from that place of difference.
By writing, producing, and theorizing her story, Lilly bears witness to her
past and constructs a new space of belonging. In an interview, conducted two
years after taking the class (see Figure 1), Lilly elaborates on the impact of
Anzaldúa on her life. She says:
figure 1
Liliana Cabrera-Murillo, Interview, Clip 6.
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It was more like she [Anzaldúa] was telling me, ‘This is you’, when I was reading it.
Having that duality and not really . . . I knew it, I knew that I had the me that I presented
at school and then I had the me that I presented at home, with people that I was comfortable bringing into my culture. When I was in elementary school, I would have friends
come over and spend the night. But when they spent the night we would have like,
chicken and rice and broccoli, and make cakes. But when I was with my cousins or
somebody else that was in my culture, we’d wake up and we’d have chorizo and pan
dulce. I knew that that was there, but she [Anzaldúa] made me comfortable, she made
me happy and feel just so prideful in the hybridity of having all of that, and not feel
that I had lost anything, but knowing that it was there. Because it existed, she gave me
the tools to go back and find it. (Cabrera, 2006)
Lilly makes explicit that the impact is intellectual, as she renames her
experience through a new conceptual vocabulary. More significantly, however,
the impact is emotional. She rejects the old deficit construct of anomie (that
posits an inability to identify in either cultural context, American or
Mexican), and embraces the power of difference. She finds in theory the
explanation for the dual marginalization she felt:
I now recognize my space. The space that includes oppressions, privilege, and transcendence. My experience entails the suffering of my parents and the educational
opportunities that their struggles provided me. My experience is that of the transgression
of cultural traditions as I chose to train my legs to dance rather than strengthen them
to hold future oppressions (or a husband) on my back. I accept the ‘westernized’ aspects
of my education and use my new consciousness to turn it on its side, finding a way to
tell the real histories. (Cabrera, 2004a: 8–9)
These examples make visible the intellectual steps that Lilly takes of moving
from narrative story to theorizing from the flesh. She uses conceptual
language to interpret the different stages of her remembered experience; then
she applies, or translates, Anzaldúa’s theory of ‘new mestiza consciousness’ to
her own personal situation and finds a way out of a long-standing emotional
bind.
Reading Anzaldúa gives Lilly the ‘tools to go back and find’ her cultural
ground. One could argue that just reading Anzaldúa might trigger this
transformation by itself, and that would be powerful enough. However, the
theorizing essay offers the critical space to read oneself into theory, merging
the psychic with larger intellectual and social dimensions. In this way, Lilly
re-enacts the process of theorizing from the flesh that Anzaldúa and Moraga
model. Her new critical understanding in turn empowers her emotionally.
She not only becomes an author of her own story, she begins to become a
theorist of her own experience. She transforms herself intellectually and
personally. This is my intention in this course.
The theorizing process cannot take place before the story, of course. The
middle step in the process is the creation of the digital story. Here, ‘the flesh’
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is both subject and actor, the topic of the story and the constructor of it. In
this way, creating a digital story becomes both the expression and the creative
embodiment of new consciousness. I suggest that the creative process in
digital storytelling is yet another form of theorizing.
c r e at i v e t h e o r i z i n g
Making a digital story involves the skills of conceptualizing, writing, performing, selecting, imaging, integrating, and signifying. As Lilly physically
constructs each step of her story on the computer, she reaffirms her new
liberated consciousness. Each step in the creative process is an act of meaning
construction. She draws connections, recognizes and renders historical and
cultural concepts and patterns through multimedia. For example, in a video
interview recorded two years later Lilly offers the following insights about
how she intentionally worked with images to represent metaphorically her
emotional and intellectual evolution. In this excerpt, she explains how she
uses color conceptually:
[I was] playing with options as far as color, changing from that sepia tone to bringing it
into full color. And I thought that it was really important as far as sort of ending it up,
because from a really sort of shaded experience, and after the digital stories I was just
able to bring all of that with full color and that’s why I did the very end with just the
brown tones and then just bringing it in to include all the colors. (Cabrera, 2006)
She plays with the aesthetic and emotion of the sepia-toned image. Sepia
fits in aesthetically with the black-and-white archival photos of her grandparents in their youth that she uses in her story. But it also effectively represents the lack of clarity regarding her cultural identity, the ‘shaded experience’
to use her words. By morphing the final image, from sepia to full color, she
metaphorically renders and celebrates a new consciousness (see Figure 2: as
this article does not include full colour images, I cannot render visually the
conceptual shift from sepia to colour that Lilly consciously employs.)
Lilly goes on to explain the significance of the archival images she used
and how she uses technology for symbolic meaning. In her video interview,
she explains a line from her script (‘I could feel my Nana and Tata as they
danced the night away’), and its artistic visual rendition. She decides to use a
vertical pan (rendered here through a sequence of still shots) for a black-andwhite image of her grandparents, dressed to go to a dance (see Figure 3).
She says:
Okay, ‘I could feel my Nana and Tata as they danced the night away’. And they were at
a dance. And because of the time when this picture was taken, and I love it, and I try
to pump my hair up every once in a while, cause I love, I just love the feel of the time
and the style of it, and that’s what I kinda wanted to show was, especially with my Tata,
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figure 2
Screen shot from Cabrera-Murillo.mov.
how brown he was with this zoot suit type, suited up, at this time, with the European
influence, but then him being stark brown and beautiful, next to my grandmother who
was wearing this white dress and she’s lighter complected and has a more European kind
of flavor to her look, and just pan down and just feel them from their head to their toe.
And that’s what I wanted to use that . . . from the panning, from here down, all the way,
all the way to the tip of the toe. (Cabrera, 2006)
Selection of the panning technique is not merely aesthetic or an experiment with special effects. There is an intimate, seamless relationship between
Lilly as narrator, multimedia creator, granddaughter, and interpreter. As she sits
before the interview camera, with her script on her lap, Lilly slides smoothly
between all these subject positions. As the narrator, she repeats a key line of
the story: ‘I could feel my Nana and Tata dancing the night away’. The key
word here is ‘feel’. As the artist and creator of the digital story, she focuses on
showing this feeling of the experience. She explains the decision to ‘just pan
down and just feel them from their head to their toe’. The slow vertical pan
enables us to ‘see’ her Nana and Tata, but it also enables Lilly to climb into
the picture and imagine herself with her grandmother, in another time and
generation. She says, ‘I try to pump my hair up every once in a while cause
I love, I just love the feel of the times’. Thus, working with multimedia
images enables Lilly to connect her experience across generations and to
place herself in intimate relationship to her grandparents’ story and lives.3
Lilly exemplifies how creating the story and theorizing it is, at once, a bodily
experience – a physical, emotional and intellectual act. Digital multimedia
actually encourages theorizing from the flesh, providing a new dimension of
complexity to the process.
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figure 3
Screen shots of beginning and end of pan, Cabrera-Murillo.mov.
Even at the micro-level of production, students become aware of their
ability to compound the meaning of the story through words, images, and
sound. In this way, digital storytelling serves theoretical thinking, and theoretical thinking serves creative expression. The impact of digital storytelling
as a preferred medium of creative and critical expression is evident when
Lilly says:
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The visual impact of the colors, the dress, of the times that were kind of surrounding
my own story . . . I would have . . . I think I would die, cry if I was able to see, you
know, if Gloria Anzaldúa had a digital story. That would be the ultimate digital story,
I think, just because it gets beyond just words on paper, but just the visual . . . We have,
you know, our own pictures in our heads, in our own thoughts, of what it might look
like, what it might feel like. But just to see it along with what our own images may be
. . . because we all have a limited set of images to what we experience and we know.
But to see somebody else’s experience first hand, there’s nothing that compares.
(Cabrera, 2006)
Gloria Anzaldúa’s work translated into digital multimedia is a curious
thought. As a poet, Anzaldúa created rich and provocative images through
words. So what does Lilly mean by wishing Anzaldúa had made her own
digital story? As she says, ‘to see someone else’s experience first hand, there’s
nothing that compares’. Perhaps Lilly is telling us that the digital age opens
new hybrid forms of self-representation and that the digital story is one of
these. Moreover, as we have seen, Anzaldúa’s work was path breaking in its
conceptualization of hybridity and plural forms of identity. She intersected
ethnicity, class, race and gender in particular historical contexts and exploded
rigid categories of social identity. Perhaps what Lilly is signifying is how well
the digital story form would have suited Borderlands, and that had Anzaldúa
made a digital story that hybridity of meaning would have been mirrored in
the multiple languages of the form. Ultimately, her wish for Anzaldúa’s digital
story speaks volumes about Lilly’s own transformative experience through
multimedia theorizing. It tells me that digital storytelling enacts a meeting of
creative and critical theorizing that is complex, rich and holistic.
d i g i ta l s t o ry t e l l i n g a s c o m m u n i t y b u i l d i n g
Finally, I would like to reflect on digital storytelling as a ‘social pedagogy’ (Bass
and Elmendorf, 2007). By this, I mean a pedagogy that approaches learning as
a collaborative process. Just as intellectual theorizing requires situating the
individual in a collective referent, the process of creating the digital story
needs and creates community in important ways. Without this element of
community, the digital stories would not be as deep and powerful as they are.
Part of the process of generating the digital story involves sharing and
disclosure. This happens gradually in the classroom, as mentioned at the
beginning of this essay. Students might say, ‘I can really relate to that story
because the same thing [or something similar] happened to me’, and the
discussion switches to personal storytelling and disclosure. Other times, I
might ask students to share their own stories on a particular theme, as Lilly
remembers in the following passage.
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It was like a discussion session. So many times that we’d be sitting . . . We tried to make
it a circle but it always end up being a square! (Laughter.) We were looking at each other,
and kind of saying . . . Cause she would ask us just these point blank questions, ‘What
is your story? What is your history? What did you feel when you went to go visit your
grandparents?’ And even though sometimes it’s like we can blow it over really easily and
just kind of give everybody the ‘Oh, it’s great. I feel warm and fuzzy when I see my
grandparents.’ But for that class it was like ‘No. I visit my grandparents and they live
across the street from the border.’ And before this class, before having all these different
women and their stories, I wasn’t able to open up. Because it was like ‘Oh, you just want
to hear about my grandma’s cookies or her food or something’, but this was like, ‘Yes, I
see the ten foot tall fence with the barbed wire on top every time I visit her. Yes, I drive
through a dirt driveway to get to my grandmas’ house. Yes, there are people who hang
out and hide out in the back yard.’ But I never really thought about it, I never really
shared it. (Cabrera, 2006)
What I find meaningful in Lilly’s comment is that in this class students feel
a desire and a responsibility to grapple with their lived experience in significant ways, connecting their emotional and intellectual worlds and constructing an empowered and safe space to speak out about their diverse social
realities. Sharing in the classroom initiates a process of bonding and crosscultural alliance. I have found that technology becomes a key contributor to
this cross-identification and bonding. Although it is often claimed that technology is alienating, the work in the digital storytelling lab effects the
opposite. Technology is the ‘Great Leveller’, as most everyone in the class is
unfamiliar with the software used for digital storytelling. So generally, students
are all in the same boat when it comes to using the various software tools for
image, sound and video production. In response, they form natural teams, help
each other out, and appreciate (in the full sense of this word) each other’s
stories. As the emotional or technological vulnerability increases, the group
support intensifies.
Once the final versions of the digital stories are complete, we have an inclass screening. This is the first time students see each other’s stories in their
entirety. Seeing one’s story on the big screen is a scary moment but, by this
point, collaborative engagement throughout the semester has produced a strong
level of solidarity. Each story is met with tears, laughter, and enthusiastic
applause. Students offer empowering comments to each other and vulnerability is transformed into pride. Everyone relates to the fear of seeing one’s
work in public, but now everyone is each other’s strongest ally. The digital story
forges a sense of cross-cultural understanding. All of a sudden, the classmates
you have been sitting next to, hearing from and working with for 16 weeks
acquire full historical dimension, as their stories take you into their lives, their
pasts, and their feelings. The story and the individual merge and produce deeper
insight into that person’s social reality, generating a deep level of cultural respect.
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Because a significant number of students of color take this class, I have had
the privilege of witnessing not only greater understanding across cultural
groups, but a remarkable process of self-empowerment among those who
have experienced educational marginalization. By centering the course in
Latina voices, students of color, particularly, identify with and recognize themselves in these stories. Consequently, they feel authorized to speak their own
truths. However, all students, even those who have led more privileged lives,
experience a transformation. Often on the final evaluations they write that
they did not think they belonged in this class but have come to realize how
it has helped them understand their own realities in a more meaningful and
personal way. The collaborative practices in digital storytelling deepen understanding across social categories of identity and difference in ways that I have
not experienced in any other course over my more than 30 years of teaching.
c o n c lu s i o n
Over the years, and based on more than 200 student stories, I have come to
see digital storytelling as a pedagogical watershed. It invites students to speak
from the flesh, to create and represent through the flesh and to construct and
interpret their identities in mind and body. Digital storytelling is an assetsbased pedagogy where students can bring their own cultural knowledge and
experience to the fore, including their skills and comfort with technology, to
transform their thinking and empower themselves. The multiple creative
languages of digital storytelling – writing, voice, image, and sound –
encourage historically marginalized subjects, especially younger generations,
to inscribe emerging social and cultural identities and challenge unified
cultural discourses in a new and exciting way. As a hybrid form, digital storytelling mirrors and enables the conceptual work of constructing new understandings of identity and places of belonging.
I do believe that the digital authoring process makes visible to students how
theory emerges from personal experience and how theorizing is both intellectual and creative. In conceiving and constructing their stories, students
become more cognizant of the contexts and backgrounds that shape their
perspectives. This helps to demystify theory and empower students to become
theorizers of their own historical and cultural experiences. While Lilly was a
very creative and thoughtful theorizer, exemplifying a sophisticated level of
critical thought and creative embodiment, I believe that all students take away
with them new insights about their own experiences that transcend the
lifetime of the class or the project. They have learned how to make powerful
stories, to express powerful ideas that transform. Their stories are seen not
only by their classmates, they are circulated among family and friends, given
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as presents, and preserved as a prideful example of meaningful authorship.
Along with the humanizing impact of these identity stories, the process of
making them creates an unusual depth of solidarity, cross-cultural understanding and mutual respect among all students in the classroom. For all these
reasons, I believe digital storytelling is, indeed, a signature pedagogy for the
New Humanities in the 21st century.
ap pe nd i x
THEORIZING YOUR DIGITAL STORY
Latina Life Stories
This essay gives you the opportunity to analyze/interpret, reflect upon, and theorize your
Digital Story. This theorizing essay is an intellectual reflection and commentary on the meaning
of the testimonio/digital story you produced and the process of creating it. Please do not
engage in retelling the story you’ve already told. Talk about it but don’t retell it.
1. Analyze/Interpret: This means explaining the meaning/message of the story and showing
where and how the story constructs that meaning.
2. Theorize: The focus here is to examine how theories have helped you uncover and
explain the larger meanings held in this story. This is also an opportunity to suggest new
ways of thinking where current theories do not account for or explain the problem you
are addressing.
3. Reflect Intellectually and Creatively: Reflect on what you’ve learned intellectually
through your story – the theories and ideas it raised, as well as reflecting on the process of
making it. Also, reflect on the process of creating this story, the choices you made and why
you made them.
PREPARATION FOR WRITING
Before you begin to write, spend time thinking and analyzing your story as follows. Make
detailed notes for each of the following sections:
1. IDENTIFY CONCEPTS: Following the process we’ve used in class, brainstorm and
identify a list of concepts present in your story. Think back to the readings we’ve done in
class and to the concepts that we’ve talked about: e.g. solidarity, abandonment, isolation,
gender roles, stereotypes, cultural identity, individualism, collectivity, etc.
2. LOCATE the important sites of meaning in your story. Sites of meaning are those words,
phrases, sentences, visual symbols, music, intonation of voice that say something important.
Sometimes the meaning is overt; sometimes it is beneath the surface, or symbolic and
metaphorical. Sometimes the meaning is lodged in historical background. Locate all these
sites of meaning in your story.
3. IDENTIFY the stories we’ve read in class that connect to your story in some way – similar
situations, similar problems, or similar issues. Think about how these stories and the themes
of the class (see syllabus), and our discussions may help you interpret your own story.
4. IDENTIFY THEORIES: Theories are attempts to explain why things are the way they
are, by connecting an individual experience to larger social forces and arrangements of
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5.
6.
7.
8.
power. Which theories (use at least two or three) best explain the individual experience
captured in your story? Old theories like assimilationist, acculturation, pluralist, feminist, etc?
Or new theories like: new mestiza consciousness, intersectionality, hybridity/mestizaje,
borderlands (real, psychic, and metaphorical), border feminisms, transnationalism, underground feminisms, power and privilege, positionality, etc. Explain how the theories you’ve
chosen help explain the significance of this story to others, to yourself? How do these
theories help you look at the problem, tension, conflict, or celebration in a new or different
or empowering way? Does theory help you explain the experience in a deeper way, or
change how you feel about that experience emotionally, now that you have been able to
name it?
SPEAKING BACK/FOR, WRITING BACK/FOR (your positionality): Reflect on how
your story responds to forces of oppression, history, or social arrangements of power and
privilege; or how it supports positive cultural values. Are you speaking back to power and
privilege? Are you celebrating positive identities and relations of kinship? Are you supporting traditions or critiquing them? Are you speaking on behalf of others? In support of
others? Are you proposing some new way of understanding and achieving greater equality?
Where is your story expressing oppositionality? Where is it being propositional?
STORYTELLING FOR SOCIAL CHANGE: Has this class and process changed your
understanding of your relationship to larger communities, social movements, and social
change, or the need to chart new ideas and concepts to bring about future social change?
You as an agent of social change? Your voice as important to social change? What changes
specifically?
CREATIVE PROCESS: Reflect upon the process of becoming an author of a digital story
– the selection of your story (why you chose to write this one), the importance it has for
you, the meaning it may have for others; what readings helped you arrive at this story; what
theories sparked your thought process? Explain the aesthetic look you wanted to give to
your story and describe your process of searching for/creating the images. Describe the
challenges this posed and how you resolved them. Explain your choice of music or decision
not to have music.
TRANSFORMATIONS: Describe any emotional transformations you experienced in the
process of creating this story – in the classroom, in the lab, in writing your story, in reading
it out loud, in putting images or music to it.
VOICE AND TONE OF THE ESSAY
I encourage you to write in the first person voice, in a reflective voice, connecting your own
story to the theories that help explain it. This is your intellectual reflection. It is not a place
to do more storytelling. So, don’t fall into retelling the story or elaborating the background to
the story. In other words, don’t start telling what happened. Instead, tell us about what you think
the story means. If you need to provide some background storytelling to make a point, limit
yourself to one sentence to clarify the background. So, as soon as you start telling what
happened to whom, you are on the wrong track. Instead, focus on explaining the story in more
abstract terms.
note s
1. A digital story is a short multimedia story that combines voice, image, and music. The
Center for Digital Storytelling, in Berkeley, California (http://www.storycenter.org/) has been
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at the forefront of popularizing this storytelling format. After taking one of their workshops
and producing my own story, I was able to understand the process and how to integrate it into
my course. This includes an assigned lab with an instructional technologist and ‘troubleshooting’ assistants, where the students learn the technical process and produce their stories.
2. The term ‘New Humanities’ comes from discussions with my colleagues to try to signify a
new approach to the study of the Humanities that is interdisciplinary, drawing from the more
contemporary fields of Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, American Studies. The term is also used
by others – The Social Science Research Network; the New Humanities program at the
University of Queensland, Ipswich, Australia; the New Humanities Reader, published by
Houghton Mifflin.
3. I am grateful to my colleagues Michael Coventry and Matthias Oppermann for pointing
out many subtleties of meaning in Lilly’s commentaries.
re fe re nce s
Anzaldúa, G. (1986) Borderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press.
Bass, R. and Elmendorf, H. (2007) ‘Social pedagogies framework’. Available at:
http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=21958734860605&id=81886024569986 (accessed
October 2007).
Bass, R. and Oppermann, M. (2005) Comments at the Visible Knowledge Project Summer
Institute. Washington, DC: Georgetown University.
Bell-Scott, P. (1994) Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women. New York:
Norton.
Benmayor, R. (forthcoming) ‘Theorizing through Digital Stories: The Art of Writing Back
and Writing For’, in R. Bass and B. Eynon (eds) The Difference that Inquiry Makes: The Impact
of Learning on Teaching and Innovation in Higher Education, pp.1–25.
Cabrera, L. (2004a) ‘Dancing Into Mi Cultura’. Theorizing Essay. California State University,
Monterey Bay. Unpublished.
Cabrera, L. (2004b) ‘Dancing Into Mi Cultura’. Digital Story, in Our Stories, Our Lives, Our
Traditions: Digital Stories of Empowerment, CD-Rom. California State University, Monterey
Bay.
Cabrera, L. (2006) Video Interview by Michael Coventry and Matthias Oppermann. Digital
Storytelling Multimedia Archive. Georgetown University.
hooks, bell (1984) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. New York: South End Press.
Latina Feminist Group (2001) Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Moraga, C. (1983) ‘La Güera’, in C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa (eds) This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color, pp. 27–34. New York: Kitchen Table Press.
Moraga, C. and Anzaldúa, G., eds (1983) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women
of Color. New York: Kitchen Table Press.
b i o g ra p h i ca l n o t e
r i na b e n may o r is Professor of Oral History, Literature and Latina/o Studies
at California State University Monterey Bay. She directs the CSUMB Oral History
and Community Memory Institute and Archive, and from 2004–06 served as
President of the International Oral History Association. She has a Ph.D in
Romance Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley. Her more recent books
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include Latino Cultural Citizenship (with William V. Flores), Beacon, 1997; Telling
to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (with the Latina Feminist Group), Duke
University Press, 2001; and Migration and Identity (with Andor Skotnes), Transaction Publishers, 2004. She has published articles on oral history, Puerto Rican
women and migration, first generation college students, cultural citizenship, and
digital storytelling. Address: Humanities and Communication, California State
University Monterey Bay, 100 Campus Center, Seaside, CA 93955, USA.
[email: [email protected]]
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