Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices Through Online Narratives

Everyone has a story to tell, and this book will inspire and guide readers to teach and learn through the production of digital narratives. This book presents the stories of educators who through digital storytelling inspire students from diverse communities to construct their empowering digital narratives. Educators from a wide range of disciplines present innovative case studies of teaching digital storytelling through the lens of personal narratives, metaliteracy, and information literacy. They describe how teaching students to tell their personal digital stories prepares them as learners who are reflective while playing active learner roles such as producer, publisher, and collaborator. As an innovative resource for teaching and learning with digital media, this book:

• Combines the theory and practice of digital storytelling with metaliteracy and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education
• Explores how to inspire learners to share their original digital narratives
• Offers the opportunity to explore and address issues of race, class, and gender to give voice to these issues as part of the storytelling process
• Investigates the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in writing and producing original digital narratives
• Examines novel approaches to collaborative digital storytelling and peer review
• Presents pioneering models for global digital storytelling among international learners online
• Describes empowering digital narratives constructed by students who found and shared their voices through this creative process
• Provides inventive models for teaching effective planning through well-written scripts and visual storyboards
• Offers openly-available resources such as rubrics, assignment descriptions, and digital technologies
• Showcases the application of metaliteracy OER in digital storytelling learning activities and courses

Through this book, faculty, librarians, school library media specialists, and instructional designers will learn how to teach the theory and practice of digital storytelling. This innovative resource will also empower students to reflect on their roles as digital storytellers and metaliterate learners in today’s dynamic and evolving information environment.

Sheila Marie Aird is the Director of International Programs for Empire State College and oversees the American programs at the college’s four international locations. Dr. Aird is also an associate professor at the college. She received her Ph.D. in Latin and Caribbean History and MA in history from Howard University. During her final year of research at Howard University, she was awarded the prestigious Sasakawa Fellowship from the Nipon Foundation in Japan. Dr. Aird also holds a BA in Anthropology and a MA in Anthropology with a focus on Historical Archeology from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

Dr. Aird considers herself a cultural historian and is most interested in public scholarship in its many forms. Her passion lies in making historical and cultural moments come alive while educating the public through the medium of documentary and film, photography and museum exhibits. Her areas of interests and focus include Public History, children of colonial enslavement, Critical Race theory and issues of race in the African Diaspora community. Dr. Aird has presented on her work both domestically and internationally. Presently, Dr. Aird is working on two video projects. One focuses on women in California who are changing their lives with the help of a community. The other project co-developed from an Oral History Association Emerging Crisis research grant with a colleague, focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and Irma. The project offers first- hand accounts from the citizens most impacted in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas V.I. and will include the environmental, social and cultural impact on the most vulnerable citizens impacted by one of the most devastating hurricanes to hit the islands in 2017.

Thomas P. Mackey is professor of arts and media in the School of Arts and Humanities at the State University of New York Empire State College. He is the Dr. Susan H Turben Chair in Mentoring and has an honorary appointment as Extraordinary Professor, Research Unit Self-Directed Learning, Faculty of Education, North-West University, South Africa. His research focuses on metaliteracy - a pedagogical framework he originated with Prof Trudi E. Jacobson-that develops individuals as self-directed learners in participatory information environments. Dr. Mackey is interested in the intersections among metaliteracy, self-directed learning and multimodality, to prepare metaliterate learners as collaborative and informed producers of information. He has published four books with Prof. Jacobson on metaliteracy, including the first book on this topic titled Metaliteracy: Reinventing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy (2014), as well as the new book Metaliteracy in a Connected World: Developing Learners as Producers (2022). Dr. Mackey teaches online courses in Digital Storytelling, Ethics of Digital Art & Design, History and Theory of New Media, and Information Design, and has developed international MOOCs about Metaliteracy including Coursera’s Metaliteracy: Empowering Yourself in a Connected World and Empowering Yourself in a Post-Truth World.

Dr. Mackey co-edited several books including: Information Literacy Collaborations That Work, Using Technology To Teach Information Literacy, Collaborative Information Literacy Assessments: Strategies for Evaluating Teaching and Learning, and Teaching Information Literacy Online. He has published in several peer-reviewed journals including Open Praxis, Communications in Information Literacy, College & Research Libraries, First Monday, Computers & Education, The Journal of General Education, College Teaching, The Journal of Information Science, and The Journal of Education for Library and Information Science.