Digital storytelling and its impact on student learning and engagement
The Ethnic Layers of Detroit (ELD) is a research and development project comprised of a six-member inter-disciplinary group with backgrounds in language, literature, culture, anthropology and instructional technology that has been awarded a Digital Humanities Start-up Grant (level two) from the National Endowment in the Humanities (NEH).
The main objective of the ELD project is to create digital stories showcasing the cultural histories of different ethnic groups that built the city of Detroit. Our group is developing a digital portal that will inform students, scholars and community members about the cultural, linguistics, and historical background of different landmarks in Detroit. Our digital portal will use augmented reality technology that allows users to interact with points of interest within a real-world environment via images, audio, and video displayed on a screen. For instance, users could hold up a tablet or smartphone at a historical landmark, monument, or building in Detroit and see a historical image of the building superimposed on their view of the building in real-time.
Goals
The broad goals of the ELD project are to use digital storytelling as a tool to:
- Reveal and create, overlapping, multilayered connections between people, practices and the urban environment
- Connect classroom & community through technology
- Advance interdisciplinary awareness and technological literacy
To achieve these broad goals the ELD project focuses on three specific areas which include:
- Detroit’s ethnic histories
- Undergraduate (and graduate) education at WSU
- Partnerships with Detroit organizations and local community
As a pedagogical tool, ELD’s digital storytelling platform and its developmental process is being integrated into the coursework of several existing WSU courses taught by the project’s co-directors. In addition to using the portal in existing courses, we also plan to create an upper-level undergraduate/graduate interdisciplinary humanities course at WSU on storytelling through digital media. Ultimately, we will create an online course on storytelling, possibly a MOOC, open to the general public beyond WSU.
ELD in the classroom
There are two major aspects to classroom integration of ELD:
- Viewing of ELD stories
- Creating of ELD stories
As one aspect of integrating ELD in the classroom, students are asked to view ELD digital stories. The other aspect involves WSU students creating such stories; through workshops, we equip students with the skills to do so. Since the pilot phases of the project in 2013, ELD has identified a variety of sites in Detroit and engaged in narrating their stories through archived and current, pictures, sound, and movies. About 25 digital stories have been developed. Many of these digital stories have been incorporated into the curriculum of existing courses and students have engaged with the digital stories in different ways.
Research questions
In our ELD classroom integration, we’re specifically interested in exploring the following questions:
Did digital storytelling help in:
- Connecting classroom & community through technology?
- Overlapping, multilayered connections between people, practices and the urban environment?
- Advance interdisciplinary awareness and technological literacy?
Were goals of ELD’s NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up grant realized?
Did digital storytelling help in promoting the following?
- Student agency
- Motivation
- Learner-centered environment
How can digital storytelling projects like ELD help address the five ACTFL standards, preparing for the 21st century?
- Communication
- Cultures
- Connections
- Comparisons
- Communities
We’re currently gathering data that will help us address these questions and more.