Developing Critical Digital Literacies Through Digital Storytelling: Student Attempts at Re-Telling the District Six Story

Developing Critical Digital Literacies Through Digital Storytelling: Student Attempts at Re-Telling the District Six Story

Alex Noble, Daniela Gachago
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/IJMBL.312184
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Abstract

The South African Higher Education sector has undergone major transformation since the end of Apartheid more than 25 years ago. Critical digital literacies and critical (digital) citizenship, aligns with the most important aspects of the transformation agenda, ‘the production of socially conscious graduates that will become the thinkers and leaders of tomorrow' (Soudien et al 2008). The ability to link the past and the present, the personal and the political is an important element of critical digital literacies. This paper reflects on projects introduced in a first year Extended Curriculum Programme course for Architectural Technology and Interior Design students at a University of Technology, in which students created a digital story after visiting historical sites in the Western Cape. Framed by Critical Race Theory concepts of master narratives and counter-storytelling, using multimodal analysis of the digital stories, this paper will highlight examples of students' attempts to disrupt common narratives through their creative yet personal engagement with the past and the present.
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Storytelling For Critical (Digital) Citizenship Within The Context Of The Built Environment

In a time of global anxiety about migration and its impacts, the notion of citizenship is highly contested. What does it mean to be a citizen? What rights and duties come with citizenship? What does it mean to be a critical citizen working within the built environment? If we accept that ethno-nationalistic forms of identity need to be challenged (Johnson & Morris 2010), what understanding of citizenship should frame our teaching? What shared values can we promote or negotiate? What would allow us to move away from models based on normative frameworks that reproduce hegemonic discourses and set up binaries, towards a model that allows us to challenge fixed notions of identity and embrace fluidity and social cohesion (Bozalek & Carolissen 2012)? What would it mean to, as Dejaeghere (2009, p.231) suggests, “allow teachers and students to bring their lived experiences and constructions of citizenship to engage with issues facing citizens in all strata of our societies”? This paper is an attempt to answer some of these questions we have been struggling with in our teaching practice.

Lister (1997, p. 3) defines citizenship simply as “the relationship between individuals and the state and between individual citizens within [the] community”. In South Africa the legacy of apartheid still complicates relationships between people from different racial and cultural backgrounds. Zinn and Rodgers (2017, p. 77) argue that:

“If [...] relationships have been fraught with and characterised by systemic injustice, as has been the case in South Africa, then this has necessarily damaged and distorted conceptions of citizenship. The pursuit of social justice becomes an imperative and driver, as citizens strive both to be fully recognised and to have their right to belong fully to that society restored”.

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