Interculturally-Critical Digital Storytelling: Narrating and Promoting Social Justice

Introduction

Situating education within the current sociopolitical circumstances is rather more problematic than any pedagogical consideration of how different ontologies come to co-exist in classrooms. Highly multicultural classrooms, without proper management, can be sites of either cultural contestation or assimilation. In the context of K-12, rendering classrooms’ procedures and agents imbued with a sense of intercultural awareness/understanding is more complicated due to students’ relatively uncompleted cognitive development. This necessitates setting different expectations with regards to intercultural learning and perception of culturally different other (Wagner & Byram, 2017). Therefore, conveying social justice-focused content should be mediated by personalized, easy-to-grasp and relatable materials. Also, there is a plausible need to implement methods that (a) offer the ability to strike a balance among engaging students in the teaching-learning process and (b) promote their self-driven quest for ascertaining equal treatment of appreciation of all individuals regardless of their identity-defining features, e.g., race, culture, class, gender. Within the general concern of this chapter, referring specifically to the intercultural is justified by how cultures relatively influence individuals’ thinking, behaviors and their perceptions of other people especially those who are different in terms of values, norms and mindsets.

Young children have to be recognized as current active citizens of their world and future decision-makers. However, ensuring the development of their intercultural understanding at this stage is rather more feasible than simply assuming they will be able to co-exist with the others when they are adults. Students have to be meaningfully dealt with as thoughtful beings with some level of intellectual ability in the process of designing teaching materials, activities and overall curriculum (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020). Stories, as narration loaded with positive attitudes and understandings, have a great capacity to make sense of and explore social realities around the world through entertaining, relatable, sensuous and poetic knowing. Teachers and students’ practice as a storyteller has the potential of provoking, encouraging and promoting the children's inclination towards social justice and active citizenship.

In current times, digital storytelling has emerged as a “modern method for expanding upon traditional storytelling techniques through a variety of digital modalities including digital photography, audio techniques and videography” (Buckner, 2018, p. 65). It offers the possibility of “combining narrative with digital content, including images, sound, and video, to create a short movie, typically with a strong emotional component” (Kaya, 2019, p. 232). In the context of K-12 education, digitally supported storytelling can be looked upon with favor since younger students would probably appreciate ”the process and result of telling a story using technology tools“ (Lantz et al., 2020, p. 231). Through accessible language, reflective analysis and candid discussions, digital storytelling can be employed to promote social justice. Instructors can make use of the stories they have experienced or seen about sensitive issues including culturally-caused disagreements/conflicts, lack of positive attitudes towards the other and racism in our society. Since making sense of the intercultural and sociopolitical constructions entails analyzing their instantiations and expressions through the language and images people encounter every day, this chapter offers strategies for using digital storytelling to develop students’ inclination to practice and implement principles of social justice. The aim is to argue for critically examining students/teachers’ previous experiences and actions through accentuating visible representation of language and images.