Renee Hayes (University of Delaware)
Eugene Matusov (University of Delaware)
This article explores the definition of successful digital storytelling projects through the examination of three projects created by children at a community center, under the guidance of adults. We propose a definition of success based on the notion of "addressivity" rather than "ownership."
Digital Storytelling: Children as AuthorsWhile digital storytelling has been with us since the early 1990s, there is no universally agreed-upon definition of the genre, much less a consensus on what constitutes a successful digital storytelling project with children. The Digital Storytelling Association calls digital storytelling "the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling" (Digital Storytelling Association, 2002), a simple definition that emphasizes the continuity of the storytelling genre. Other definitions emphasize new, media-specific possibilities, such as engaging reluctant writers (Banaszewski, 2002; Show and tell, no date), introducing teachers to new technological possibilities (Brinkley, Leneway, Webb, & Harbaugh, n.d.), or even teaching participants to use specific software (Chamisa Mesa High School, n.d.). Some consider digital storytelling to be a "political movement…to change the distribution of power and resources" (Lambert, 2000) because people can directly publish their stories on the Internet without any mediating agency. On the other hand, large corporations have discovered the mass marketing potential of digital stories, such as Coke's digital compilation of personal stories devoted to the sentimental value of Coca Cola in their lives ("The power of digital storytelling," 2000).
In our work, we found ourselves overseeing projects where children created digital stories under the guidance of adults. With such a disparity of definitions and their implicit goals, how do we define success in such projects? In our specific case we had an additional question, since the authoring of digital stories was also a means to foster relationships between children and adults: How can the act of collaborative digital story authorship help to develop mutual curiosity and relationship-building among the participants?
The University of Delaware has been working in partnership with the Latin American Community Center (LACC) in Wilmington, DE since 1997, when Eugene (second author) arrived at the University of Delaware. The partnership, called "La Red Mágica" ("The Magic Web" in Spanish), is loosely based on a worldwide network of similar programs called "The Fifth Dimension" (Cole, 1996). In La Red Mágica, elementary education majors who are enrolled in a mandatory course entitled "Cultural Diversity, Schooling, and the Teacher (EDUC 258), spend two evenings a week for 10 weeks at the LACC with the children. However, this is not a traditional teaching practicum, and students are advised to engage with children in child-initiated activities or to invite the children in the students' activities on a volunteer basis rather than help them with school mandatory homework (Matusov & Hayes, 2002; Matusov et al., 2003). Students are required to complete a final project with the children over the course of the semester. Students have a great deal of latitude in choosing their topics, and perhaps because they are often surprised at the level of computer experience and interest they find among these low-income Latino children, many of the projects take the form of digital storytelling.
Two of the projects analyzed in this paper were conducted by students in classes that Renée (first author) taught during three semesters at the University of Delaware. A third project, Marcos' (Fake) Crackheads, took place outside of the class context and was introduced to the children directly by Eugene in the summer of 2003. During these three semesters, Eugene was either on sabbatical or teaching other classes, but because he had had a great deal of experience teaching the class and continued to be involved with La Red Mágica, much of the analysis here developed from our ongoing discussions over the year and a half. As we reflected on the projects and what we defined as success and failure, we decided to collect data to help us understand how others (university students, children, and LACC staff) understood the projects. These data included student final project journals and final project reflective essays, the projects themselves, interviews with students and children, a survey of current students, taped recordings of our own conversations with children at the LACC, and interviews with selected LACC staff.
It is important to understand that the digital storytelling projects described in this paper were not themselves the goal of the class, but emerged through the choices of children and the pre-service teachers working with them. The analysis in this paper reflects our attempts to understand how these projects might or might not help to create the kinds of relationships between child and preservice teacher that would benefit both, which was in fact the goal of our class.
Our students are almost all white, middle-class females in their late teens or early 20s raised mostly in suburban communities. LACC children are mostly from Puerto-Rican and Mexican urban working class families varying in age from 5-year old to 15-year old (there are more older boys than girls at LACC). The goal of this 10-week teaching practicum has been for the students to learn how to build relations with culturally diverse children in an after-school program as the LACC children voluntarily engage in diverse educational activities and games. As instructors, we have assigned the students to work with these Latino children, engaging with them in their play activities and then eventually inviting them to work together on projects. For us, digital storytelling was never a conscious decision; we discovered that what we were doing might be called "digital storytelling" after the practice had already begun to emerge in our ongoing activities. Our emergent focus on digital storytelling was a result of our realization that this new practice can become a potential crossover between popular youth culture, academic school curricula, narrative traditions in local communities, and many new important technology- and narrative-based practices emerging in the adult society. Over the years, as our pre-service teachers have been working on projects with Latino school children, these children as well as our adult students[1] have become increasingly adept at and interested in digital media as the means to accomplish some of their projects. As a result, we began to reflect on how the new media practices helped, or hindered, the existing goals of the adult-child collaboration, which in turn led us to clarify and reconsider our goals.
In this adult-child collaboration, we hoped that both the adult students and the children would benefit from their working relationship. We were initially preoccupied with "the transfer of ownership" of these projects (cf. "the transfer of responsibility" in Rogoff, 1990). The adult (white, Anglo) students are situated as more powerful participants in US society in terms of race, social class, and age[2]. The LACC children are highly susceptible to the deficit approach (Sautter, 1994) toward minority children that values the mastery of mainstream and socially valuable practices of our evidently successful mainstream majority students over the knowledge and skilfulness of the poor minority children at the LACC. In fact, many of the conversations we have had with these children's teachers, as well as with LACC staff, students, and the children themselves, have suggested that the knowledge and skills of these children are often undervalued and even overlooked completely. Our students have often expressed a well-meaning but uninformed intention to "fix" or "save" these children, something we have come to refer to as "the missionary syndrome." We wanted to disrupt these lines of deficiency and power, and so wanted to take the collaboration between white adult and minority child as far out of the school context, which reproduces and reinforces these patterns, as possible. We thought that, given these socially constructed power differentials, if students did not eventually relinquish at least some of the ownership of the projects to the children, the children would not benefit from full authorial participation, and the students would not benefit from interaction with the children as full participants.
The notion of ownership, for us, implied responsibility for making important design and planning decisions as well as responsibility for seeing the project through to completion; in a real sense, a sort of possession. Conceptually, our notion of "transfer of ownership" has been rooted in a Vygotskian tradition with its emphasis on the developmental transition from "the social plane", when a child works in the "zone of proximal development" with more capable others (e.g., University students), to "the psychological plane, " where the child masters the activity on his her own (Vygotsky, 1978). We saw the success of digital story projects as unfolding according to Vygotsky's three-plane stages: 1) planned and started by the University student and observed by the LACC children ("the natural plane" according to Vygotsky), 2) student-child working jointly in the zone of proximal development ("the social plane", shared ownership), and 3) child assuming the full responsibility for the continuation of the digital storytelling project or doing similar digital storytelling projects ("the psychological plane" or full ownership). However, influenced by Piaget (Matusov & Hayes, 2000; Piaget & Smith, 1995), we also conceptualized our notion of ownership as closely tied with the notion of power. Children working on school projects, we reasoned, have a very low degree of ownership for these projects, since the teacher has not only designed the projects but is ultimately responsible for their completion and quality control. Even when the children work on these projects alone or in peer groups, teachers own the projects because they design and implement evaluation criteria, and use extrinsic motivators such as grades to motivate project completion. In direct contrast to this institutionally defined teacher-child relationship, we hoped to at least effect the transfer of ownership from the adult to the child, so that even though projects might have been initially suggested by the adult, the child would eventually and voluntarily assume a more powerful and egalitarian role, which we initially conceptualized as a primary responsibility for directing and completing the project.
Reflection on several of the digital storytelling projects, however, has led us to question this notion of ownership as a criterion of project success, since some projects that did not seem to be fully owned by children still seemed to us and to the participants to be successful (Matusov, 1998). The paradox that we faced was that the more we focused on the transfer of ownership for the projects from the University students to LACC children (and from us to University students), the less meaningful the projects were for all the participants. Soon we started challenging ourselves and doubting if 1) "full ownership" is a good pedagogical ideal (Matusov, 1998) and 2) "the transfer of ownership" is a truly useful construct.
We began to explore different ideas of authorship, and eventually we found that Bakhtin's notion of "addressivity" (Bakhtin, 1986; Bakhtin, Holquist, & Liapunov, 1990; Voloshinov, Matejka, & Titunik, 1973) provided a much more accurate criterion for successful collaboration. Matusov and White (1996) defined "open collaboration" as occurring when participants respect each other's agency and integrate the joint activity with other aspects of their lives. Addressivity implies a sense of expectation of the other's reply to the project, where the addressee and addresser are mutually engaged in the act of communication. Unlike our initial (monologic) conception of full authorship as ownership, addressivity allowed us to examine a different relational matrix in terms of the degree to which the other (the addressee) is finalized by the addresser. In Bakhtin's notion of authorship, what is important is not so much ownership but the degree to which the author is able to address an unfinalized other, resulting in a dialogic exchange. In this paper we analyze three of these projects in terms of this revised criterion for success: one fully unsuccessful, one fully successful, and one project deemed successful by the revised criterion but whose success could not be explained using our early criterion of ownership. In this way we will demonstrate the usefulness of addressivity as a guide to designing and guiding effective digital storytelling projects, at least where participants are expected to learn from working together.
Of the many projects that emerged from the La Red Mágica project over the course of the three semesters, we have selected the following three for close analysis:
1. Getting to Know LACC Staff[3] was a video produced in the Fall semester of 2003 by a group of students in Renée's class working with LACC children. The video was designed as an instructional video to acquaint future University students with the LACC staff in advance, and consisted of a series of interviews where on child asked a staff member a series of questions about their work at the LACC. While there were several projects produced each semester by children working with university students, we chose to focus on this one because we found this to be a particularly unsuccessful project.
2. (Fake) Crackheads was a video produced by Marcos, a 13-year old Puerto Rican boy attending the LACC, in the summer of 2003 as part of a video project initiated by Eugene. This project was not initiated as part of a University class, but was part of a broader "Oscar project" that he introduced directly to LACC children. Eugene brought video editing software and video cameras to the LACC children and proposed to them his idea for making movies and sharing them with others by way of an " Oscar website" where Internet viewers could view the movies, provide feedback, and rate them. While there were several videos produced as part of the Oscar project, we are focusing on Fake Crackheads because, according to our own and children's evaluations, this was a particularly successful project.
3. Orientation to the LACC was a web site designed by Nikki, one of Renée's students in the Spring, 2003 semester, and Antonio, a child who belonged to the LACC's "techie club." The techies were a small group of children, mostly boys, who worked closely with LACC computer instructor ("Mr. Steve") and prided themselves on their generally recognized skills in computer repair and construction as well as software, game, and web page-design expertise. Antonio was considered to be the most skilled among the techies in web site design. The project consisted of a web page designed to orient future students to the LACC practicum, including information about the LACC itself as well as the types of activities students would be expected to carry out as part of the practicum requirement.
Initially, we considered the concept of "ownership" to be crucial to the success of these projects. We were concerned about the inequality inherent in the relationships between the adult students and the children, as mentioned earlier, and we were also concerned about the fact that that the projects were born of the class requirements of the adults (university students). We felt that these factors combined to create a tendency for adult students to design and direct projects for rather than with LACC children, that is, a tendency for full and exclusive adult ownership.
Students were given considerable latitude in the design of these projects, and were allowed to work in groups of two to four, although some students chose to work alone with children. The number of children involved in each project varied considerably. Since children's participation was voluntary, this number depended on which children were interested in which projects. Some children participated in several different projects. In some cases, the children involved in a given project varied over time as some children lost interest and others were attracted, at times to the frustration of our students. As we hoped, this presented students with a challenge: projects had to be engaging enough to maintain children's interest or they would simply go away. Child participation had to be continually negotiated rather than being mandatory, as in school settings. Students were told that projects would need to meet the following three criteria:
1. The project must be beneficial in some way to the LACC and/or University community
2. Both adult students and children must learn something from participation in the project
3. Children must be deeply involved in both the design and the implementation of these projects.
We were intentionally vague about what we meant by "beneficial," "learning something," and "deeply involved" because we hoped that, by being ambiguous and open-ended, these terms would guide students to define goals together with LACC children according to what they together considered to be beneficial, learning, and deep involvement. It was one of the main goals of the project that our pre-service teachers learn from their experiences with the children to broaden and/or shift their definitions of these terms as they discovered what they might mean from the child's point of view, and that they record this process of discovery in their written project reflections.
Renée chose to call these projects "service learning projects," in order to emphasize the first two components, although Eugene in his previous classes had simply referred to them as "final projects." Neither Eugene nor Renée explicitly required these projects to be digital storytelling Projects, although this was one of the forms suggested.[4]
As instructors, we were concerned that students (adults) would fail to take ownership and responsibility for these projects, than that the project would be so completely adult-designed and adult-run that the children, whom we envisioned as being collaborative partners, would end up simply being co-opted to work on the adults' projects. In this way, we worried that the adults would quickly develop ownership for their projects and never transfer this ownership to the children (as, unfortunately, had happened in previous semesters). Ultimately, we believed that for children to benefit from these projects they had to have ownership. We also believed that for our adult University students to really get to know the LACC children as full, individual, and unpredictable people (rather that as the usually unsuccessful "Latino students" they would eventually encounter within the institution of school), they would have to interact with the children as equal collaborators on a project for which they shared ownership.
In terms of the three projects to be analyzed in this paper, we evaluated the first project, Getting to Know LACC Staff, as completely unsuccessful; that is, there was no transfer or ownership from adults to children. Above all, it was more immediately obvious that the activity seemed to be completely meaningless for all the participants. By following this link, you can view a brief excerpt from this video, in which a child interviews the LACC art teacher. We noticed that the child interviewer is reading from a list of prepared questions, and in fact is reading rather painfully and slowly, and with frequent clarifications from the adult student who is sitting nearby off-camera. The relations among the child interviewer, the student coach, and the staff interviewee in this video segment suggest strongly that the interview is a rather tedious process designed by the adults and conducted by a child who is not even really sure what the questions are that he is reading from the sheet provided. Watching the full video was a painfully tedious experience, as this excerpt illustrates, and the rest of the interviews demonstrate a similar lack of engagement between the interviewer and the interviewee.
In the students' journal, they reflected on the fact that the children involved in the project had to be bribed with candy in order to participate:
We brought some food and drinks and rounded up some kids…Many of the kids were enticed by the snacks that they saw, but we told everyone that came that they could not enjoy the food until they came up with some questions that they would like to ask the staff (Student Journal entry 11/5/03).In their final reflective paper, these students indicated that they found the need to bribe children disturbing, and seemed puzzled as to how to avoid the problem:
Being turned down by the kids made me think a lot. It really shows that it takes an awful lot to get the kids interested in helping, such as bribes and reinforcements...Often you came here the children saying "Is there some food? NO! Then I'm not going." Not having the food this night made me feel like it's not a good thing when the only way the children will help is when there is food involved (Student Reflection 12/3/03).At that time, it seemed to us, however, that students had to bribe children to participate simply because the children did not feel any ownership for the project.
Eugene: OK...Come here as well, because this is interesting idea. Why don't we create Oscar? You know, Oscar, like, video, movie award, like best director, best music...best story, best this, best that. Why don't we do that with our videos as well? The way how we will do that is we will create website, you, Antonio, create a website, so there will be video, and there will be rating. So people can rate...
Child: So we have like, each make a movie, and direct it?
Eugene: Yeah, for example, you will do a video about dance. And people can say I like music. Or I like how somebody shoot it, or I like storyline, title. And then it will be awards after that. So it will be run (unintelligible) two weeks, and different people in the community can vote. Like your parents can watch stuff and vote, your parents can vote, your siblings, whoever can vote on that, and then we will see (unintelligible). What do you think about this idea? (audio-taped 7/30/03).
This audio-taped excerpt demonstrates that the Oscar Project idea did in fact originate with Eugene: the children were simply listening to his suggestion and had nothing to do with devising this project. Eugene gave Marcos and several other children who showed interest in the project three video cameras that they could take turns using, taking them home if they wished, and offered his technical assistance in video editing and placing the clips on the website that he designed. Nevertheless, full transfer of ownership is evident in the fact that Marcos made his particular video, (Fake) Crackheads, in response to Eugene's suggestion, but without consulting Eugene on any of the design decisions (such as what the topic of the video would be, title, production decisions, etc.). In fact, Eugene was completely unaware of the content of Marcos' video until it became a sensitive issue at the LACC.
One day while he was using one of Eugene's video cameras, Marcos was chased by an LACC officer who demanded that Marcos surrender the camera to her. Marcos rushed to find Eugene and passed the camera to him. The LACC officer tried to destroy the video because she believed that Marcos had videotaped a drug deal next to the LACC. This was a valid concern, since the tape would have endangered the child and the LACC community if the drug dealers and users discovered that they had been captured on tape. Unfortunately, the LACC officer did not allow Marcos to explain his project, and Marcos burst out in anger and feelings of injustice, and ran away from the adults. Another LACC officer took the tape to erase it. It was only when Eugene found the untouched video a week afterwards and watched it that he discovered that the "Fake" crack heads were actually friends of his posing as crack heads. Only then did Eugene himself realize that the tape was not dangerous, and so he convinced the LACC staff that Marcos' project had to be supported. He found Marcos and apologized that the adults did not let him speak and explain this project. Marcos enthusiastically asked if he could finish the project and if Eugene could help with editing. Marcos initiated, demanded, and guided technical help from Eugene. "Fake Crackheads" – the title that Marcos chose for his video -- is not a topic that Eugene probably would have chosen himself, even in this fictional form.
Unlike the Getting to Know LACC Staff video, Marcos' video was publicly available on the Oscar Project website. It is noteworthy that this project was actually the most popular with his peers, receiving the highest rating. Marcos's public claim of sole authorship (as the title credits demonstrate) and his willingness to present the work publicly for peer evaluation further illustrate his full ownership of the project.
The third project we analyze here, Orientation to the LACC, provided us with a dilemma. The website was in fact fully completed by the project due date and looked great, with photos, text, graphics, and music. Nikki, Antonio, and Renée all felt that this project was successful, yet the project failed to meet our initial criteria for success; that is, Antonio, despite the time and effort he devoted to the web production, never seemed to take ownership of the project. Interestingly, Nikki chose to work with Antonio on web design specifically because she did not know anything about web design, and felt that it would be a beneficial experience for both of them to reverse roles so that the child was the expert and the adult pre-service teacher was the novice. We interviewed them both later about the project, and their interviews demonstrated that both of them viewed Antonio as the expert web designer. Nikki explained to us that she had asked Mr. Steve, the computer teacher, to recommend a boy who was an expert in web design and who could teacher her, since she had no idea how to design a web page:
If I had done it, it would have been like all black and white, and there probably wouldn't have been any pictures in it, and cause, obviously I don't know how to do anything…so [Antonio] would show me, like you know, you can put backgrounds on it, you can put music on it…(Nikki interview 3/11/04).
Antonio corroborated her story, and in his more humble way conceded that he was selected to work on the project due to his expertise:
So when Steve came to me, he said, I have this job for you. Not job, but I got Nikki, and she needs help building a web site (Antonio interview 3/31/2004).
We also found that both adult student and child reported that they enjoyed working on the project. Nikki reported that not only was she pleased that she learned something new from working with Antonio, but she enjoyed working with him:
I can probably find my way now to make a web site by myself, and so like I learned something from it, and me and him got to know each other well. So it was a good bonding experience (Nikki interview 3/11/04).
In addition, Nikki told us that Antonio always dropped whatever he was doing when she came to the LACC to work with him on the website. In fact, when we interviewed Nikki, we were surprised that she told us that when she arrived at the LACC Antonio always chose to leave his favorite activity, an extremely popular computer racing game at LACC at that time. Antonio was a leading player of this rather complicated game, and everybody knew that he was spending a lot of his time playing this game and improving his playing mastery:
Eugene: Wait, and you didn't have troubles with Antonio in terms of he's willing to drop what he's doing, even playing that racing game?! Nikki: Right. Eugene: Wow!!! (Nikki interview 3/11/04).
Of course, we investigated this surprising finding, and Antonio confirmed Nikki's account of his enthusiasm in his own interview:
Eugene: Was it really like that? Like [Nikki] would come and you were like, "OK!"?
Antonio: I think after a while after I got into it, but in the beginning it was like, "Oh, I got one more race, come on."
Eugene: And she was waiting for you?
Antonio: Yeah, but in the middle, like after a while, I saved [the racing game] and just left it there and came back later.
Eugene: Because it was interesting?
Antonio: Yeah.
Eugene: Would you do it again?
Antonio: Yeah! I would definitely do it again. It was fun. If I didn't know it was gonna be that fun, I would have probably said, like, can't you get Jose or something like that? Bit was interesting going like every day, doing something different, and looking at all the pictures, and some of them I never even saw before (Antonio interview 3/31/04).
Contrast Antonio's enthusiastic and voluntary participation with the reluctant participation of children who would only work on the Getting to Know LACC Staff project when bribed with candy. Antonio's interview also suggests that this process was the kind of gradual process that we might expect from a transfer of ownership. Antonio in the beginning describes how at first he participated dutifully because he was asked, but with time the project became so interesting for him that he preferred working on the website to even the racing game that many of the techies were hooked on that semester.
Nevertheless, we found to our surprise that Antonio reported that he saw the website as Nikki's project, as her class assignment, and so was reluctant to participate in design decision-making:
Antonio: I don't really remember disagreeing with her, like that. Cause I did like say, cause this is your thing, and however you think looks better, cause you know I never been to college, and I don't really know what teachers want…If you think it's gonna impress the teacher better like how you want it, well, let's do it (Antonio interview 3/31/04).
Nikki: I don't think we ever really disagreed, like he was pretty much like, "I'll do whatever you want cause this is your thing" (Nikki interview 3/11/04).
We were confused. How could a project with such a promising premise, Nikki's deferral to the expertise of a child technology expert, and such enthusiastic participation by both adult and child, fail to meet our criterion of child ownership? We decided that we need to more carefully critique our notion of ownership.
Authorship and addressivity: some help from Bakhtin
We explored the assumptions underlying the definition of authorship that we had uncritically assumed. This definition, with its implicit notion of ownership, seems to stem from an interpretation of art as private property that is best exemplified by Diderot's claim, "I insist, the author is the owner of his work" (Smolka, in review, p. 1). However, the word author originated from the Latin augere, which means to increase or improve. The author of a work, in the original sense of the word, does not own the work so much as improve what already exists (Smolka, in review). The notions of authorial ownership came later, and we decided that, given the paradox of Antonio's successful authorship without ownership, the original definition of authorship might be more useful for our criteria of success.
Further, Diderot's concept of authorship with ownership implies a single voice. One author, one owner. Since our projects are by definition collaborative, this definition fails to capture the relationships among multiple authors. Bakhtin's notion of monologism and dialogism are useful for clarifying these relationships. According to Bakhtin, monologism is a single-voiced assertion that objectifies other voices, failing to recognize their individuality and unpredictable nature (Bakhtin & Emerson, 1999). This is clearly not the type of authorship we are striving for. Rather, we strive for the kind of authorship that Bakhtin describes as dialogism, or the affirmation of the independence and unfinalizability of the other voices (Bakhtin & Emerson, 1999). This multi-voiced and dialogic relationship is what we are constantly striving for among our pre-service teachers and children, a collaborative authorship that adheres more closely to the original Latin definition of authorship. Relating very closely to the Latin definition of authorship as increasing or improving is Bakhtin's notion of intensifying: This activity, the intensifying of someone else's thought is possible only on the basis of a dialogic relationship to that other consciousness, that other point of view" (Bakhtin & Emerson, 1999, p. 69).
Bakhtin's definition of dialogic authorship is based fundamentally on the concept of addressivity, which proved to be central to our new understanding of successful authoring. Addressivity refers to the social nature of one's voice -- conditioned by the people to whom the author addresses his/her deeds, work, thoughts, and words and from whom a response is expected. Bakhtin argued that addressivity provides meaning and motivation for one's deeds and thoughts. Studying words and utterances, Bakhtin and his colleague Voloshinov defined addressivity in the following way: the word is always
oriented toward an addressee, toward who that addressee might be… each person's inner world and thought has its stabilized social audience that comprises the environment in which reasons, motives, values, and so on are fashioned… the word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the produce of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses the one in relations to the other. I give verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately from the point of view of the community to which I belong. A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another… it is territory shared by both addresser and addressee (Voloshinov et al., 1973, p. 85-86).
Nikki: All the kids would come in and like "What are you doing? And everybody was interested…And so, like he was, "Oh, these kids are so annoying, they're not supposed to be in here." Like he'd shoo them out of the room and say "they do this all the time, I deal with this every day in the computer room." And he kinda, you know, got on a little power trip about it. I mean, obviously, he knows he's one, well, he is one of the highest-ranking kids in the techie thing, so that's why, um, like he has power in the computer room, so I think this kind of added to it, to be helping me. So I think that was one of the things that kept him interested as well (Nikki interview 3/11/04).
- Internal monologic: addressing project co-participants and finalizing them, that is, predicting their response (e.g., the LACC child interviewing the LACC art instructor asks "Do you speak Spanish?" knowing well in advance that she speaks Spanish in the Getting to Know LACC Staff project).
- Internal dialogic: addressing project co-participants and not finalizing them, that is, with genuine naïve curiosity about their response (e.g., Nikki was learning from Antonio how to design the web while Antonio was learning what has to be on the web in the Orientation to the LACC project).
- External monologic: addressing people outside of the project and finalizing them, that is, predicting their response. (The example above, where Antonio is sure that others will admire him for his Webmaster work, is a good illustration.)
- External dialogic: addressing people outside of the project and not finalizing them, that is, with genuine naïve curiosity about their response (e.g., Marcos wanted to know if other people would enjoy his video and how they would score it in comparison with other videos in the (Fake) Crackheads project).
We decided that, for our purposes, dialogicity was a key element of success, since all projects by design had at least two authors (at least one adult and at least one child). Further, internal dialogicity was an especially important criterion for success, since one important purpose of the projects (and in a broader sense, the class itself), was for the students develop a dialogic relation with the children, getting to know them as living, unpredictable, non-stereotyped people (aka unfinalized). This success criterion was overlooked by the simpler and individualistic notion of ownership that we initially proposed.
Our revised vision: Toward a dialogic addressivity
When we analyzed these three projects using the lens of internal and external addressivity, we found an interesting pattern. Getting to Know LACC Staff, the project that we initially evaluated to be least successful, was monologic in both internal and external addressivity. (Fake) Crackheads, the project that we initially evaluated to be the most successful, was dialogic in both internal and external addressivity. These patterns fit our initial evaluations nicely, given that our goals in fact involved the creation of dialogic relationships. Orientation to the LACC, the project that we were not sure about, demonstrated a more complicated pattern; while internal addressivity was dialogic, external addressivity was monologic. This seems to provide a clue as to our initial ambivalence about this project. Below are graphical summaries of these patterns and more detailed explanations of each:| Internal | External | |
| Monologic | X | X |
| Dialogic |
Table 1: Types of addressivity in Getting to Know LACC Staff
In Getting to Know LACC Staff, relations between children and the staff they interview constitute internal addressivity, since they are all involved directly in the project. Children ask the interviewees questions drawn from a list that has already been prepared ahead of time. In the segment linked from this paper, for example, a boy asks the LACC art teacher a series of questions. We considered this to be a strong case of internal monologic addressivity, since the series of questions continues without any modification based on the response, that is, the interviewing child is not really listening to the response and responding to this response as he or she might in a dialogic conversation. Further, the children even sometimes already know the answer to the question. The boy interviewing the art teacher knows her very well, yet he asks her "Do you speak Spanish?" Given her recent arrival from Puerto Rico and her habit of using Spanish during art instruction, it is common knowledge among the children at LACC that she is a native Spanish speaker. This kind of questioning, where answers are predetermined or even irrelevant to the flow of the conversation, is strongly monologic.
We consider other class members and other LACC children not working on the project, as well as the instructor (Renée), to be possible subjects of external addressivity in this project. The external addressivity was monologic simply because there was very little consciousness of the existence of an external audience. There was no attempt to make the video available to LACC members, or to fellow class members. Further, the lack of engagement between interviewer and interviewee rendered the film useless for the "intended" external audience, the future class members.
In (Fake) Crackheads, by contrast, we saw a very high degree of dialogic internal addressivity evidenced by the fact that the co-participants, Eugene and Marcos, are never able to fully anticipate the views and actions of the other. Eugene, when he introduced the overall Oscar Website project, did not anticipate that Marcos would make a video featuring crack heads, even fake ones. Marcos, in genuinely dialogic spirit, refuses to be finalized.
| Internal | External | |
| Monologic | ||
| Dialogic | X | X |
The video was also dialogic in external addressivity because it was a completely public and interactive work. Marcos posted his video on the Oscar website and waited for responses from his peers. He invited these responses, but did not have any idea what they would be. In fact, Marcos's video was the most successful one posted on the website, with the highest Oscar ratings. Furthermore, Marcos didn't anticipate that the LACC would misinterpret the video and take disciplinary action against him. Thus, not only did Marcos refuse to be finalized, but he also did not finalize his external audience members.
Finally, the project Orientation to the LACC proved puzzling for us because, as mentioned earlier, Renée, Nikki, and Antonio all described the project as a success. Yet Antonio's lack of interest in making design decisions (because it was Nikki's project, after all), caused us concern.
| Internal | External | |
| Monologic | X | |
| Dialogic | X |
However, looking at this project through our revised analytical lens, we can see that while there is a great deal of monologism inherent in the external addressivities of both Antonio and Nikki, the success of the project seems largely due to the dialogic nature of the internal addressivities, that is, the open, interactive and non-finalized relationship between the adult and child collaborators.
Antonio insisted in his interview that the project was not in any way his:
Antonio: I knew it was a final project for the school, for her class…so I let her define how she wanted it (Antonio interview 3/31/04).
And in fact, we realized that Antonio was very distant from what he perceived as the audience for the project – future university students. He really didn't seem to think that there was an audience for the project, aside from the formality of Nikki turning in her class assignment. He never indicated that he understood that the project was intended for future university class members. Nikki did have that audience in mind (aside from the formality of class assignment, for which the audience was, of course, primarily her instructor, Renée). But upon closer inspection, we noticed that Nikki's addressivity to her external audience was decidedly monologic. Notice in the following fragment that she tells the imaginary audience that she already knows what questions they might have, without asking:
I bet you are wondering what you are going to be doing in this class...I'm sure you're thinking, "What in the world am I going to do there?" (LACC Orientation Web Main Page).
We also noticed that she did not survey peers or former class members to find out what kinds of questions they might have had upon enrolling in the class. Of course, she was able to make a pretty good guess from her own experience, but her certainty leaves the website with a clearly monologic addressivity toward the intended audience.
In fact, Renée provided the class a link to the website as part of the initial orientation to the class in both of the semester's following the website's creation. Later in the semester, students were surveyed to find out how many of them had actually accessed the website, which was conveniently linked from the current class web page, and only 2 out of 24 class members surveyed reported that they had visited the web site. We also surveyed the techies at the LACC, and out of 11 people we asked, only one had accessed the web site, and that was Mr. Steve, the computer teacher. We suspect this was because the website was created on his personal office computer and under his supervision. It was the fact that this web site was highly unsuccessful in attracting an external audience, along with the fact that all addressing of the external audience was highly monologic in nature, that made us wonder about the success of the project.
It was Nikki and Antonio who provided us with the key to their success. In their interviews, they both revealed a very high level of dialogic internal addressivity. They both explained to us that while working on the project, they learned a lot about each other:
Antonio: Yeah, we did talk about a lot about other things, and not just the web site (Antonio interview 3/31/04).
Nikki: So it was a good bonding experience between me and another student, like, personal, on a personal level, not in a group, how we had been, like in the general practicum, and like me being able to learn something from them, that was cool. It wasn't like just me teaching them, they were teaching me too (Nikki interview 3/11/04).
Antonio revealed to us, for example, that Nikki was involved in a lot of sports at the University (she was majoring in Athletic Training and attended a lot of the intramural sporting events), and that they would frequently discuss sports when she came to work with him at the LACC. Nikki revealed to us that Antonio had an especially close relationship with his mother, who was very supportive of his technology interests. She also revealed that her relationship with Antonio surprised her in some ways by their differences. For example, she wanted to give him a gift of a music CD to show her appreciation, but was surprised to find that he did not have a CD player. She told us that this made her consider that she had taken for granted many of the things that her family had when she was growing up[5]. In other words, Nikki and Antonio developed a dialogic internal addressivity together as they worked on the project. They both learned something from each other that they could not have predicted, and so approached each other as unfinalized, unfinalizable individuals. We realized that this relationship was actually very much aligned with our goal for the collaborative projects: that students would come to understand Latino children in a non-stereotypical way, and children would learn something about a University life that is actually quite far removed from their own community, despite the physical proximity.
The implications for our own practice are clear to us. We hope that by sharing our story with a broader community that others who might share similar ambiguities about goals and authorship in Digital Storytelling projects might benefit from sharing our self-reflection and self-revisions. First, it is clear to us that authorship as exclusive ownership, our original assumption, is a narrow and misleading construct. Children can become legitimate authors (participants) in an adult initiated project, even one where they do not develop or even share the goals, as long as they are contributing to the project in a meaningful way. If we had maintained ownership as our criterion, successful projects like that of Antonio and Nikki might have been underestimated and discouraged. We felt compelled to shift our criteria for success from ownership to addressivity when we realized that Antonio and Nikki's project met our class goals based on their own reflections, while we had initially judged it to be less successful based on our early assumption that a child needed to take "ownership" to achieve authorship.
Second, the goals of the project must be in line with the broader goals of the activity. Since our broader goals for this University-Community Center partnership are clearly dialogic in nature, it was important for us to adjust our project goals accordingly. This does not mean that monologism is essentially wrong and useless in all situations, but that in a class where students and children are encouraged to learn about each other as whole living people rather than as static stereotypes, dialogic interaction is the most effective means of fostering this goal.
Finally, although our projects are not digital by definition or design, the example of Antonio and Nikki demonstrates that digital media can be an especially useful tool in fostering dialogic internal addressivity between children and adults. It was specifically Antonio's digital expertise and Nikki's lack of expertise that inspired their collaboration in the first place. More broadly speaking, collaborating around digital media can provide an opportunity for adults and children to reverse the traditional roles of child novice and adult expert, and in breaking these traditional patterns of interaction can open up a space for more meaningful and open relationships.
[1] We will consistently refer to our adult University students as "students" throughout this paper. For the sake of clarity and consistency, we will refer to the children with whom they are working as "children." Also the children at LACC are not seen as "students" by themselves and others except, maybe, during tutoring sessions. The UD instructors insisted that preservice teachers refer to the LACC children as "kids" and not as "students" to promote a sense of voluntary and playful after-school atmosphere rather then an extension of "school" with its busy focus on "covering curriculum" and mandatory participation in adult-defined activities.
[2] The role of students' gender in the "power picture" is ambivalent at LACC. At times it was the basis of the students' authority when LACC children saw them as adults (i.e., "motherly" or "older sister" figures) but at times it was the basis the students' subordination when they were seen by some LACC boys as sexually attractive young female peers available for flirting.
[3] This video clip, unlike the other two, was not specifically designed for open internet publishing. For that reason, we have blurred the images to protect the identity of the participants.
[4] In fact, student projects during the course of the three semesters that Renée taught took a variety of forms in addition to the Digital Storytelling form described in this article, including a cooking project, a gardening initiative, art and science clubs, and student-led tours of the University.
[5] She ended up presenting Antonio at the end of the semester with a music CD and a personal CD player.
References:
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. M., & Emerson, C. (1999). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (Vol. 8). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bakhtin, M. M., Holquist, M., & Liapunov, V. (1990). Art and answerability: Early philosophical essays (1st ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Banaszewski, T. (2002). Digital storytelling finds its place in the classroom. Retrieved May 16, 2004, from http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan02/banaszewski.htm
Brinkley, E., Leneway, R., Webb, A., & Harbaugh, C. (n.d.). Preparing for digital story telling. Retrieved June 3, 2004, from http://t3.preservice.org/wmu/Preparing%20for%20Digital%20Story%20Telling.htm
Chamisa Mesa High School. (n.d.). Media center. Retrieved May 3, 2003, from http://www.chamisamesa.net/tech.html
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Digital Storytelling Association. (2002). Digital Storytelling. Retrieved May 30, 2004, from http://www.dsaweb.org/01associate/ds.html
Lambert, J. (2000). Has digital storytelling succeeded as a movement? Some thoughts. Retrieved May 30, 2004, from http://www.dstory.com/dsf6/newsletter_02.html#oped
Matusov, E. (1998). When solo activity is not privileged: Participation and internalization models of development. Human Development, 41(5-6), 326-349.
Matusov, E., & Hayes, R. (2000). Sociocultural critique of Piaget and Vygotsky. New Directions in Psychology, 18(2-3), 215-239.Matusov, E., & Hayes, R. (2002). Building a community of educators versus effecting conceptual change in individual students: Multicultural education for preservice teachers. In G. Wells & G. Claxton (Eds.), Learning for life in the 21st century: Sociocultural perspectives on the future of education (pp. 239-251). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Matusov, E., Pleasants, H., & Smith, M. P. (2003). Dialogic framework for cultural psychology: Culture-in-action and culturally sensitive guidance. Review Interdisciplinary Journal on Human Development, Culture and Education, 4(1), available online: http://cepaosreview.tripod.com/Matusov.html.
Matusov, E., & White, C. (1996). Defining the concept of open collaboration from a sociocultural framework. Cognitive Studies: The Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, 3(4), 11-13.
Piaget, J., & Smith, L. (1995). Sociological studies. London ; New York: Routledge. The power of digital storytelling. (2000, April 15). Businessweek on line.Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sautter, R. C. (1994). Who are today's city kids? Beyond the "deficit model." Retrieved July 28, 2003. Show and tell. (no date). Retrieved May 22, 2004, from http://www.medialab.co.nz/mainsite/ST.html
Voloshinov, V. N., Matejka, L., & Titunik, I. R. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language. New York: Seminar Press.
Attachments:
(Fake) Crackheads (Windows Media) (Movie format), 5823 K.
Getting to Know LACC Staff (Windows Media) (Movie format), 3467 K.