Digital Storytelling In Indigenous Education

Exploring the relationship between the role of education and Indigenous survival, Digital Storytelling in Indigenous Education is an ethnographic exploration of how digital storytelling can be part of a broader project of decolonization of individuals, their families, and communities. By recounting how a remote Indigenous (Métis) community were able to collectively imagine, plan and produce numerous unique digital stories representing counter-narratives to the dominant version of Canadian history, Poitras Pratt provides frameworks, approaches and strategies for the use of digital media and arts for the purpose of cultural memory, community empowerment, and mobilization. The volume provides a valuable example of how a community-based educational project can create and restore intergenerational exchanges through modern media, and covers topics such as: Introducing the Métis and their community; decolonizing education through a Métis approach to research; the ethnographic journey; and translating the work of decolonizing to education. Digital Storytelling in Indigenous Education is the perfect resource for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of Indigenous education, comparative education, and technology education, or those looking to explore the role of modern media in facilitating healing and decolonization in a marginalized community. .

Indigenous oral narratives are an important source for, and component of, Coast Salish knowledge systems. Stories are not only to be recounted and passed down; they are also intended as tools for teaching. Jo-ann Archibald worked closely with Elders and storytellers, who shared both traditional and personal life-experience stories, in order to develop ways of bringing storytelling into educational contexts. Indigenous Storywork is the result of this research and it demonstrates how stories have the power to educate and heal the heart, mind, body, and spirit. It builds on the seven principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy that form a framework for understanding the characteristics of stories, appreciating the process of storytelling, establishing a receptive learning context, and engaging in holistic meaning-making.

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

In 1884, the Canadian government enacted a ban on the potlatch, the foundational ceremony of the Haida people. The tradition, which determined social structure, transmitted cultural knowledge, and redistributed wealth, was seen as a cultural impediment to the government’s aim of assimilation. The tradition did not die, however; the knowledge of the ceremony was kept alive by the Elders through other events until the ban was lifted. In 1969, a potlatch was held. The occasion: the raising of a totem pole carved by Robert Davidson, the first the community had seen in close to 80 years. From then on, the community publicly reclaimed, from the Elders who remained to share it, the knowledge that has almost been lost. Sara Florence Davidson, Robert’s daughter, would become an educator. Over the course of her own education, she came to see how the traditions of the Haida practiced by her father—holistic, built on relationships, practical, and continuous—could be integrated into contemporary educational practices. From this realization came the roots for this book.

Exploring the relationship between the role of education and Indigenous survival, Digital Storytelling in Indigenous Education is an ethnographic exploration of how digital storytelling can be part of a broader project of decolonization of individuals, their families, and communities. By recounting how a remote Indigenous (Métis) community were able to collectively imagine, plan and produce numerous unique digital stories representing counter-narratives to the dominant version of Canadian history, Poitras Pratt provides frameworks, approaches and strategies for the use of digital media and arts for the purpose of cultural memory, community empowerment, and mobilization. The volume provides a valuable example of how a community-based educational project can create and restore intergenerational exchanges through modern media, and covers topics such as: Introducing the Métis and their community; decolonizing education through a Métis approach to research; the ethnographic journey; and translating the work of decolonizing to education. Digital Storytelling in Indigenous Education is the perfect resource for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of Indigenous education, comparative education, and technology education, or those looking to explore the role of modern media in facilitating healing and decolonization in a marginalized community. .

This book explores how narratives are deeply embodied, engaging heart, soul, as well as mind, through varying adult learner perspectives. Biographical research is not an isolated, individual, solipsistic endeavor but shaped by larger ecological interactions – in families, schools, universities, communities, societies, and networks – that can create or destroy hope. Telling or listening to life stories celebrates complexity, messiness, and the rich potential of learning lives. The narratives in this book highlight the rapid disruption of sustainable ecologies, not only ‘natural’, physical, and biological, but also psychological, economic, relational, political, educational, cultural, and ethical. Yet, despite living in a precarious, and often frightening, liquid world, biographical research can both chronicle and illuminate how resources of hope are created in deeper, aesthetically satisfying ways. Biographical research offers insights, and even signposts, to understand and transcend the darker side of the human condition, alongside its inspirations. Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research aims to generate insight into people’s fears and anxieties but also their capacity to 'keep on keeping on' and to challenge forces that would diminish their and all our humanity. It provides a sustainable approach to creating sufficient hope in individuals and communities by showing how building meaningful dialogue, grounded in social justice, can create good enough experiences of togetherness across difference. The book illuminates what amounts to an ecology of life, learning and human flourishing in a sometimes tortured, fractious, fragmented, and fragile world, yet one still offering rich resources of hope.

Provides information on integrating digital storytelling into curriculum design.

This book addresses oral history as a form of education for redress and reconciliation. It provides scholarship that troubles both the possibilities and limitations of oral history in relation to the pedagogical and curricular redress of historical harms. Contributing authors compel the reader to question what oral history calls them to do, as citizens, activists, teachers, or historians, in moving towards just relations. Highlighting the link between justice and public education through oral history, chapters explore how oral histories question pedagogical and curricular harms, and how they shed light on what is excluded or made invisible in public education. The authors speak to oral history as a hopeful and important pedagogy for addressing difficult knowledge, exploring significant questions such as: how do community-based oral history projects affect historical memory of the public? What do we learn from oral history in government systems of justice versus in the political struggles of non-governmental organizations? What is the burden of collective remembering and how does oral history implicate people in the past? How are oral histories about difficult knowledge represented in curriculum, from digital storytelling and literature to environmental and treaty education? This book presents oral history as as a form of education that can facilitate redress and reconciliation in the face of challenges, and bring about an awareness of historical knowledge to support action that addresses legacies of harm. Furthering the field on oral history and education, this work will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of social justice education, oral history, Indigenous education, curriculum studies, history of education, and social studies education.