Home
“Stories are what we do as humans to make sense of the world”
(Lambert, 2013)
Digital Storytelling (DST) is an integrated project in Spanish courses at Princeton University. Students from different cultural backgrounds are given the opportunity to find their voice and tell their stories.
DST is used to capture students’ emotions, develop visual literacies, and foster creative abilities. Implementing DST helps learners reflect on their use of words and images in Spanish. This language-in-use approach becomes a meaningful and powerful tool.
Goal
Finding your voice, conveying emotions, and constructing meanings through images and musical score.
Objectives
Students will be able to….
- Plan and craft their digital stories in Spanish that integrates oral narration, their own images, and music to share a meaningful experience to an audience.
- Use appropriate vocabulary, grammar, and register in Spanish to narrate events and convey emotions in a multimedia format.
- Revise and improve a digital story based on peer and instructor feedback (horizontal learning), enhancing linguistic accuracy and the significance of multimodal communication.
Prompt
Digital Storytelling
- Origins in early 1990’s
- Multimedia and multiliteracies project (words, images, music, sounds)
- The process of sharing and telling significant stories
Digital storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community
Joe Lambert (2013)
Our Approach
- Emphasis on giving students creative writing techniques to a model story
- Centered on personal emotion and significance, symbolism, and visual literacies
- Process is key in the digital storytelling project (four steps): writing drafts, storyboard, and final video
- Formative Assessment: evaluating different steps with rubrics that highlight key elements in stories
Why Storytelling?
- Agency and Significance
- Learning as personalization, mediation, and crafting
- Creativity through self expression
Crafting Stories
- L2 agency and the development of personal creativity/self expression
- “La capacidad de expresar quién soy yo y en quién me quiero convertir”
Negueruela-Azarola & Gavela-Ramos, 2024 “Mediación y consciencia sociocultural.” In Negueruela-Azarola, E., P. García, A. Escandón (Eds.). Teoría Sociocultural y español L2/LE. New York: Routledge.
