Class activity
The "pedestrian speech act", 34 framing the familiar through digital storytelling
Inspired by Michel de Certeau's Walking in the City and Janet Cardiff's The missing voice, students will utilize digital video story telling to spatially act-out a place. Students will work in small collaborative groups to produce three-minute video presentations creatively capturing the visual and aural experience of walking their everyday "city"- the school hallway between class bells. This class activity seeks to open up a narrative to reveal multiple truths of intricate lived experiences. The multi-fold frame of knowledge and experience constitutes an essential aspect of students' responses to the phenomena of school based psychological and social boundaries and the need to respond to them in a positive way. The following steps in the dialectic approach to storytelling are adapted from Darcy Alexandra. 35
Foreground the voice
Form an oral story-sharing circle.
Students will talk about their experiences as migrants in the city, as students in the hallway.
Students will select the story they wish to tell. This produces greater ownership and relevancy to the process.
Allow time for reflection, writing, problem posing.
From this center navigate the process by selecting from diverse writing activities:
Write a letter to a relative, another student, a teacher.
Recall the memory of a phone call from a loved one, or a text or tweet from a friend.
Outline a linear and factual sequence of the events that led to a situation, such as undocumented status, missing out on a conversation or event.
Students will develop evocative prose while writing in school or at home and share scripts during the class.
Initial analysis of the story work
Students will consider how to visually engage their stories in ways that would open new pathways for understanding the story and not detract from the evocative centrality of the spoken voice.
Pose the challenge question: how can I produce images that could serve to visually represent complex and emotionally charged experiences of invisibility, discrimination, separation and fear?
The point of departure is the spoken word. Students will craft their words into a written script and digitally record them.
Transformational representation: the invisible becomes visible
Students will produce images useful to their stories. Students may also use photos from family archives as possible, copyright free source images from the Internet, or original photos taken expressly for purposes of expressing the story.
Students will create a storyboard to plan the visual expression/representation of the script.
Students will conceive, edit and screen a three-minute digital production.
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