Alexandra Krasova
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
This workshop was initially designed for undergraduate multilingual students participating in my dissertation study. My participants had some background experience in creating digital stories for social media, such as TikTok or Instagram. However, digital storytelling with integrated translanguaging practices for academic purposes was a new and unique experience for them. Educators sometimes have limited resources, and while searching for the digital storytelling workshop for multilingual writers, I encountered a lack of information on this topic as well as methodological and pedagogical challenges. To provide my participants with an understanding of how to create digital stories and help educators integrate this workshop in their curriculum, I designed an online digital storytelling workshop. Anchoring Wu and Chen, who offered an extended definition of digital storytelling, describing it as a story that “usually contains some mixture of digital images, text, recorded narration, and/or music” (2), I defined a digital story as a short 1-2-minute video, containing various digital multimodal components or modes, namely, visual (images, pictures), audio (voice over, music), linguistic (text), spatial, and gestural, which students use to communicate their message and convey meaning. As a result of a combination of digital storytelling and translanguaging practices, students will develop their identities and shape their personalities.