Exploring the potential of digital storytelling in a widening participation context

ABSTRACT

Background

Digital storytelling combines traditional storytelling with digital technologies. Although recognised as a powerful creative method across many domains, its application in the context of widening participation remains underexplored.

Purpose

This study from Australia sought to investigate teachers’ perceptions of the benefits and limitations of using digital storytelling in a widening participation programme.

Methods

Five partner schools engaged in a programme that involved creating a digital narrative about students’ post-school futures. A total of 36 teachers delivering the 10-week programme to students of 13–14 years of age participated in focus groups, with 12 completing post-delivery surveys. Data were analysed qualitatively.

Findings

The analysis suggested that, according to the teacher participants, digital narrative can be an effective tool for maximising student engagement in widening participation activities. However, emphasis was placed on the impact of the digital divide, which disproportionately affects students from low socioeconomic backgrounds in under-resourced school environments.

Conclusions

The study highlights the potential of using digital storytelling in a widening participation context. It also underscores how support for developing teacher and student digital literacies, as well as reliable access to technology and infrastructure, needs to be in place if the digital narrative is to be strongly embedded into future widening participation outreach activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital storytelling
• widening participation
• creative method
• student engagement
• secondary education
• digital literacy

Introduction

Digital storytelling combines traditional storytelling with digital technologies. It can offer a versatile and autonomous approach that allows students to create artefacts that reflect their skills and experiences (Clarke and Adam 2012). This way of working has been utilised in various formal educational settings, including primary, secondary, and higher education (Aktas and Yurt 2017; Campbell and Cox 2018). Some benefits of using digital stories have been reported in the literature as giving voice to those who are marginalised (Clarke and Adam 2012; de Jager et al. 2017), empowering the participants in creating their digital stories, and fostering agency (Lenette 2017; Robin 2016). As Williams et al. (2017, 7) note, digital stories can afford ‘marginalised groups a means of expressing alternative voices that can be absent or misrepresented by mainstream discourse’. As a research methodology, digital storytelling can act as a power equaliser between participants and researchers (Parsons et al. 2015), empowering participants and enhancing their sense of agency over what they share with researchers. Research projects utilising digital storytelling have evolved to accommodate different participants, contexts and purposes (Matthews and Sunderland 2017; Sitter, Beausoleil, and McGowan 2020) and has been used in various fields, including journalism (Planer and Godulla 2021), health (Lenette 2017) and migration studies (McGinnis and Garcia 2012).

Research therefore suggests rich potential in terms of the application of digital storytelling in supporting widening participation in an education setting. This paper offers a contribution in this space by reporting on a case study from Australia, which aimed to explore the benefits and limitations of using digital storytelling in this context. It involved five partner schools who were engaged in a programme that centred on creating a digital narrative about students’ post-school futures. To gain insight into the experience, we sought the perceptions of teachers who delivered the programme. As our study considers digital storytelling as a creative method for maximising student engagement in widening participation activities, our hope is that the study findings could help inform future programmes in this area. Before explaining more about the study itself, we seek to situate our work in the context of digital storytelling and widening participation.

Background

Digital storytelling and education

In the context of education, digital storytelling can be used as a pedagogical tool. As it has a lower reliance on written text and formal literacy, it can serve as an alternative to written narratives or assessment (Jenkins and Gravestock 2012), and can enhance technological, visual and media literacies (Churchill 2020). It can help to develop learners’ 21^st century skills, such as digital literacy, collaboration, critical and creative thinking, and problem-solving (Niemi and Multisilta 2016; Preradovic, Lesin, and Boras 2016; Robin 2008). Moreover, digital storytelling is widely regarded as an engaging, student-centred method that involves the generation and use of text types that students encounter in real-world contexts, on a day-to-day basis in the digital age (Hopkins and Ryan 2014). As Schuch (2020) argues, digital storytelling naturally allows for differentiated instruction, thereby providing educators with the opportunities to cater to a range of student needs, interests and learning styles. Through digital storytelling, students may be encouraged to express their creativity, share their experiences, and reflect on their learning in a personalised and meaningful way (Robin 2016). Studies suggest that learners can experience increased engagement and motivation for the task when this approach is used in formal educational contexts (Aktas and Yurt 2017; Campbell and Cox 2018).

Digital storytelling and widening participation

When used effectively, digital storytelling, or digital narrative,¹ can help to bridge the gap between secondary and higher education, by providing a means for students to reflect on their experiences and develop their identity as learners (Austen, Pickering, and Judge 2021). It can provide a sense of agency: for example, through creating digital stories centred on their own experiences and post-school futures, ‘students are more willing to take ownership of this process’ (Mayes et al. 2009, 290). Further, Hopkins and Ryan (2014) found that digital stories can amplify ‘hidden voices’ in the classroom by providing a means for students from marginalised communities to express themselves while simultaneously developing their literacy capabilities.

Digital storytelling is, therefore, a potentially helpful resource in the context of widening participation. For instance, in research from America, it has been used ‘as a tool to reposition power relations between teacher and students’ in the context of a targeted programme for ‘non-university bound’ and ‘unengaged’ young people in rural locations in the mid-West (Staley and Freeman 2017, 1). The study concluded that ‘a digital storytelling project can be an effective approach to engaging students, providing a fertile space to develop teacher-student relationships and invite student input into the design of relevant learning materials and their future education pathways’ (Staley and Freeman 2017, 14). Elsewhere, digital storytelling was employed in research in England as a widening participation tool to ‘diversify the stories of student progression available to both the higher education community and other young people’ (Mazzoli Smith 2020, 81). This study noted the benefits of digital storytelling as an inclusive, flexible methodology with the potential to ‘enrich widening participation practice and institutional knowledge through better engaging with how individuals perceive and act on barriers in their own framework of meaning’ (Mazzoli Smith 2020, 91).

In Australia, digital storytelling was utilised in a series of widening participation workshops for regional and remote students. In the first instance, year 11 students (aged 16 to 17), and their teachers, participated in a digital storytelling workshop entitled ‘ASPIRing for our/your future’, wherein commencing students from regional, rural and remote backgrounds were tasked with producing a digital story about their transition into higher education (O’Shea et al. 2019, 3). Thus, the approach was employed as a ‘youth-focused methodology’ to engage participants meaningfully, support them to develop technical skills in scripting and production, and accurately articulate their experiences in a way that may not have been afforded by written text or verbal interview (O’Shea et al. 2019, 3). In the context of higher education, digital storytelling as a research method has also been used to better understand the stories and experiences of university mentors delivering Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience programmes (Kervin et al. 2014).

It is important to recognise that producing digital stories involves access to resources (Gubrium and Turner 2011; Lenette 2017). This means that some school communities may encounter significant challenges, including, for example, unreliable Wi-Fi, old technological infrastructure and outdated devices (Hopkins and Ryan 2014; Quah and Ng 2021). Therefore, in the context of widening participation programmes, ensuring equitable access to reliable technology for all participants is a necessary first step. This includes facilitating students’ access to appropriate technology: for example, by bringing devices to the school during outreach activities (O’Shea et al. 2019), or providing access to devices on campus (Hopkins and Ryan 2014; Shelby‐Caffey, Úbéda, and Jenkins 2014). Time is another important consideration – as Kervin et al. (2014, 18) observe, the creation and production of digital stories can be ‘time intensive’.

Study context

This paper reports on a research project undertaken in Australia through the New South Wales Equity Consortium² (the NEC). The NEC is a collaboration between three universities in Sydney: the University of New South Wales (UNSW), which is the lead organisation; Macquarie University; and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). There are five NEC partner schools in Sydney. Each of the five NEC partner schools is a government-funded public school located within a geographical area (an SA1 area) which is defined as having low socioeconomic status (LSES), in accordance with the Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas – Index of Education and Occupation (SEIFA) classification (ABS 2022). LSES has long been recognised as being a priority equity group (DEET 1990). LSES is attributed to schools which fall within the lowest 25% of SA1 areas when ranked by their SEIFA score. Whilst SEIFA as an aggregate score may be an imperfect measure of individual, community or school ‘disadvantage’, it is a widely accepted measure of LSES in the Australian education system and it is a common practice for widening participation initiatives to be offered to students who attend schools within identified LSES areas (NCSEHE 2023).

The term ‘widening participation’ is used in our study to reference university programmes and initiatives designed to increase the access, participation, retention, completion and success of students from identified underrepresented equity groups (Gale and Parker 2013; Grant-Smith, Irmer, and Mayes 2020). Widening access refers to university programmes designed to increase visibility and awareness of higher education, and to nurture existing aspirations for post–secondary education (Tham, Raciti, and Dale 2023). Where traditional widening participation initiatives tend to focus on selected underrepresented students within targeted schools (Peacock, Sellar, and Lingard 2014), the NEC employs a whole-cohort approach, involving all students in years 7, 8, and 9 (i.e. students aged between 12 and 15 years). Following analysis of the partner schools’ aggregate National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) reading data, each university worked collaboratively with particular English teachers from the five partner schools. This involved co-designing a literacy-focused unit of work for a specific year group, to be co-delivered by English teachers and trained university students (referred to as ‘student ambassadors’ in the context of this case study). Macquarie and UTS each led the co-design of a unit of work aligned to the New South Wales Stage Four syllabus (years 7 and 8, respectively), whilst UNSW led the co-design of a unit of work aligned to the New South Wales Stage Five syllabus (for year 9 students). The UTS unit of work for year 8 students (i.e. students aged 13 to 14) is the focus of the case study reported in this paper.

Conceptual background

Self Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan 1985) informed the approach of the study. It is relevant to formal educational contexts as it centres around student motivation, engagement with tasks and student performance (Ryan and Deci 2020). It assumes that all individuals are on a growth journey, and to realise this growth, they need support for their psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. The importance of ‘novelty’ has been highlighted as a fourth psychological need to maximise student engagement, thereby expanding the definition (González-Cutre et al. 2016). In this context, novelty is defined as ‘the need to experience something not previously experienced or (that) deviates from everyday routine’ (González-Cutre et al. 2016, 159). Accordingly, we define four psychological needs in the context of our research: autonomy, competence, relatedness and novelty (Ryan and Deci 2020). In a formal classroom context, the support of these needs can lead to increased engagement in learning tasks and improved student performance (Hsu, Wang, and Levesque-Bristol 2019). Teachers play a seminal role in motivating students in their learning and shaping their future thinking (Reid and McCallum 2014). Moreover, there is an important relationship between teacher motivation and student motivation, meaning that the psychological needs of teachers must be supported so that in turn, they can support students’ psychological needs to maximise student motivation and engagement (Ahn, Chiu, and Patrick 2021; Ryan and Deci 2020; Skinner and Belmont 1993).

Purpose

Against this backdrop, the study sought to explore teachers’ perceptions of the benefits and limitations of using digital storytelling in the widening participation programme. The guiding questions for the study were: (1) What are the affordances and limitations of using digital narratives in a widening participation outreach programme? (2) How do teachers respond to the use of digital narrative in this context? (3) What are the implications of the findings for equity practitioners, schools, teachers, and policymakers?

Method

Ethical considerations

Ethical approval for the research was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) and the State Education Research Applications Process (SERAP): UNSW Sydney and Macquarie University – HREC reference: HC200713; UTS – Ethics ID: ETH205553. Participation in the focus groups and surveys was voluntary. Those taking part provided informed consent by signing a detailed consent form, including guarantees of informed consent to participate (and withdraw) from the research. The anonymity of participants has been ensured, through the de-identification of relevant data, including participant names, school names and location.

Methodological approach

In line with our study’s purpose, we aimed to foreground the experiences of the teachers involved in co-delivering the programme. Accordingly, a case study methodology was selected, with focus groups chosen as the main method for the production of data that could be analysed qualitatively to provide insights into the collective attitudes of the participants (Cyr 2019). Focus groups also allow efficient access to diverse perspectives and may uncover issues that can otherwise be overlooked in individual interviews (Adler, Salanterä, and Zumstein-Shaha 2019).

Case study context

As mentioned above, within the broader programme, the UTS unit of work for year 8 students formed the basis for the case study reported here. In this unit of work, students use digital narrative as a creative method to explore and express their post-school imagined futures. Despite the impact of the digital divide which disproportionately impacts LSES Australian communities, digital narrative was chosen because of its capacity to centre students’ voices in targeted contexts to enhance participation and engagement (Seale 2009), and its potential to address inequities through a social justice lens (McLeod 2011).

The key resource for students in this programme was a workbook containing activities that guided them through the planning, drafting and creation of their digital narratives. Two versions of the workbook were created, with the activities in the differentiated version containing additional scaffolding and examples where necessary to provide further support for students with developing literacy skills and English language capabilities. The workbook provided clear instructions about the digital narrative activity, including that it was to be 30 seconds to one minute in duration, and created using a particular platform and computer tablets loaned to the school from UTS. Free access to this platform had recently been made available to all New South Wales Department of Education staff and students, and this accessibility consideration informed the choice of platform.

Teachers were provided with a programme guide containing the lesson plans and activities for the student workbooks. In addition, they had access to additional online resources including a model digital narrative for students to deconstruct, as well as a short video outlining the key multimodal features and techniques of digital narratives. Student ambassadors, who were current UTS students with diverse lived experiences who, in some instances, attended the partner school, were also involved. They, too, were provided with a programme guide, and asked to produce their own digital narrative to model the digital narrative structure and multimodal techniques.

The unit of work was co-delivered by students’ regular English teachers in their scheduled year 8 English classes. The number of classes and the size of classes involved varied across the partner schools. These ranged from 5 to 12 classes per school, with student numbers in each class ranging from 5 to 25 students. In total, 1750 students (13- to 14-year-olds) and 38 teachers were involved in the year 8 programme. Programme delivery spanned 10 weeks, or one school term. English teachers took the lead in the explicit teaching of the English unit of work, and exploration of digital narrative as a text type. One lesson per week was led by the UTS student ambassadors, who provided mentorship and scaffolded support for the planning, design and production of the digital narratives. In most instances, the ratio of ambassadors to students in these classes was one ambassador to three students. During the ambassador-led lessons, students and teachers were supported in using the tablets to create the digital narratives. Students had a total of ten lessons to plan, draft and create their digital narrative using the platform.

The initial five teacher-led lessons outlined the purpose, audience, structure and multimodal features of a digital narrative. This design approach embodied the teaching and learning cycle as a pedagogical framework. Students were supported through the process of building the field of purpose, audience, structure and multimodal techniques and features of the text type. They then transitioned through the cycle of deconstructing, jointly constructing, and independently constructing their own digital narratives, to creatively express their vision of their imagined futures (Derewianka and Jones 2016). Though general approaches to the teaching of text types in English varied across the five partner schools, the learning activities were mapped to the elements of narrative text register outlined in the Stage 4 content descriptors from the New South Wales K-10 English syllabus to ensure a degree of consistency in the content.

The lessons in the programme were designed with flexibility, to allow teachers to make individual decisions about how to teach the content. Additionally, a broad set of criteria specifying what multimodal features needed to be included in the digital narratives was provided, to support students to develop a text to the best of their ability. For example, a student with developing English language proficiency may have elected to use simple text captions supported by images in a literal sense to conceptualise their imagined future, while a student with high-level literacy skills and capabilities may have utilised textual and visual metaphor to conceptualise their imagined future. Students of all abilities were, thus, enabled to experience success in creating a digital narrative, according to the aims of the programme.

Data collection

The participants in this research were the English teachers responsible for delivering the year 8 programme in the five partner schools. All teachers were invited to attend a school focus group and complete an accompanying online survey. In all, a total of 36 of 38 teachers involved in the delivery of the programme participated in a focus group. In addition, 12 teachers completed a post-delivery survey. Altogether, five focus groups – one for each of the five partner schools – were conducted at the conclusion of the widening participation programme. The focus groups were conducted in person and ranged from 36 to 68 minutes in duration. Schools were given a choice of location, with three opting for the focus group to be held on-site at school, and two opting for the session to be conducted whilst students and teachers were on the university campus for an immersive field trip, to reduce the likelihood of interruption. Whilst the purpose of the focus groups was to canvass teachers’ feedback and reflections on the unit of work in general, there were two specific questions that directly addressed teachers’ perspectives on the use of digital narrative in the programme. Teachers were asked: What did you think of the choice of digital narrative for this unit of Imagined Futures? And How did your students respond to it?

In addition to participation in the focus groups, participating teachers were invited to respond to an additional online survey, sent via email at the conclusion of the programme. The survey included 26 questions, which broadly covered experiences delivering the programme. Three specific questions were considered for this research: (1) Were students engaged in the programme? (5 point Likert-type scale); (2) Why do you think students were/were not engaged in the programme? (Open-ended response); (3) Which design or delivery factors facilitated this student engagement? (Open-ended response). The survey was conducted online via survey software. A total of 12 survey responses (out of a possible 38) were received. The relatively low response rate to the survey was likely due to timing (it was circulated at the conclusion of the unit, prior to the school holidays). Despite this, the additional qualitative survey data received was considered a valuable supplement to the focus group data.

Data analysis

The focus group data were transcribed, and the responses to the survey were downloaded. These data from the focus groups and the survey were then redacted and coded, in accordance with the research–coding schedule, to ensure participant anonymity. Procedures were informed by Braun and Clarke’s six-stage approach to reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006, 2019, 2021; Clarke and Braun 2013). First, all authors familiarised themselves with the anonymised focus group and survey data. A meeting was then conducted to discuss high-level impressions and share notes (Braun and Clarke 2021, 42). Next, an initial semantic analysis was undertaken by one author, in order to identify the predominant and recurrent themes (Braun and Clarke 2021, 64) from the focus group and survey data. The data were then rigorously mined and coded, to further refine the themes. To ensure consistency of coding, at this stage, the remaining authors reviewed and compared judgements. The themes were subsequently viewed through the lens of Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan 1985), which helped to distil and refine them further (Braun and Clarke 2021, 111). The data analysis was iterative and consistently collaborative (Braun and Clarke 2006).

Findings and discussion

Using the analytical methods described above, it was possible to address our guiding research questions, thereby allowing us to better understand the teachers’ perceptions of the benefits and limitations of using digital storytelling in the widening participation programme. It is imperative to recognise that, in the search for latent meaning, the analysis outcomes have been framed by our subjectivities, including in particular, our lived experiences and perspectives as widening participation practitioners (Braun and Clarke 2021, 72). Moreover, the themes that we highlight in the subsections below are chosen not because they were necessarily the most common or frequent observations made by the teachers during the focus groups or survey but rather, because of their direct relevance to the research questions (Braun and Clarke 2021, 98). We present a total of three major themes: Student engagement; Teacher-student rapport-building; and Digital literacy. Where relevant, anonymised quotations from the data are included.

Theme 1: Student engagement

Across all five focus groups, teachers noted a positive increase in student motivation and engagement throughout the unit of work. For example, one teacher described this engagement as ‘a joy to watch’, whilst another observed that ‘we talk about student wellbeing, engagement and success, and [this unit of work] has hit all … three absolutely on the head’. Other teachers framed student engagement in terms of increased maturity and notable changes in student behaviour, as evident in the following quotation from a teacher:

I saw some students really grow. And their behaviour changed in class … It was a switch in week six. It went on for a lot of them. And I really loved it, because I just thought, okay, if we need programmes like this to light some fire … Let them see that door in the future. And I thought that was good for them to see. And they became more engaged.

In this theme, to explore more fully how and why teachers perceived that the digital narrative component of the programme promoted an increase in student engagement, we describe our findings through the lens of Self-Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan 1985) by considering relationships with autonomy, competence, relatedness and novelty.

Autonomy is understood as the need to have control and ownership over a learning activity (Ryan and Deci 2020). The highly structured workbook and project-based learning approach underpinning the design of the unit give students the opportunity to work at their own pace, and have agency over their digital narrative production. In creating digital stories centred on their own experiences and post-school futures, students demonstrated a willingness to take ownership of this process (Mayes et al. 2009, 290). As one teacher mentioned, the digital narrative supported students to work autonomously, developing ‘skills to work on their own, like independent learners’. This ensured a student-centred approach to learning, whereby teacher support may be ‘gradually reduced as the learners take increasing responsibility for independent use of the language’ (Derewianka and Jones 2016, 54).

In our analysis, we understood competence as the need to feel capable while being challenged in a well-structured context by a learning activity (Ryan and Deci 2020). During the focus groups, the notion of competence tended to be used interchangeably with observations about students experiencing success and expressing pride in their work. As one teacher commented, the students ‘were very proud of themselves and wanted to show [their digital narratives] again and again’. Indeed, pride was a consistent theme across all focus groups, with teachers observing a sense of pride in their students across the whole spectrum of abilities. For instance, one teacher emphasised that their support class ‘achieved success with the digital story. They’re probably not going to be the best of all the digital stories, but they did it and they were proud of it’. This sentiment was echoed by a teacher at another school, who felt that many of the students were:

… actually quite surprised in what they could create. And I mean, I know a lot of it came from the […] platform itself, given that it has a lot of the templates and it does do a lot of scaffolding and guiding for you.

Here, we can see the important convergence of students being appropriately challenged but also supported by well-structured learning activities (Ryan and Deci 2020). This was echoed by a teacher at another school, who noted that ‘the digital story worked quite well when it was structured, and they knew what they were doing. They made some, there were some that were really good’. The importance of structure was a theme that emerged strongly, too, in the survey data, with multiple teachers across the five partner schools attributing the positive student engagement to the explicit learning goals, scaffolded learning activities and structured workbooks.

Relatedness can be described as the need to feel connected and relate to the learning activity (Ryan and Deci 2020). Teachers across the five partner schools consistently noted that the subject matter of the digital narratives, in centring the experiences of the students, was key to students relating to, and feeling connected with, the unit of work. As one teacher mentioned, ‘the students really enjoyed the fact that [the digital narrative] was very personal to them and it had their identity and their future in mind’. Another emphasised the importance of providing students with the ‘opportunity to have a say, to have a voice and deciding on their own what to do’.

The digital narrative not only served to motivate students to think about their future, but also encouraged them to consider their current self-efficacy and attitudes to their learning, linking this to their educational trajectory. As one teacher explained, throughout the unit of work they observed a student effectively ‘joining the idea of what she wants to do in her future’ with her current notions of self, reflecting on her current attitude to schooling and identifying what might need to change in order to realise her existing aspiration for higher education. Here, digital narrative helped to bridge the gap between secondary and higher education by providing a means for students to reflect on their experiences and develop their sense of identity as learners (Austen, Pickering, and Judge 2021).

Novelty may be regarded as something which has not been experienced before, or is different from daily routine (Ryan and Deci 2020). There were various novel features in the unit of work that teachers identified as having contributed to increased student engagement. The most noteworthy of these seemed to be the presence of the student ambassadors in the classroom, providing modelling and mentoring to the students. During the ambassador-led lessons, the student ambassadors supported the students and teachers through the creation of their digital narratives. This provided opportunities for students to seek help, or just-in-time support, from the student ambassadors when needed. Unstructured conversation and mentorship about education and post-school opportunities facilitated meaningful rapport-building as well, while structuring the ambassador-led lessons around the use of technology proved to be highly engaging for students. As one teacher noted, ‘the implementation of technology really engaged the students and they were always looking forward to that Friday lesson that they knew the [ambassadors] were coming in’.

Teachers’ perceptions of the provision of technology as a novel element of the programme largely depended on the existing levels of technology in the school. In two of the five schools, with technology readily available, the novelty of the tablet computers did not feature in the discussion of the focus groups. However, in the three under-resourced schools, the provision of technology was emphasised as a novel factor that supported student engagement. As one teacher noted ‘they did love the being on the [tablets]. Once they did that, they were just in the zone’. The chosen platform that was used for the programme proved to be an effective, novel choice of graphic design platform to support the creation of digital narratives, with one teacher commenting, ‘the fact that [UTS] chose [platform] was something the kids really, really liked’. Interestingly, most teachers indicated that whilst they were familiar with the platform at a surface level, and some had used it for personal projects, no teachers involved in the programme noted that they previously used it in lessons, prior to the unit of work. For the most part, the chosen platform was novel for the students as well, with most accessing it for the first time during the unit of work. One teacher commented on the novelty of using this platform, as opposed to more familiar presentation software:

but they were able to submit things that, had they done on [presentation software] by themselves, would’ve been the blank sheet with the plain black text that we’ve all seen before. But instead, they had animations involved and gifs and little bits of music and whatever. And it was just really good for them. I think they felt empowered by their use of technology.

The novelty of using the chosen platform was closely tied to the presence of student ambassadors. The connection between student ambassador support and students’ increasing confidence in the use of the platform beyond these scheduled lessons was highlighted, with one teacher observing ‘so the next lesson after the ambassadors, I got them the [tablets] again because they wanted to work on the digital narratives, and they were just able to work on them on their own. So it was good. They knew what they wanted to do’.

Digital narrative as a text type was highlighted by teachers as a novel feature of the programme. Many students were already somewhat familiar with traditional forms of narrative, but, as another teacher explained, digital narrative as an imaginative text type allowed students to ‘verbalise what they wanted to do in the future, but then putting it into words for their video…that transition between verbalising those ideas and then into actual something that you can see, I think was very helpful for them’.

Theme 2: Teacher-student rapport-building

In addition to the rapport-building between the students and student ambassadors, participants felt that engagement in the programme resulted in an increasing connection between teachers and their students. For example, during one of the focus groups, one teacher touched on how vital rapport-building was for successful teaching and learning at the school, observing that ‘caring about [students] … really helps with that rapport which is so vital here … it is very difficult for them to learn from you if they do not like you’.

Student-teacher rapport may be understood as a ‘harmonious teacher-student relationship which encompasses enjoyment, connection, respect and mutual trust’ (Reyes and von Anthony 2020, 2). It is thought to have a positive effect on student learning outcomes (Xie and Derakhshan 2021) and can be facilitated by learning activities which centre the students and allow them to express their beliefs and ideas (Wilson, Ryan, and Pugh 2010). In the context of this case study, student-teacher rapport-building was facilitated by the subject matter of the unit, which provided students with the opportunity to share their post-school aspirations, and explore talents and interests that may have lain beyond the scope of their usual English lessons. For example, one teacher drew attention to the obvious pride with which one student shared illustrations for their digital narrative with the teacher, commenting that:

We got to the final week and one of my boys had uploaded drawings he had done himself at home to his digital narrative and he was so excited to just show me like, look, these are my drawings. I’ve put them in here myself. And it was so nice to see him want to bring part of himself to this.

This resonates with the observation made in Staley and Freeman (2017, 2) that, in their context, ‘digital storytelling offered an opportunity for this classroom teacher to engage in pedagogical activities which included critiquing and challenging normative and restrictive expectations, beliefs and values imposed upon rural students’.

For the teachers involved in our case study, engaging in student-centred content and learning activities provided an opportunity to shift the dynamics in the classroom. In some instances, this was reciprocal, with teachers noting a positive shift in the way students engaged with them in class, which, in turn, shifted the way in which teachers connected with their students. As one teacher reflected, ‘I think you were getting kids responding in ways that they don’t necessarily respond to their teachers. So I think us seeing the kids in a different light was really nice as well … there was a lot of laughter’. A similar sentiment was echoed by a teacher at another participating school, who observed that:

A lot of the barriers between us broke because they always see me as this authoritarian in class, which I am… it just completely – it broke that – it shattered the formality a little bit. But still, there’s respect, but a lot of the formality came down.

The sense of an increased, or improved, rapport was a common theme that emerged across all focus groups. It highlights the potential for digital narrative to act as an effective creative method in widening participation. This is not only because it facilitates meaningful student engagement but also because it may enable the kind of teacher-student rapport-building that can play a part in shaping students’ thinking about the future (Reid and McCallum 2014).

Theme 3: Digital literacy

Students’ capability to utilise technology effectively and efficiently for educational purposes was a key theme across each of the five focus groups. While it may be easy to assume that young people growing up in the digital age are skilled ‘digital natives’, this does not necessarily reflect the realities of the digital divide, which disproportionately affects individuals in under-resourced LSES communities (Dodd et al. 2021; Tanton et al. 2021). For instance, Staley and Freeman (2017, 4), in the context of their widening participation work with rural youth student participants, make the point about students in their programme who did not have the technological literacy or skills we might expect.

Differences in teachers’ perceptions of students’ digital literacies was a common theme across the focus groups. Some teachers lauded the way their students were able to navigate new programmes with relative ease. For example, a teacher from a school with ready access to technology noted that their students were ‘so quick at picking up things like [platform], because they’re always, always using everything digitally’. This observation was in stark contrast to the perspective of a teacher at a school with comparatively lower technology resourcing, who observed that their students were ‘very much not computer literate and barely even literate with their phones’. Such a sentiment was echoed by another teacher at a different partner school, who commented ‘because they play games on their phones all the time, people think that kids are naturally adept at using technology, [but] they’re not’.

Whilst it may be tempting to draw the simple conclusion that students at schools with greater access to technology are inherently more digitally capable than their peers at schools with access, the picture is not this simple; access to technology is only one factor contributing to students’ capabilities (Dodd et al. 2021, 59). Some teachers commented specifically on students’ abilities to perform simple administrative tasks such as logging into their education-related account and resetting their email password. Relatedly, concerns around the amount of time it can take to support students with developing digital literacy capabilities was another common theme across the focus group data. For example, one teacher described the initial lesson as a ‘painful hour’:

We log in, make sure we’ve got our account, okay, you’ve sent a code to the email. So we’re going to go back to the email. That was… it took forever. And it was always going to take forever with these students. But because we lost that lesson with them, it would’ve been nice to have maybe an extra lesson with…the [tablets].

Another teacher at the same school explained that because ‘[students] don’t seem to have this grounding in using technology… we spend a lot of our English teaching time teaching basically how to use technology’. In the context of our case study, the presence of student ambassadors was intended to mitigate this concern. One teacher commented that, without the presence of the ambassadors, the programme delivery ‘wouldn’t have run smoothly, because one teacher with 30-odd kids trying to teach them how to use [a tablet] would have led to a lot of resignations’.

Irrespective of the school’s technology resourcing, teachers across the five partner schools reiterated that the level of support students required in creating digital narratives could only be achieved through the student ambassadors working closely with them in small groups, on tablets loaned to the schools. This raises the inevitable question of sustainability. Would schools be able to deliver a unit of work like this effectively, without the involvement of an external partner to provide this additional resourcing? If widening participation programmes are best positioned with university or community partners, is there a risk of further entrenching the digital divide by prioritising short-term programme delivery over long-term solutions to resource public schools properly and enhance the digital literacy skills of students and teachers? It is beyond the scope of this article to explore such questions in depth. However, we believe that it is critical to recognise that the use of digital narrative in a widening participation context requires deep consideration of a range of complex and interrelated factors, including: existing levels of technology resourcing; students’ levels of generalised and task-specific digital literacy; and, indeed, teachers’ own levels of digital literacy and confidence to embed technology into their teaching.

Limitations

The observations made by teachers in this case study are subjective and context-specific. Our goal is not to generalise but, rather, provide contextualised insight informed by an in-depth, qualitative analysis of rich focus group and survey data.

Conclusion

In our study, we set out to investigate, from teachers’ perspectives, the benefits and limitations of using digital storytelling in the context of a widening participation programme. According to the analysis, teachers felt that digital narratives provided the opportunity to form an effective, creative method to maximise student engagement in a widening participation programme. This research responds to calls to centre on the experiences and observations of teachers, who may often be positioned as bystanders rather than active participants in widening participation programmes (Harrison and Waller 2018). In our case study, the subject matter empowered teachers to engage in pedagogical activities which allowed them to step outside the usual restrictive bounds of the English curriculum, and build a rapport with students that they considered, in some instances, led to a positive shift in the classroom dynamic and increased student motivation and engagement in learning activities (Staley and Freeman 2017). Our research highlights the potential in using digital narrative approaches as a creative method in other widening participation programmes and initiatives more broadly. However, the harsh realities of the digital divide cannot be overstated. On the level of policy, this draws attention to the need for structural inequities to be addressed, so that all schools are adequately resourced and teachers suitably trained and supported for the benefit of learners.

Acknowledgements

The authors further acknowledge all individuals involved in the ideation, conceptualisation, ethics approval, delivery, data collection, and data analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The NSW Equity Consortium is jointly funded by partnering universities (Lead: University of New South Wales, the University of Technology Sydney, and Macquarie University), the Commonwealth Government’s Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program and the New South Wales Government Department of Education’s Collaboration and Innovation Fund.

Notes

1. Various terminologies have been employed when referring to digital storytelling, including multimodal storytelling, digital narratives and digital stories (Wu and Chen 2020). In reporting on our study, the term ‘digital narrative’ is used to refer to the digital stories created by students during the widening participation programme, as this was the term adopted in the programme to ensure alignment with the text-type terminology in the relevant syllabus.

2. The NEC is jointly funded by the three partnering universities (University of New South Wales (UNSW); Macquarie University; and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS)); the Australian Government’s Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program funding; and the New South Wales Department of Education’s Collaboration and Innovation Fund.