‘The Transpoemations Project’: digital storytelling, contemporary poetry, and refugee boys

Abstract

This article describes a five-week summer literacy program designed for a group of 70 multilingual refugee boys resettled from their home countries in Africa and Asia to a city in the Southeastern USA. The students attended local public schools but struggled to experience academic success in the traditional classroom. The summer program addressed this issue by offering the students a curriculum in which they worked, alongside American teachers, in small learning groups, completing activities premised on specific twenty-first century literacies, such as critical thinking and the creative manipulation of texts and technologies. The students interacted with high-interest literature written in English and with selected productivity tools, including the filmmaking software MovieMaker. The program culminated with each student producing a digital story – a ‘transpoemation’ – adapted from an autobiographical response to George Ella Lyon’s poem, ‘Where I’m From.’ The students translated their own poems through a series of scaffolded steps in order to create short films for preview and critique. Working with the computer, with texts they had generated, and with images and music, the students showcased their facility with storytelling, with the English vocabulary they were acquiring, and with visual media, demonstrating a growing sense of academic confidence.

Keywords:

• refugees
• refugee education
• multicultural education
• multiliteracies
• digital storytelling
• arts-based pedagogy

Notes

1. Refugees, according to the 1951 Refugee Convention establishing UNHCR, are individuals who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” are outside the country of their nationality and, because of reasonable fears, are unable or unwilling to seek protection from their home countries.

2. See the US Department of State website for more details: http://www.state.gov/j/prm/. The estimated number of refugees varies, but the US Department of State suggests that there are approximately 10.5 million refugees worldwide.

3. See the UNHCR’s report on global trends for more details: http://www.unhcr.org/4fd6f87f9.html. See also ‘Refugee Resettlement,’ an article posted on the the Center for Immigration Studies’ website: http://cis.org/refugee-system-needs-review.

4. Digital storytelling is the art of combining personal narrative texts with media such as images and sound (Robin 2008).

5. I served as the curriculum designer and instructional supervisor for the program, so my role on the planning team included explanation, training, and consensus-building. I was invited to lead the project as a result of the research I had begun conducting with a charter school whose student population includes a significant refugee/immigrant contingent and because of my experience in literacy instruction and teacher education.