Digital storytelling in adult education and family literacy: a case study from rural Ireland

ABSTRACT

Previous research on digital storytelling (DST) has focused chiefly on children and youth, but we know little about how it is used in non-formal adult education. This article analyzes a DST class in rural Ireland, which was organized by a family literacy program and offered for parents at an elementary school. Data sources included fieldnotes, interviews, and digital stories by the parents who finished the class (n = 3). Janks's interdependence model of critical literacy is used to analyze how the class incorporated power, access, diversity, and design. The class did not engage in ideology critique or analyze the origins or consequences of dominant technologies, languages, and literacies (i.e., investigate power as domination). However, the class did provide access to technology knowledge and skills; affirm parents’ diverse knowledge, languages, life experiences, and identities; and equip participants to design and disseminate their digital stories. The study highlights possibilities for using multimodal composition in family learning and adult education.

KEYWORDS:

• Adult education
• critical literacy
• digital storytelling
• family literacy
• multimodal composition

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the staff at the Clare Family Learning Project and Clare Adult Basic Education Service – particularly Breege, Dipankar, Mary, Moira, and Sean – for being wonderful hosts, opening their program to me, and helping to make this project possible. Božica, Kazi, and Monica deserve special thanks for graciously sharing their stories and their classroom with me. Angela Mooney's assistance with the literature review and data analysis was invaluable. Previous versions of this article were presented at the 2015 National Families Learning Summit and the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Commission of Professors of Adult Education and published in a practitioner's guide by the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy at Penn State.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Esther Prins is an Associate Professor in the Adult Education Program at The Pennsylvania State University, and Co-Director of the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy and the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy.

Notes

1. I had already begun data collection when I started reading Janks, so the book did not inform the study design.

2. The article preserves the digital stories’ orthographic features.

3. A hurley is a wooden stick used in the Irish sport of hurling. Kazi used it as a pointer during his presentation.

4. I do not have data to determine whether this multicultural day illustrated an uncritical, ‘holidays and heroes’ approach to multicultural education (Janks 2010, 114) or more complicated notions of cultural diversity.