Digital Storytelling and Metaliteracy Explored in New Book!

The new book edited by Dr. Sheila Marie Aird and Dr. Thomas P. Mackey Teaching Digital Storytelling: Inspiring Voices Through Online Narratives has been published by Rowman & Littlefield. The editors worked with an exceptional team of authors from SUNY schools, Temple University, and universities in South Africa to share their narratives about teaching with digital storytelling through the lens of information literacy and metaliteracy. The new book features a Foreword written by futurist and digital storytelling pioneer Dr. Bryan Alexander. This is the newest book to be included in Trudi Jacobson’s Innovations in Information Literacy Series at Rowman & Littlefield.

This book project emerged from the collaborative teaching by the Drs. Aird and Mackey to design a fully online course in Digital Storytelling to unite Empire State University students studying in Prague, Czech Republic and the United States. This course fully integrates the metaliteracy framework and features learning objects available at the metaliteracy.org blog. The editors wrote the framing chapter about this case study Metaliteracy and Global Digital Storytelling: Building Shared Learning Communities.

As noted in the book overview and description:

This book presents the stories of educators who through digital storytelling inspire students from diverse communities to construct their empowering digital narratives. Educators from a wide range of disciplines present innovative case studies of teaching digital storytelling through the lens of personal narratives, metaliteracy, and information literacy. They describe how teaching students to tell their personal digital stories prepares them as learners who are reflective while playing active learner roles such as producer, publisher, and collaborator. 

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538172919/Teaching-Digital-Storytelling-Inspiring-Voices-through-Online-Narratives

We invite you to explore this new book and tell us about your own digital storytelling adventures!

-Sheila and Tom

Poetic Ethnography and Metaliteracy: Empowering Voices in A Hybrid Theater Arts Course

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Metaliterate Learning for the Post-Truth World

Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, an Associate Professor at Temple University offers the following preview of her chapter: “Poetic Ethnography and Metaliteracy: Empowering Voices in a Hybrid Theater Arts Course’ appearing in the forthcoming book, Metaliterate Learning for the Post-Truth World.

When is a Theater arts course more than a theater arts course? How do we encourage students to “have voice”? In an age when “alternative facts” have become the new norm, how can theater and the theater studies curriculum give students agency to contribute to the discourse? Well… at Temple University, these days, its when faculty consciously use a metaliteracy lens to develop or improve their courses so as to encourage students to not just consume new knowledge but also to produce it and to distribute it through multiple modalities and across multiple platforms.

At Temple University in Philadelphia, the Theater Studies curriculum exemplifies the metacognitive domain of metaliteracy teaching students to effectively consume and produce new information in the form of devised theater productions, displays, press releases, exhibitions, community performances and critiques. One such course that goes a long way to introduce metaliteracy concepts into the theater curriculum is THTR 2008 Poetic Ethnography.

The course, THTR 2008 Poetic Ethnography operates as both ethno-drama and as a theater hybrid that incorporates several tightly structured field site audio and video digital storytelling projects into its 13-week curriculum. These projects encourage students to expand their knowledge base, investigate multiple forms of information gathering methodologies and to develop performative and distributive content across multiple cultural and social platforms.

Through the process of research and new knowledge production, students gain life-long learning skills about how to develop more nuanced, personal narratives that tell a more complete and factual story about communities, individuals and contemporary events. This chapter, then, looks at how Poetic Ethnography teaches students how to develop ethnographic and personal narratives set to poetry about Philadelphia neighborhoods and its people—giving voice to the sometimes voiceless in our communities, while simultaneously learning metaliteracy and metacognitive learning strategies.

Dr. Kimmika L. H. Williams-Witherspoon, Associate Professor

Department of Theater

Temple University