Digital storytelling: facilitating learning and identity development

This study examines how digital storytelling facilitated students’ reflection and learning in a project-based year-end middle school capstone program. It also explores how students expressed their voices, identities, and emotions using the multimodal resources available in digital stories. Using qualitative case study methods, the study draws on interviews, observations, and artifacts to analyze two focal cases. It uses a framework derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyze the digital stories. The findings show how two students used text, images, sound, animations, emojis, and other resources to present and remix messages about the subject matter and about themselves. One student enacted a teacher role as she presented to a group of third graders. The other enthusiastically engaged with peers through a culinary project that used math in cooking, in which he shared a Salvadoran pancake from his home country. The study shows how embedding digital storytelling projects in a school curriculum can engage learners with a wide range of expressive resources while also enhancing students’ motivation, creativity, identity development, and connection with others.