Our presentation at the International Conference “Digital storytelling in Crisis”, 8-10 of May 2014, Athens.
Abstract:
As societies become more and more diverse, the risk is high for learners to become wary or hostile towards the ‘other’ – the ‘other’ who is seen as a threat to their own comfort, a threat to their lives. This is still true for South Africa, where although becoming a more and more racially integrated society, the legacy of Apartheid still impacts on our learners social engagements in and outside their classrooms. This paper reports on a digital storytelling project where final year pre-service education students’ reflected on one social issue in education. Adopting Nussbaum (2010) capabilities framework for a socially just democracy, this paper explores 27 of these students’ perceptions on the digital storytelling project and its potential for developing capabilities necessary for engaging empathetically with the ‘other’ and in the process raising students’ awareness of their own role in the quest to create more socially just classrooms in South Africa. Using narrative inquiry, the research team extracted and analysed the narratives students constructed in four focus group conversations at the end of the project. In these narratives Nussbaum’s capabilities were evident. However, it was also found that in the collective sharing of their stories a strong sense of agency and a belief in their capabilities to make a difference emerged, not only individually within the confines of their own classrooms, but also as a collective of teachers. Further research is needed to investigate whether students could transfer this emerging agency and sense of collective responsibility into their own teaching practice to create the safe, enabling spaces South Africa needs.