In recent years, digital storytelling has emerged as an alternative medium of knowledge production for students in American studies. A growing number of faculty are creating assignments which combine methodological markers of American studies and reinvented notions of critical pedagogy in a multimedia learning environment. Based on an analysis of student learning and interviews with student producers of digital stories, this essay investigates the potential of digital storytelling for the development of voice and intellectual depth at the intersection of affective (...) and cognitive dimensions of learning. Evidence from student-produced digital stories suggests that affective developmental processes can enable epistemological expertise instead of opposing it. In the same way, the multimedia authoring process does not obscure traditional forms of expert research and scholarship, but makes expert strategies visible and explicit. (shrink)

Enabling students' engagement with gender theory can be a difficult task. One of the best ways to help students learn difficult conceptual material, such as theoretical texts, is to provide them with opportunities to state and restate those ideas in multiple ways and through multiple means. Digital storytelling provides an effective pedagogy that enhances this process of stating and restating, forcing students to express themselves in the `new language' of multimedia. Through a detailed reading of one student's work the essay (...) proposes a taxonomy for novice uses of theory, ranging from summary to development of theoretical symbols. I then argue that digital storytelling uniquely enables students to illustrate and apply difficult conceptual material. In some cases, the visual form can even open up new possibilities for the application and refinement of concepts. (shrink)

Humanities teachers in higher education strive to locate and implement pedagogical approaches that allow our students to deepen their inquiry, to make significant intellectual connections, and to carry those questions and insights across the curriculum. Digital storytelling is one of those pedagogical approaches. Digital storytelling can create an intervention in the educational experience of students from a variety of perspectives and at a variety of levels. The process of slowing down to create purposefully in the new medium of the digital (...) story, through timing, imagery, music and narrative, has enabled students to position themselves in the cultural and theoretical conversation. Claiming that space of authority, they are not only better situated to read and respond to others' work, but also to create their own. (shrink)