Digital Storytelling and Youth: Toward Critically Engaged Praxis

Abstract

This article explores how digital storytelling and applied theatre can help bridge the gaps between formally sanctioned knowledge (such as textbooks and other traditionally school-based forms and content) and the everyday interests and experiences of youth. The author examines elements of a digital storytelling residency to analyze how devised performance work can invite personal contexts into the classroom and help build active engagements with history. Through descriptive analysis and practice-based examples, the article theorizes how digital storytelling as an applied theatre praxis invites students to see and name the relevance of formalized curriculum content to their own lives. The author then theorized critical questions and challenges raised in and by her approach to applied theatre praxis and called for more critically engaged approaches to performance pedagogy and practices with youth that explicitly address identity, representation, and power.