Digital storytelling in study abroad: toward a counter-catalogic experience

Karen Rodríguez

doi:10.7577/seminar.2444

Abstract

This article examines a pilot project incorporating digital storytelling into a short-term study abroad program in the small city of Guanajuato, Mexico. After contextualizing the project’s pedagogical and theoretical concerns, the article examines the resulting stories, underscoring their potential for helping students pay attention to specific sites, to think beyond the usual images one is bombarded with and to spark critical thought. It argues that digital storytelling allows both students and host community members to become authors and representers of their experiences, thus creating a “counter-catalogic” study abroad experience, i.e. one that goes beyond the staid images used to market these experiences abroad. Digital stories afford an exciting mode for thinking about how to create critical, intimate and dialogic encounters with others.

Highlights

For many US international educators raised in the pre-digital era, the question of whether technology separates the student sojourner from a more embodied, emotional experience in a foreign study site has been a prominent subject of late
The stories that emerged included images unlike the images produced by the city for tourist purposes and unlike those in our organizational catalogue
Tourist texts produced by the city emphasize the romantic and colonial aspects of this place; they are rarely peopled, focusing more on iconic historical sites or architecture that conveys the correct colonial look – 200-year old buildings, large baroque or churrigueresque church facades, empty Spanish-style plazas, and the like. These images on billboards, tourist brochures, posters and postcards work to tell a certain story about what one finds in this locale

Summary

Introduction

For many US international educators raised in the pre-digital era, the question of whether technology separates the student sojourner from a more embodied, emotional experience in a foreign study site has been a prominent subject of late. Others rarely hang up the cell phones that connect them to significant others and family members, which can prompt onsite educators to question whether they are truly “here” or not. Students are using new media in intriguing ways, and within the field, there exists a growing fascination with employing new media to help students engage with the study site and to connect with local community members in meaningful ways. This article examines a pilot project that includes digital storytelling within a study abroad program in Guanajuato, Mexico. With approximately a dozen American undergraduates per semester, the CIEE

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