Empowering Teachers Through Digital Storytelling: A Multimedia Capstone Project

Abstract

Although used in teacher education at the preservice level and with in-service teachers with their students, less is known about the influence of digital storytelling created by teachers themselves. Furthermore, capstone research mostly focuses on more traditional text-driven products and the experiences of preservice teachers. The capstone discussed here is a multimedia digital storytelling project using iMovie, produced by first-year teachers simultaneously earning their master’s degree. Teachers created their own capstones representing their personal experience, professional development, and overall process toward becoming an empowered educator, while teaching students in urban schools. Utilizing a constant comparative content analysis, we determined whether and how teachers defined and represented empowerment in their capstones. Implications for the affordances of a multimedia capstone experience are discussed. (Keywords: digital storytelling, capstone, teacher preparation, in-service teachers, iMovie)