Knowing-being-doing with digital stories: affective and collective potentialities in the higher education classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACT Creative assessments hold the potential to counter outcome-oriented and utilitarian approaches to teaching, characteristic of neoliberal academia. This paper explores the potentialities of digital stories as one form of creative assessment that may help rupture normative ways of teaching-learning and engaging with affective pedagogies. The authors are a group of teacher-learners who engaged with digital stories as a part of teaching-learning assemblages at two universities in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Drawing on our collective dialogue and writings, this paper explores the potentialities of breaking ‘dichotomies’, including personal/academic, good/bad affect, and certainty/uncertainty. The ways in which digital story assessments can unsettle but also affirm teaching-learning assemblages are explored. Various moments of glow from the authors’ reflections on engaging with digital stories as teacher-learners are followed to consider affective pedagogies for the 21st century. Through openly sharing vulnerabilities between students and teachers the paper affirms, imagines, and creates openings for pedagogical praxis.