Abstract
Abstract Literature argues that for post-conflict pedagogies to facilitate student engagement across difference it requires emotional engagement with the subject. However, how to achieve such emotional engagement, without falling into the trap of sentimentality, is an area that is under-researched. This paper reflects on conversations with South African students in a final year pre-service teacher-training programme, who developed digital stories as a vehicle for student engagement across difference. Applying ‘critical emotional reflexivity’ (Zembylas 2011) as an analytical framework, we found that students described the digital storytelling process as opening up different ways of being with/for the ‘Other’ and allowing them to start questioning cherished beliefs and assumptions about the ‘Other’. However, they had difficulties in placing themselves in a bigger historical and sociocultural context. Furthermore, the specific set-up of the project made it difficult to track lasting social change within students, the fourth element of Zembylas’ theoretical framework. Findings also confirmed the potential of digital stories to lead to sentimentality and ‘passive empathy’ (Boler 1999), characterised by pity from the part of the privileged observer and resentment from the subjugated storyteller. We recommend adding a historical-political analysis of previous students’ stories to the digital storytelling process in order to help students deconstruct positions premised on the existence of clearly differentiated identities and to consciously create spaces where a reflection on the emotions students encountered while sharing and listening to their stories can be facilitated.
Highlights
Journal of Cultural Science http://cultural-science.org/journalVol.8, No 2 (2015): Broadening Digital Storytelling Horizons 22While over the last 18 years racial integration has happened in many Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in South Africa, social, class and cultural integration among students are lagging behind (Jansen 2004; Pattman 2010)
Joe Lambert (2010, v), founder of the Center for Digital Storytelling makes a bold statement in the introduction to his ‘Digital Storytelling Cookbook’: ‘The students that share their stories in our circles recognize a metamorphosis of sorts, a changing, that makes them feel different about their lives, their identities.’
The particular focus of this paper is to explore whether or not the particular digital storytelling model adopted for this study, closely aligned with the model developed by the Center for Digital Storytelling, allowed students to develop ‘critical emotional reflexivity’, necessary to transform students’ engagement across differences or whether it promoted sentimentality, merely re-affirming individual student assumptions and contributing to further polarization in the classroom (Zembylas 2007, xiii)
Summary
Journal of Cultural Science http://cultural-science.org/journalVol., No 2 (2015): Broadening Digital Storytelling Horizons 22While over the last 18 years racial integration has happened in many Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in South Africa, social, class and cultural integration among students are lagging behind (Jansen 2004; Pattman 2010). Critical voices warn against the danger of ‘sentimentality of digital stories’, arguing that it promotes ‘individualistic, and naively unselfconscious accounts of personal stories’ (Hartley and McWilliam 2009, 14) The danger of this sentimentality (Zembylas 2008; 2011), which can reside in both the teller and the listener of stories, especially when storytellers and their audience are from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, lies in the risk of desensitization of the story listener and feelings of defensiveness and resentment in the storyteller, leading to a re-affirmation of established beliefs and assumptions as opposed to change and transformation within students. This activity allows students to get a more nuanced view of their own identity (e.g. they are White students, and daughters, mothers, teachers, South Africans), and to realise that students from different racial backgrounds foreground different identity categories (e.g. while race often does not feature among White students, it is ever present among African students)
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