‘The Transpoemations Project’: digital storytelling, contemporary poetry, and refugee boys

Abstract

This article describes a five-week summer literacy program designed for a group of 70 multilingual refugee boys resettled from their home countries in Africa and Asia to a city in the Southeastern USA. The students attended local public schools but struggled to experience academic success in the traditional classroom. The summer program addressed this issue by offering the students a curriculum in which they worked, alongside American teachers, in small learning groups, completing activities premised on specific twenty-first century literacies, such as critical thinking and the creative manipulation of texts and technologies. The students interacted with high-interest literature written in English and with selected productivity tools, including the filmmaking software MovieMaker. The program culminated with each student producing a digital story – a ‘transpoemation’ – adapted from an autobiographical response to George Ella Lyon’s poem, ‘Where I’m From.’ The students translated their own poems through a series of scaffolded steps in order to create short films for preview and critique. Working with the computer, with texts they had generated, and with images and music, the students showcased their facility with storytelling, with the English vocabulary they were acquiring, and with visual media, demonstrating a growing sense of academic confidence.