A GENRE THEORY PERSPECTIVE ON DIGITAL ... - ETD

organizations to create after-school learning environments that support multimedia literacy
learning. Young people come on their own volition and work on multimedia projects with the
help of trained adult facilitators and peers. Conceptually, the clubhouse model embraces digital
storytelling as a means of promoting new ways of participating in new media culture and new
ways of thinking about stories, everyday experiences, identities, and communities. As designers,
implementers, and technological facilitators, university researchers often integrate research
components into the design of DUSTY programs, which have become empirical research sites to
generate theorized accounts of how digital storytelling mediates literacy learning, identity
formation, teacher education, and pedagogical innovation with regards to multimedia learning
(G. Hull & M. E. Nelson, 2005; Hull & Katz, 2006; A. S. Nixon, 2008; Paull, 2002; Roche-
Smith, 2004b; Turner, 2008). Over time, the clubhouse model has not only served as a
pedagogical model for teaching multimodal literacy, but has also functioned as a research model
for studying multimodal literacy learning.
On the social front, the cultural democratic and expressive potential of digital storytelling
have been fully capitalized by media projects of various scopes and scales. BBC’s Capture
Wales and Telling Lives, for example, have utilized digital storytelling as a tool for potential
democratization of the individual voice and building of communities. Similar projects have
emerged in different communities, including Silence Speaks, an international initiative that
supports the telling of stories of surviving violence, discrimination, and injustice; Digital
Storytelling Asia, which collects creative narrations in Singapore; the Creative Narration
program and the musariam program, which host firsthand accounts of American stories. Central
to these projects is an emphasis on personal voice and everyday experiences in service of
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