A GENRE THEORY PERSPECTIVE ON DIGITAL ... - ETD

stories guided children to arrive at a clearer conception of how events in their lives had
consequences and how such events could lead to changes in future actions and feelings.
More importantly, digital storytelling provides a space where youth can experiment with
and appropriate identities that are otherwise not afforded. Hug’s (2007) study of middle school
girls’ digital storytelling in an after-school program, for example, demonstrates that digital
storytelling offers girls opportunities to try on feminine identities as well as identities as
competent and confident technology users. Davis (2004) discusses how digital storytelling
allows one youth to think about conflicting messages he receives daily from participating in
multiple “figured worlds” (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998). By putting one version
of himself (from versions of him as a popular cultural broker in hip-hop culture, a son who
watches romantic movies with his mother, and a student who is pushed to succeed) into a digital
story and presenting it as a finished object, he takes a step towards embracing one potential
identity over another, freezing it in time, and externalizing it as the foundation for conceiving his
future. As Hull and Katz argue (2006), youth are able to “assume agentive stances toward their
present identities, circumstances, and futures” (p. 40) through articulating a true and convincing
personal narrative in digital stories. In this vein, digital storytelling allows youth to experience
themselves differently by trying on alternative identities.
From this perspective, the analytical work revolves around the individual author, who is
positioned at the center of a discursive scene and observed for how one takes on digital
storytelling to engage in the problematic and complex task of discovering, making sense of, and
redesigning the self. Implicit in the expressivists’ celebration of digital storytelling’s expressive
potential is the argument that multimodality and technology engages and motivates youth, for
whom school-based literacy learning has often been discouraging, alienating, and disengaging.
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