A GENRE THEORY PERSPECTIVE ON DIGITAL ... - ETD

The cultural democrats
The cultural democrats often work hand in hand with the expressivists in celebrating
digital storytelling as a socially influential cultural practice. To the cultural democrats, digital
storytelling is a powerful discursive tool for disrupting entrenched social structures that are
oppressive, discriminatory, and divisive. Over the years, the Center for Digital Storytelling and
the various digital storytelling programs inspired by it, have maintained a coherent
humanist/activist identity because of their commitment to helping “people who believe they are
mundane, uninteresting, or unmemorable” to uncover vivid, complex, and rich body of stories
that everybody possesses (Storytelling, 2010). Accordingly, various digital storytelling programs
have been organized to motivate and train people from historically silenced communities to
discover and transform their personal stories into publishable digital artifacts. As a cultural
practice, digital storytelling dissolves established boundaries that separate the vernacular from
the mainstream, the novice from the expert, and the media consumer from the media producer.
As amply documented by research on digital storytelling, educators are often at the
forefront of the cultural democratic mission as they seek to provide children and adults in
underserved communities with access to literacy and technology (Hull & Katz, 2006; A. S.
Nixon, 2008; Paull, 2002; Turner, 2008). For the cultural democrats, digital storytelling is a tool
of empowerment, which can be used to support the construction of counter-narratives by youth
from oppressed communities (A. S. Nixon, 2008; L. Vasudevan, 2006; L. Vasudevan, DeJaynes,
& Schmier, 2010). Vasudevan and colleagues (L. Vasudevan, et al., 2010), for example, argue
that digital storytelling provides African American boys with opportunities to explore and tell
stories about their own urban life experiences, which otherwise remain unexplored and untold.
Also, digital storytelling invites youth to transcend ascribed roles and to explore ways of
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