This article examines the digital storytelling practices between an African American mother and son. We used agency as a theoretical framework to explore how the two exercised their own power to collaborate on their digital story. As digital technologies became part of their practice, challenges and tensions arose when both participants attempted to override each other's agency, as demonstrated in their interviews. Data were collected during digital storytelling workshops conducted at a university computer lab, church, and the participants' home. Using thematic coding, we analyzed audio-recorded interviews to determine the participants' agency in the context of their digital storytelling activity. We found how a mother and son worked together through resisting and redirecting when creating a digital story, and how their digital storytelling practices displayed evidence of agency. Implications include how familial interactions in digital storytelling practices contribute to the ways agency is conceptualized for families, educators, and researchers.
This column focuses on the interactions during family and group conversation circles that not only helped participants talk about personal, emotional, and social issues in their digital stories but also helped them make sense of artifacts and the meanings that stories carry in shared spaces and practices. This work adds to the bourgeoning dimensions of today's family structures and changing practices in digital literacy research. In addition, it introduces artifactual literacies as a theory that signifies how artifacts are infused with meanings and mediated in everyday literacies vis‐à‐vis stories and texts.
In this meta‐ethnography, the authors analyze the metaphors that inhabit highly cited examples of family literacy scholarship. Meta‐ethnography is a methodology, as described by Noblit and Hare, in which metaphors are analyzed as linguistic tools; in this article, they are used to compare and synthesize understandings across existing ethnographic family literacy studies. Specifically, the authors identified and translated key metaphors in highly cited family literacy research studies to trace the development, refinement, and expansion of epistemological stances that have informed and continue to frame family literacy scholarship. This meta‐ethnography makes visible changes in understandings and emerging lines of argument related to family literacy practices that generally are not visible. Specifically, this analysis led to the identification of a problematic silence related to racism and systemic oppression, which the authors take up as a significant meta‐ethnographic finding.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.