Plateaus, Puzzles, and PhDs: Un/Making Knowledge Differently through Digital Storytelling

Abstract

Digital storytelling as part of study creates an opening for reworking ideas. It marks an instance of recognition to access alternative ways of knowing, thinking, and doing. Guided by radical black studies and decolonizing methodologies, the authors draw on insights from digital storytelling to extend current understandings of educational research, theory, and practice. The connections across five digital stories are highlighted through a retrospective analysis of educational journeys to and beyond doctoral study. The digital stories are presented in a series of plateaus to (1) challenge the constraints of academic writing and (2) signal methodological openings in collective restorying. To that end, the authors unravel processes of becoming, trouble the pedagogical encounters in their work, and push for otherwise possibilities to make room for the not-yet.I am embracing the work of challenging existing narratives of marginalized communities.-OlgaMy time teaching … was a lesson in understanding how my struggle is bound up with young people and their struggle for a dignified life and education.-CeeAs I dug deeper into the memories and still images of my childhood and neighborhood … a digital story provided the layers and texture that a written assignment might not.-AlishaDigital storytelling has been a useful tool for expanding pedagogical possibilities with media technology at different levels. It has been valuable to educators and researchers interested in examining the link between cognition and modality. For us, it has been constructive to draw on digital storytelling as part of our study, a kind of intellectual practice that involves revisiting and reworking ideas to create openings in our academic labor. The mode of activity occurred in relation to the university of which we are members but also extended beyond the confines of the university, to refuse the normalized ways it regulates and suppresses study. Digital storytelling from this view marked an instance of recognition to access alternative ways of knowing, thinking, and doing.