Revitalizing legends through transmediation: a workshop for Deaf storytelling

Abstract

In compulsory education in Chile, Deaf students and their teachers must navigate through an educational system that relies heavily on verbal language to validate and communicate knowledge. Most educational resources available to students have been produced for and within a hearing community, privileging sound and written verbal materials over other ways of exchanging knowledge. In this practitioner piece, verbal texts produced in an oral and written culture are transformed in a visual storytelling workshop by a group of Deaf students. The alterations made to the ‘original’ text are traced in four stages, conceptualized here as transmediation, outlining the way the verbal text is transformed into Chilean Sign Language scripts, objects and characters, altering its structure and meaning. The authors aim to provide teachers and practitioners who work in diverse educational settings with ways of producing educational material through participation with students in creative ways.