Vol. 1, No. 1 | Spring 2002
Jeeva Roche-Smith and young digital storytellers at the Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth (DUSTY) UC Links site in west Oakland.
TECHNOLOGY AND LEARNING
Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth—DUSTY—is located in a low-income neighborhood in west Oakland. The site offers after-school digital storytelling and literacy development activities to middle school students in this community. The Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley and the Prescott-Joseph Center for Community Enhancement, funded in part by a US Department of Education Community Technology Center grant, collaborate to bring UC Berkeley undergraduates to west Oakland to work with youth on their digital stories. Professor Glynda Hull (Education, UC Berkeley) is the principal investigator for the DUSTY UC Links site.
"I Didn't Know I Had So Many Stories in Me"
Digital Storytelling in West Oakland
BY JEEVA ROCHE-SMITH
It was a late afternoon in December. The sun had set, the semester was over, and my storytellers had finished their digital stories.
We were in the basement of an old Victorian house in west Oakland, in a room lined with brightly colored computers and scanners and TV/VCRs. The kids, the UC Berkeley undergraduates, and I huddled around a purple iMac to watch the stories, which the students had created using video-editing software. First, pictures of Doreen and her grandfather, Papito, glowed on the screen. Then Roberto narrated a legend his Abuelita had told him. Anton gave us news about the popular cartoon Dragon Ball Z, and Sheena filled us in on the lives of her favorite pop stars. Eric's voice was serious as he related his experiences with gang violence. John told a fishing story, and Don told the story of his life.
From dusty to DUSTY: Making a home for digital storytelling in west Oakland
Before opening the program in the fall of 2001, we had to transform a basement into a digital storytelling lab and make sure that the space was welcoming for middle school participants. The undergraduates, program director, and I cleaned, built computer desks, painted walls, installed wiring, and loaded software on ten iMac computers, four of which had been donated by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley. At the same time, we planned the curriculum and designed a daily schedule. Then we began recruiting young people from St. Martin de Porres School, a private middle school across the street from the Prescott-Joseph Center that serves low-income children in this predominantly African American community. Many of the students were struggling in school, and they came into the program eager to download music from the Internet, play computer games, and eat snacks.
Collaboration in motion
"Is cussing allowed?"
"Can we
write whatever we want?"
"I'm done!"
"Pleeease listen to my song."
From the moment they first gathered in a circle in the DUSTY basement, the young storytellers asked one question again and again: "Can we write our story?" Everyone wanted to know what was "allowed": what kinds of language they could use, what types of stories they could tell, what rules they had to follow. I soon set them free to "write their stories," but every day we came together as a group to discuss their work. Where do stories come from? we wondered. How does a writer justify her choice of words? How does he decide who his audience is? How does the writer know when she's done? DUSTY participants wrestled with these questions as they created storyboards, wrote scripts, and recorded their voiceover narrations.
Meanwhile, the students and their undergraduate learning partners experimented with i-Movie, manipulated and sized images with Adobe Photoshop, and searched the Internet for pictures. Storytellers also brought CDs to the lab, gathering music for their soundtracks. They would slide a CD into the computer and call me over to listen to their favorite rap or hip-hop artist. All their music was new to me, as I had grown up listening to western opera, Indian music, and French popular music. Through sharing and discussing our favorite songs, the storytellers, undergraduates, and I came to learn about new cultures, and we also challenged each other to ask what each choice of music added to our stories. We listened to lyrics and beats and melodies and analyzed what the author of the song was telling us. Some students found ingenious ways to use a favorite song: an upbeat tune, which seemed inappropriate for a serious story, worked well as the credits were rolling and helped to end the piece on a hopeful note.
We reached a turning point when storytellers began to put their words and images together to create rough cuts of their "movies." Suddenly, after weeks of working with their undergraduate friends from UC Berkeley, they got it—the process made sense. As they combined their pictures and their voices, they could see their experiences coming to life.
"I didn't know I had so many stories inside me"
I have been fortunate to work with Professor Glynda Hull from UC Berkeley and Dr. Washington Burns and Michael James from the Prescott-Joseph Center to design and coordinate DUSTY. I have played many roles through my participation in this project. I am a mother-figure, making sure the students keep the kitchen clean in the Prescott-Joseph Center. I am a researcher, collecting data on adolescent literacy development. I am a teacher, helping storytellers find just the right word to enrich their narratives. I am also a digital storyteller myself, sharing with students how I learned to use software and how I took creative and personal risks in telling my own story. Drawing on these many strands of who I am, I've tried to discover who my students are and how they come to perceive their own lives through the process of telling stories. I have watched these students take great risks to tell stories that are important to them, and I have watched them make tremendous gains as readers, writers, and multi-media creators. Empowering students to take risks, I believe, is what allows them to make such gains.
The program has now entered a second semester, and we have new recruits who will write, tell, and listen to more stories. In the fall, I interviewed Doreen, a girl who had become so skilled using Apple iMovie software that she began teaching others how to make movies on the computer. She expressed confidence in her ability to write: "I didn't know I had so many stories in me!" I am hopeful that our new storytellers will make the same discovery.
Jeeva Roche-Smith is site coordinator at DUSTY. She is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley.
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