I cut and pasted this from a pdf file that some doctoral candidate sent to me..shhhh...
Orientation
For
any time we interact with others or the material world we are attempting to
change the lead of common experience into something more than it was before.
(Cavelli, 2002, p. 17)
The opening narrative of my experience in this story
circle was written after a lab for a class on storytelling for peace and
justice, an undergraduate liberal arts class at a university in the
Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. For this particular class, I was a
teaching assistant in charge of facilitating discussions around helping
students apply themes from traditional, oral stories into their own digital
media projects around big ideas of peace and justice. In other words, I
mentored students on the process of transforming traditional narratives into
digital narratives where they projected themselves as central agents or actors
for peace and justice, a daunting task for any of us. Yet, it is a task I find
myself compelled to describe as I turn to investigate the lived experience of
digital storytelling for the projecting of peaceful and just narratives. The
discussion of authentic care and its manifestations in story heralded the
following guiding questions regarding this investigation: In what ways do
students enrolled in the Good Stories class use their experiences with story to
transform themselves into perceptive beings engaged in authentic care? What are
students’ experiences and conceptions of peace and justice? In what ways do
their experiences with stories, oral and digital, reflect upon their
experiences of peace and justice? What pedagogical insights may we distill from
the students’ experiences with using digital storytelling as a vehicle to
project narratives on big ideas like peace and justice?
In order to seek understandings of the lived-experiences of
digital storytelling in the present study, I employ hermeneutic phenomenology
as the methodology for this seeking. In addition, in order to discern a better
understanding of digital storytelling multimodal, multi-mediated essences, I
choose alchemy and its spiritual practices of using the synergy of “base”
experiences for transformation into a “just” soul; possibly just as important,
alchemy can be a guide showing us how to transmute our lived-experiences into
valuable digital stories to tell others.
Heidegger’s (1962)
analytic of Care as a result of our being thrown into a world means, for me,
“that Being gets to me,” which means that being calls to me. My way of being
seeks to use story as method to transmit
a peaceful and just narrative, which heralds the arrival of my caring and
seeking for understandings of digital stories mediated through digital places. I
am compelled to investigate the class on storytelling for peace and justice
because it creates an exigent role for narrative and digital narratives in
particular. It requires students to move beyond the autobiographical
celebration of their own lived-experiences into projecting stories to better
not only their own communities, but to act as counterfactuals to other dominant
narratives designed to coerce and oppress. My advisor, who created and teaches
this storytelling course and credits storyteller Idries Shah for the term, calls
these types of stories teaching-stories[1]:
stories we use to teach and learn. In order to move story into a
teaching-narrative, the story must have the capacity to be transformative for
the teller and the audience. The experience of telling and listening to
teaching-stories must provide a space allowing both audiences and storytellers
to see the possibilities for projecting their own narratives for peace and
justice. This requires the individual to transform herself into an agent, or
individual, with the purpose of disseminating positive change within her
community.
Transmuting the Philosopher’s Stone
Carl Jung (1963/1970) likens this transformation to the
individuation of a coherent “whole” self, a capable well functioning individual
capable of projecting positive change into her community. Jung uses alchemy as
the guiding principle of the psychological development of individuation.
Alchemists describe the process to heal disease or extend life as the creation
of the Philosopher’s Stone:
The
Philosopher’s Stone is a concept that describes the most sophisticated
psychology a person could ever hope to achieve. Accordingly, changing lead into
gold psychologically means transforming our base, unconscious nature
(symbolized by lead and called the prima
material) into the philosopher’s stone. (Cavelli, 2002, p. 21)
Cavelli (2002) continues to point out that our symbolic
and alchemical relationship to fire is “our awareness and our capacity to change
all that we see and touch” (p. 9), which alludes to how our narratives can
change our lifeworld. However, these narratives have the potential for
benevolence or malevolence. As educators, we should want all our students to
aspire to tell ameliorating narratives that heal our lifeworlds. However, not
all individuals will aspire to tell healing narratives; some may aspire to
manipulate and trick others like many email scams using stories of foreign
“princes” seeking help to transfer their “wealth.” In what ways are students
able to perceive ameliorating or coercive narratives? Does their experience in
critically looking at the different levels of narrative (Boyd, 2010), archetypal,
social/cultural, individual, and particular, allow students to be able to reflect
upon and deconstruct the important narratives in their lives in order to
determine or evaluate narratives as the transmuted “golden” narratives used to
teach others? A person’s individuated narrative, a narrative that has undergone
the alchemical transmutation turning into a “golden” narrative, has the
potential to project a teaching-story capable of healing and extending not only
the lives of others, but the quality of lives as well. This is a critical
function in today’s digitized world, where narratives can be spread “virally”
almost instantaneously through the networked
publics [2]interconnected
globally via the Internet.
During
our class discussion on authentic care, the discussion shifts toward one of the
big ideas of the good stories class, reciprocal altruism. After our remembering
of the youngest prince’s journey in the Grimm brothers’ Water of Life, the students begin to reflect on the story.
“I
think the youngest prince learned a lot about reciprocal altruism after his
brothers betrayed him by stealing the Water of Life and accusing the youngest
brother of trying to kill the king,” one student remarks.
“You
just can’t simply trust everyone, you have to be careful because some people
might take advantage of your kindness,” she continues.
Boyd (2010)
combines evolutionary theory and game theory to define reciprocal altruism as a maxim: “I help you in the expectation that
you may help me later” (p. 57). This maxim runs contrary to many survivalists
conceptions of evolution as well as early models of game theory, which focus on
constant-sum games (sometimes referred to zero-sum games) where in order for
one to score or win a point another has to lose an equivalent amount. Boyd’s
argument for reciprocal altruism plays the central role in the good stories
class because it is through the spirit of cooperation and collaboration with
others while discriminating against cheaters or people who “game” the system
where peace and just acts can be seen. The lens of reciprocal altruism begins
to define the big ideas of peace and justice within the good stories class.
For Boyd, the evolution of story, especially fictional
story, allows greater possibilities to teach cooperation and collaboration by
emplotting stories about sympathy, trust, gratitude, shame, indignation toward
cheaters, and guilt to keep me from “seeking the short-term advantages of
cheating” (p. 58). All these themes constructed around teaching reciprocal
altruism are built in and evolving through our capacities to tell stories. This
is how we as participants in the good stories class begin our journey to
amalgamate a story about our own role as a practitioner of reciprocal altruism.
This is the turning toward an understanding of peace and justice and our roles
in disseminating these ideas through digital narratives.
Most producers of digital videos use digital media to
recapture and tell meaningful experiences in their lives (Ito et al., 2010).
The underlying social purpose of most digital media, then, is to give memory to
one’s lived experiences and retell them in forms that are accessible and
meaningful for digital audiences: digital stories, or lived digital-stories.
Digital stories are multimodal/multimedial representations of lived experiences
using image(s), sound(s), and text(s) (speech and writing) presented, or
mediated through /in digital places. The interplay between images, sounds,
texts, and authors-tellers-audiences through the environmental architecture of
digitally mediated places opens a clearing for an existential examination
(lived-time, lived-body, lived-space, and lived-relationship) of our
experiences, participating as digital storytellers-memoirists-audiences within
these digital places. We experience these places, despite the illusion of
digital disembodiment, as an embodied threefold present with similar cohesion
to our experience of temporal events inherent in “traditional” narratives
(Carr, 1986; Ricoeur, 1984).
Gadamer (1975/1989) asserts in his analysis of history
and historicity that an unconscious teleology constructs our coherent understanding
of historical significance when we read or write history. Carr furthers
Gadamer’s assertion by explaining that the telos
projects the coherence of narrativity as to how we, as human beings, experience
the world. We have an innate desire to construct coherent narratives that give
purpose to the history embedded in our lives. Could this narrative telos design coherence in the narratives
of our lived experiences, which we can transmute into digital projects? What is
the meaning of coherence that is arrived at through image, sound, and language?
What are these experiences like in the lived stories of digitally mediated places
where narratives are always incomplete (Monaco, 2009), always becoming? What
are these experiences of digital stories and the places of lived digital-(re)telling
existentially? What does the transformation of digital narratives into
purposeful teaching-stories for peace and justice entail for students? These
experiential questions require ontological understandings of this phenomenon;
therefore, in order to come to a deeper human understanding of the lived
experience of lived-digital storytelling, I employ van Manen’s (1997)
methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology according to these guidelines for
human science inquiry:
(1)
turning to a phenomenon which seriously interests us and commits us to the
world;
(2)
investigating experience as we live it rather than as we conceptualize it;
(3)
reflecting on essential themes which characterize the phenomenon;
(4)
describing the phenomenon through the art of writing and rewriting;
(5)
maintaining a strong and oriented pedagogical relation to the phenomenon;
(6)
balancing the research context by considering parts and whole. (pp. 30-31)
My purpose for this
chapter, then, is to reflect on my turning, or (re)turning to the phenomenon of
telling lived-stories through digital media, or digital storytelling for the
purposes of creating narratives designed for establishing a more peaceful and
just world. The ultimate purpose, then, is to develop an understanding of the
following question: What is the lived experience of telling digital stories for
the purposes of peace and justice?
[1]
According to Shah (1978), “No account of teaching-stories can be really useful
unless there has been a recital of some these tales without any explanation at
all. This is because some of the effect can be prevented by an interpretation:
and the difference between an exposition and a teaching-event is precisely that
in the latter nobody knows what his or her reaction is supposed to be…so that
there can be a private reaction and a personal absorption of the materials” (p.
120).
[2]
boyd (2007) defines networked publics
as online places that have different interactions than face-to-face encounters.
There are four characteristics of networked
publics: persistence, searchability,
exact copyability, and invisible audiences. These characteristics will play a
significant role in describing digital architecture and the place of digital
story.
