Digital Stories of Coming to Learn

In this project, I worked with a method called 'digital storytelling'. This method is functions in several ways: as a practice of community development and community-based education, as a method for gathering data in the form of first-person multimedia narratives, and as a medium for representing learning. In collaboration with two community-based organizations in Toronto - Central Neighbourhood House and the Centre for Community Learning and Development - we conducted two digital storytelling workshops and in-depth interviews with approximately 20 immigrant women were in downtown Toronto.

My analysis of the research data explores, first, the social and psychological factors that effect immigrant women's access to community-based adult education, and second, how the digital stories of these women, and the processes of their production, might function as transitional and transnational spaces that allow for the complex negotiation of multiple selves, times and places. Through this study, I have become particularly interested in both the limits and the possibilities of self-expression and the complex relationship between knowing the self and representing the self.

In the digital stories created by the women in the study, the coherence of the spoken autobiographical narrative is both undermined and enriched by the various ruptures, contradictions, and gaps posed by the juxtaposition of multiple sound, text, and visual images. In this way, the stories offer complex insights into the experience of migrating and not migrating, growing up and not growing up, leaving home and not leaving home, being a daughter and not being a daughter, being Canadian and not being Canadian, and so on. In their stories, these women occupy multiple selves and their experiences do not fit easily within the totalizing discourses that aim to locate 'women' and 'immigrant women' in particular ways.

This project was funded by the Canadian Council on Learning.