Toward a Theory of Story for Digital Storytelling
R. Lester Walsh
rob.walsh@vcsu.edu
Dale Y. Hoskisson
dale.hoskisson@vcsu.edu
Valley City State University
USA
Abstract: Digital storytelling has the power to transform learners. This transformation
occurs through the intersection of self and technology. This paper examines the role of
digital storytelling strategies to create a space in which the student can learn, heal, and
create. What learners appear to gain from the preparation and delivery of digital
storytelling can only be described as therapeutic. The larger implications within adult
education for these findings are approaches to teaching and learning that connect learners
to their own lives and to the processes that lead to their productive participation within
society.
Introduction to Story
For time untold, stories have provided entertainment and conveyed information. Ancient
manuscripts such as the Bible (1979) and the Qur’an (1997) are replete with narrative. For example, the
story of Adam and Eve, found in both texts, buoy archetypes within the collective unconscious. These
archetypes reinforce ideas about the human condition such as the origin of sin, the existence of evil, and
gender superiority. Creation myths are among the earliest of recorded stories.
Storytelling is, arguably, the oldest form of education. Maguire (1985) elucidates the value of
storytelling as a means to relate to and build upon a sense of trust, particularly between a child and an adult.
The mechanism of narrative bridges a generational gap, reassuring a child that the adult can grasp her
thoughts and feelings. Storytelling develops the “minds eye,” cultivating attention span and retention
capacity and making vocabulary come alive.
Roger Shank (nd) engages the power of narration through his story-centered curriculum (SCC).
He explains that a good curriculum tells a story and that good education is built on stories. Through
narratives, a learner can participate in and feel deeply about what he is learning. A well-constructed SCC is
composed of real-life situations that include the bulk of the work that the students do and a series of events
that occasionally interrupt or enhance those activities.
The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt University created a series of video discs for
math instruction. The adventures are written like good detective novels with all the data necessary to solve
the adventure (plus additional data that are not relevant to the solution) embedded in the story. They rely in
the power of story to hook the students and keep them interested (Jasper, nd).
The means of presenting a story has evolved from the individual raconteur to troupes of players to
the written word to brightly colored illustrations to film and video to the current digital age and digital
storytelling.
What is Digital Storytelling?
Digital storytelling is a technical advancement of the “mind’s eye.” Lowenthal and Dunlap (2010)
define digital storytelling as a narrative told in digital format that shares a point of view, often the teller’s
point of view. The University of Houston’s Uses of Digital Storytelling depicts this technology as using
computer-based tools to tell stories, including a combination of digital photos and images, text, audio
narration, video clips and music. Daniel Meadows, British photographer and digital storyteller, defines
digital storytelling as personalized multimedia tales told from the heart. Meadows suggests that the beauty
of digital storytelling is that people anywhere can create and share them with the world (University of
Houston, nd).
The popularity of digital storytelling has increased in the last two decades. Digital storytelling is
used around the world (Yuksel, Robin & McNeil, 2011). The 5th International Digital Storytelling
Conference and Exhibition will be hosted by Hacettepe University, Faculty of Communication, in Ankara,
Turkey in May, 2013. The previous conference was held in Lillehammer, Norway.
Robin (2006) has classified digital storytelling into three categories—personal narratives, stories
that examine historical events, and stories that are primarily used to inform or instruct. It is little wonder
that digital storytelling is being used in various fields: non-profit development (SocialBrite, nd), corporate
training (Arbinger Institute, 2010), and education (Robin & McNeil, 2012).
The Theory of Story for Digital Storytelling
Traditional storytelling assists a learner to visualize like a media screen, creating a learning
environment in living color (Wellik, n.d.). Digital storytelling makes the media screen a central part of the
story event. Digital storytelling, as a language tool, is a profoundly effective as a teaching tool. The
transderivational role that digital storytelling plays in re-call actuates a whole body response to learning.
Narratives can ensure retention of the process and outcome of learning, playing a critical role in the success
of specific learning environments.
Combining digital storytelling in learning environments conveys students into four cycles of
awareness germane to captivating their attention. These awareness cycles include the following:
 Private planning and gathering thoughts.
 Portray the giant.
 Hold personal contact.
 Take in the entire audience.
Each cycle warrants explanation to illustrate how depictive approaches to teaching can impact speakers and
listeners.
Private Planning and Thought Gathering
Learners live inside narratives: “To be a person is to have a story to tell” (Keen & Valley-Fox, p.
8). Being as narrative portends a linguistic phenomenology. Yet learners don’t naturally realize that
knowledge of self and the capacity for language are singular. Language is to humans as water is to fish or
air is to birds. Therefore, a would-be digital storyteller must first extricate the self from the automation of
internal dialogue. Simultaneously, she must intuit this truism: “Every person is plural. There is no I without
we. Each of us was shaped by a social group” (Keen et al., p. 9). So then, selfhood is dependent upon
language, but identity is dependent on a social construction: “There is no psychology without sociology”
(p. 9). Both genuflect to philosophy, and philosophy kneels before story.
The irony of planning and gathering thoughts is the understanding of the dualistic yet monist self
yet other occurring simultaneously. This insight is the beginning place for the digital minstrel. Adults who
cannot escape the gravitational pull of the wounded child “face the world in bewilderment because of their
psychic poverty and lack of ability to imagine alternative pathways to move ahead” (Hill, p. 10). Stories,
Hill suggested, occur within archetypes of the human condition such that the feeling and resonance of a
story is an a priori collective (p. 11). The maturing storyteller apprehends that digital stories need time and
characters and imagination and emotion and rhythm and repetition and tone. The skilled raconteur becomes
the characters as an extension of personal power.
In this critical first stage, the reflective digital story-preparer will decide on the purpose of the
story by envisioning the audience and imagining the final outcome. Then, she will break the story into
short, manageable episodes. Doing so will aid in retention, and the unnecessary parts of the story can be
jettisoned. Moving from story-preparer to digital storyteller can begin by using the simplest technologies at
learners’ fingertips to bridge the episodes together.
Portraying the Giant
As the digital craftsperson weaves the tale, the audience is held spellbound. The storyteller
becomes aware of her own power—the power of legerdemain. The narrator, through the technology’s slight
of hand, disappears and the characters appear, an embodiment of Buber’s transformation of I – Thou from
the separate self to the existence inside an electronic relationship without bounds. This subject-to-subject
relationship is a unity of being (Buber, p. 13). Digital stories bring people together and hold people together
to share a common humanity. Digital stories are a vehicle to awareness.
In any storytelling venture, persistent memory is access to personal mythology. These reclaimed
memories are recollections that return from time-to-time as a reminder about past occurrences. These
remembrances are a creative force because they are the genesis of personal power yet unaware, a
metamorphosis in embryo. Recognizing seemingly disparate, yet transformative, events are valuable
insights: they may signal an opportunity for healing.
Healing is a gravitational force, a doorway to communicatae, from the Latin “to participate with.”
Where the person requires healing, she lacks participation. To participate is to be healthy within the
triangulation of mind, body, and essence (Caplan & Caplan, p. 61-66). Is there a more salient means to
prove participation than to take in the story of another and to share one’s own? Digital storytelling, then, is
the cornerstone of the teaching profession with three central purposes: to teach, to heal, and to entertain
(Zabel, p. 32-33). To do the latter well, the digital storyteller must portray the giant. When the storyteller
becomes the characters, she becomes the giant and offers passage by which the characters emerge while the
storyteller disappears right before the eyes of the audience. Into imagination, portraying the giant is the
selfless act in which the digital storyteller forgets herself for the benefit of participation.
Portraying the giant begins with choosing stories or versions of stories that are compelling and
comfortable for the teller and the audience. For stories that are borrowed, permission should be sought.
Pacing must be practiced to avoid speaking too slow or too fast. Beginning storytellers, like neophyte
public speakers, often deliver too rapidly, thinking they will forget their story. A device to slow the mind is
to “see the images in your head before you speak them to your audience” (Buvala, p. 17). However,
balance is important. Some beginners lather on too much paint rather than allow the audience’s imagination
to do its share of the work. The audience must be lured, and perhaps the most obvious talisman to gather
imagination is the use of voice. Inflection is a powerful technique to audience intrigue. Consider the
implications of adjusting the inflection in the following sentence:
Statement
I didn't say Minni stole my blue pen.
I didn't say Minni stole my blue pen.
I didn't say Minni stole my blue pen.
I didn't say Minni stole my blue pen.
I didn't say Minni stole my blue pen.
I didn't say Minni stole my blue pen.
I didn't say Minni stole my blue pen.
I didn't say Minni stole my blue pen.
Implication
Someone else said it.
Strong denial of having said it.
I didn’t say it; I wrote it!
Someone else stole it.
She did something else with it.
She stole someone else's pen.
She stole one of another color.
She stole something else blue.
(timelessteacherstuff.com, n.d.)
Digital storytellers are charged to attend to the technology used and to be mindful of the way language is
wielded.
Giants express emotions. Storytellers should too. Keen and Valley-Fox (1989) were frank about
the link between squelched social interaction and mental and physical health: “Psychological research
suggests that the people most predisposed to develop cancer are those who fail to express their emotions”
(p. 10). The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) levels insights into the collaborative effort of
storytelling and emotions:
Both tellers and listeners find reflections of themselves in stories. Through the language
of symbol, children and adults can act out through a story the fears and understandings
not so easily expressed in everyday talk. Story characters represent the best and worst in
humans. By exploring story territory orally, we explore ourselves…teachers can learn a
great deal about themselves. (NCTE, n.d.)
Portraying the giant resonates within a sequence of holism, a yin and yang of digital storyteller and of
audience.
Hold Personal Contact
Anyone who has access to language and access to technology can create digital stories, but
creating pictures in the mind so these images can be relayed electronically to connect with an audience
requires initiative and strategy. The storyteller needs her audience. The energy of the audience fuels the
stories forward and may even instruct her in a choice of material. The authentic storytelling experience
becomes a meditation for both the listener and the storyteller. Antecedent psychologists such as Freud and
Jung knew the power of stories to bridge dissociations caused by neglect or trauma. Einstein also
understood the power of language to affect liberty. He proclaimed, “The significant problems we face
cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them” (Covey, p. 42). Complete
abolition from the self may not be possible, but boundaries for self-disclosure can be established through
digital stories. At the source of digital storytelling is the dervish, the blending of thought and technology.
Take in the Entire Audience
By engaging the entire audience, the digital storyteller must use deliberate methodology. For
example, compelling imagines that catch the eye will set the stage for the entire event. Prentice digital
storytellers may tend to use imagery in a predictable pattern. Savvy storytellers ensure combining imagery
that illustrate and language that generate to engage their entire audience.
Generating Stories for Social Interaction
Stories emerge from three patterns within the nature of reality: surviving, adjusting, and
encountering. Stories of struggle are a catalyst for change and the strength to transform. Freud’s deep
understanding of this paradigm led to the enmeshment of Greek mythology into his theories as a means for
intuiting the depth of the subconscious mind—his gift via Schelling to Western thought. [Source?] From
the Oedipal Complex to the Narcissus Complex, Freud provided the doorway to symbols through narrative.
He understood implicitly that habits are borne out of urge to survive. The need to survive occurs through
instinct in animals but through stories in humans. The hero or heroine’s journey is a dynamic source for
rich and powerful stories (Bristow, p. 18). And by working in the third person, the digital storyteller
manages survival sans anxiety (p. 19). Survival stories bring people together and hold people together by
sharing a common humanity. Survival stories teach.
Digital storytelling as adjustment has the timbre of healing. Many adjustment stories contain a
message, a lesson learned. Adjustment stories may begin as persistent memories, but within the context of
the story, the memory is a butterfly suddenly appeared for the first time as it flutters in the garden of the
mind as it had done unnoticed over the seasons of time. The digital story creates a bridge of language to
expanse over the silence that has been the inexorable jailor. A life story stays the same until it is told out
loud (Satir, 1994). Because humans survive trauma through dissociation, digital stories create access to
overcoming intrapersonal obstacles. The digital storyteller should be forewarned: success in adjustment
comes at a price, and that price is discomfort. Convictions are both bonds and bindery. Adjustment stories
heal.
Stories as encounters are those which lead to what Abraham Maslow referred to as selfactualization. Encountering life is synonymous with departure. A Maslow assertion illustrates this journey
to awareness: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it
were a nail” (Maslow, p. 15). The digital storyteller who encounters also creates, and through the story the
teller has a structure and a means. In other words, this storyteller is at the center of cause rather than
situated at the din of effect. The locus of control shifts to collaboration in which the raconteur can check the
reality of self and others in any given situation. Whether through pre-cognition or pre-consciousness, the
sub-conscious mind knows how to be connected and how to be part of a relationship (Richo, p. 57). Digital
stories become a way to establish boundaries for self-disclosure to maintain connections that build rapport
and sustainability. Encounter stories create.
Conclusion
To create digital stories, the storyteller recaptures memory. Recall is, given time’s arrow,
transderivational, yet learners encounter what they need through story. Listeners are engaged with both
known and new understandings of language and technology through narrative. New words build new
contexts. Through the construction of digital storytelling, the learner first notices and then becomes aware
of her own process as subtle as this moral code is. Educators have a tremendous ally in digital storytelling.
Too often, going to school can be an interruption of one’s education, but through narratives, the teacher can
intuit the most important of questions such as What do you want? What are you interested in? Digital
stories are conduits for teachers in order to recognize the state of flow in learners. The most insightful of
educators use digital stories to move a student from what they appear to self and others to what occurs as
potential. In short, the teacher is an arranger of successes.
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