Keywords

It is often said that storytelling is the foundation of human experience. We learn about the world and share our learning through stories. According to McDrury and Alterio (2003), among others, storytelling is a uniquely human experience, by means of which we not only make sense of past experiences, but also convey emotions and values, and connect with other people.

Stories are among the most powerful tools of anyone concerned with education or learning, whether formal or informal. It is through stories that we learn those things we need to know about being part of, and navigating, a family, group, organization or society [1]. Lindemann Nelson highlights the need for stories to give meaning to abstract sets of morals and ethical theories [2]. By making the universal particular, she suggests, stories give us the chance to connect individual experience with socially shared realities such as power and gender, wealth and health, pandemics, war, migration and climate change. Although research paradigms might privilege data that can be presented in the form of quantitative statistics, it is important to recognise that qualitative data is a necessary balance to such an overly quantitative approach, particularly when professional judgements are required, as is the case in education, health and social care and, indeed, any profession where human beings are central. According to Sumner, ‘statistics tell us how the system experiences the individual; stories tell us how the individual experiences the system’ (Sumner 2009). Stenhouse [3] offers an elegant and succinct argument for the use of stories in improving professional judgment in education. He writes thus [3]:

‘There is a need to capture … the texture of reality which makes judgment possible for an audience. This cannot be achieved in the reduced, attenuated accounts of events which support quantification. The contrast is between the breakdown of questionnaire responses of 472 married women respondents who have had affairs with men other than their husbands and the novel, Madame Bovary. The novel relies heavily on that appeal to judgment which is appraisal of credibility in the light of the reader’s experience. You cannot base much appeal to judgment on the statistics of survey; the portrayal relies almost entirely on appeal to judgment.’

We find and make meaning through stories. We can tell stories to entertain and to teach. We also tell stories to heal and to bring about change and transformation. In this respect, digital stories, which are readily transmissible via the internet, provide particularly valuable opportunities to learn from personal experience and build on that experience to design and deliver services that are suitable for the constituent group, whether these are students, patients, service users, immigrants, refugees or other vulnerable populations. Chamberlin goes one step further, highlighting the role of stories in enabling us to hold and grasp both wonder and wondering simultaneously:

‘Every story brings the imagination and reality together in moments of what we might call faith. Stories give us a way to wonder how totalitarian states arise, or why cancer cells behave the way they do, or what causes people to live on the streets… and then come back again in a circle to the wonder of a son… or a supernova…. Or DNA. Wonder and wondering are closely related, and stories teach us that we cannot choose between them. If we try, we end with the kind of amazement that is satisfied with the first explanation, or the kind of curiosity that is incapable of genuine surprise. Stories make the world more real, more rational, by bringing us closer to the irrational mystery at its centre. Why did my friend get sick and die? Why is there so much suffering in the world? Whose land is this we live on? How much is enough?’ [4]

1 Digital Storytelling

Although the term ‘digital storytelling’ has become ubiquitous in the digital age of the twenty-first century, it was not always so. First coined by Joe Lambert, Dana Atchley et al, ‘digital storytelling’ described a creative workshop process that led participants through the process of creating a short video using then-new technology in the shape of a laptop computer and video editing software. Inspired by the home movies created on cine cameras by Dana Atchley’s family, the combination of new technologies, creativity honed in theatres and creative writing workshops, a kind of idealism drawing on Freire’s approach to emancipatory education, and the support of funding from Apple Computers, Lambert et al. ran the first digital storytelling workshop in Los Angeles, California, in 1993 [5].

These technological developments wrested the monopoly of filmmaking away from well-funded movie directors and placed the possibility of creating short, personal videos within the grasp of everyone, regardless of age, class, educational attainment, or ability; with a bit of support, anyone could become the director of their own short film.

The model of a carefully facilitated and curated workshop for a small number of people that combines elements of creative writing, reflection, careful listening, photography, community theatre and small group work has become known as the ‘classical’ model of digital storytelling. Classical digital stories are normally short (2–3 min) videos that weave together a recorded voiceover, still images and/or short video clips and sometimes music or other sound effects into a rich tapestry of experience and reflection. They are characterised by the authentic voice of the storyteller and a degree of emotional openness that encourages viewers to make a connection with the storyteller and his or her experiences [6]. They are truly multimodal, drawing upon multiple techniques and technologies that engage the different senses through seeing, hearing and reading.

It is this classical model of digital storytelling that informs the work of Patient Voices, a digital storytelling project established in 2003 as an educational resource with the aim of restoring humanity and compassion to healthcare through the creation and dissemination of digital stories created by those who receive and deliver healthcare—and sometimes the lack of it. The actor James Earl Jones said ‘one of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter’ [7]. During 20 years of facilitating digital storytelling workshops, it has been humbling to see that those who are seldom heard and who may not even believe they have a voice—those we might describe as vulnerable—are able to articulate and describe—in words and images—their deepest pain and most heartfelt longings. By creating a digital story, they are able ‘to convey their felt experiences of healthcare, via new technology, so that their voices can be heard in any lecture theatre, Board room or conference venue anywhere in the world’ [8]. Use of these digital stories to prompt reflection, discussion and debate would, it was reasoned, result in a recognition of our shared humanity and, hopefully, to improvements in healthcare design and delivery. These same aspirations can be applied to education, social care or, as indicated above, any endeavour that has human beings and their existence as its central focus.

Both StoryCenter and Patient Voices have worked around the world, with people from across the spectrum of age, race, gender, class and ability, listening deeply to their stories about the subject in which they are inevitably the expert: their own experience and existence. Those unable to write are supported by someone who can; those unable to use a computer have a ‘chauffeur’ to follow their instructions in a collective attempt to distil the story to its very essence, to get to the heart of the story. This is a pedagogy alongside and not driven by the teacher leading from the front or influencing from behind.

Both StoryCenter and Patient Voices owe much to the democratising work of Paulo Freire [9]. Determined to liberate peasant farmers from the shackles of illiteracy, Freire built their confidence and competence by starting with what they already knew: their own existence and experience of subsistence farming. The emancipatory work of classical digital storytelling opens the possibility of a deeper understanding of individual existence through close and creative examination of a storyteller’s experience or experiences, illuminated by the collective consciousness of all the members of the group. This process often results in new insights and is reported by many storytellers to be transformative [10].

The remainder of this chapter will consider how the support of existential philosophy can increase our understanding of how the process of classical digital storytelling can lead to new ways of knowing, including but not limited to a deeper understanding of our shared humanity and recognition of the importance of community. In what follows, we will look at the deep sharing and examination of personal stories that occur in a digital storytelling workshop through an existential-phenomenological lens and consider the kinds of knowing that may result from the process.

2 What Happens in a Classical Digital Storytelling Workshop?

The schedule for a typical classical digital storytelling workshop is full and varied (see Table 1 below as an example). Before the Covid-19 pandemic, most workshops were held face-to-face in person, over the course of 3 days; travel restrictions imposed by national lockdowns kickstarted what was previously an experimental approach to online workshops so that these were able to establish themselves as a norm. Despite some reluctance to depart from the intimacy and immediacy of face-to-face workshops, it has to be said that there are some advantages to the online model, not least the huge savings in time, money and carbon emissions and, of course, the possibility for participation from anywhere in the world. The Patient Voices online workshop model derives, as does the face-to-face model, from the pioneering work of StoryCenter and relies on a somewhat heady blend of reflection, creative writing, image creation, selection and editing, voice coaching and recording, video editing, group and individual work that results in the final digital story—a distillation of all these ingredients that is, as one storyteller commented: ‘pure, clear and potent’ (Tait 2009)—a bit like good whisky.

Table 1 Depicting seven sessions in a digital story telling workshop
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But first, let us set out a plan of what happens in a typical workshop, whether online or in-person; a session, whether online or in-person, equates to roughly 2 hours. In all Patient Voices workshops there is an icebreaker that involves asking each participant in turn: ‘please tell us your name (or whatever you would like us to call you) and then tell us three things you really like and three things you really dislike’.

Individual work is any time that is not occupied by specific teaching; in face-to-face workshops, participants work individually on laptops provided, with plenty of support from facilitators. Online workshops necessitate working remotely, but participants are encouraged to arrange individual meetings with facilitators during all stages of the process from script work through to completion of the final video.

Such an outline plan, while useful for scheduling purposes, and for giving participants some idea of the range of activities with which they will be engaged and the different kinds of knowledge and skills they may hope to acquire, does little more than scratch the surface of what actually happens in a workshop. These courses are inherently experiential and, therefore, difficult to describe, certainly if words are our only descriptive tools. Visual methods provide different opportunities for exploration and description. Darcy Alexandra employed this approach, in part, in her doctoral thesis on digital storytelling as transformative practice [11]. Another attempt to understand what happens in a digital storytelling workshop resulted in a short documentaryFootnote 1 that captures something of the essence of the experience, [12] but even this falls short of revealing the essential experience.

Before going on, it must be noted that digital storytelling workshops are inherently a collective and communal experience and digital stories are co-creations, owing their existence as much to the facilitators and workshop participants as to the individual storytellers. The stories—and the storytellers—cannot help but influence each other as their stories weave in and out of individual and group focus. Crisan and Dunford put it like this:

‘On the surface these digital stories are all singular, personal audio-visual accounts of an individual’s story, yet—the making of them is shaped by the collaborative experience in the workshop. Each story shows how someone envisages their place in a personal and a public world. They all bridge the past, present and the future. Particular sets or groups of stories acquire a wider representative meaning and, in doing this, say something deeper about the place they come from.’ [13].

3 Philosophy, Phenomenology and Ways of Knowing

In this section we will explore philosophically inspired approaches and, in particular, those inspired by phenomenology, to further illuminate the experiences of participants in a digital storytelling workshop. Traditionally, phenomenology is about reducing the concerns of the individual to describe and focus upon experiences unaffected by social, structural or other forms of explanation. In technical terms, this is known as ‘the phenomenological reduction’, as in meditating upon a life-changing event and how it is experienced (Puligandla 1970). Such a view aligns with those ‘stories’ where events are simply laid out for the viewer with minimal interpretation added by the storyteller. This form of storytelling echoes the tradition of the chroniclers of the Middle Ages who presented successive lists of events as a narrative, where the touch of the storyteller is reduced to the barest minimum (Sharfman 2015).

However, in the digital storytelling of the workshop format presented above, the minimalist view of the chronicler is lost. The focus is still upon the existential experience of the individual, a key trait of the phenomenological reduction, but the stories often include the sharing of interpretative judgements and ethical dilemmas that demonstrate the importance of knowledge and skills founded upon phronesis. Socio-cultural, economic and political explanations are more often referenced. Moreover, while phronesis is honed by the storyteller, the listener or viewer is also invited, as they engage with the story, to make their own meanings.

The phenomenological method in storytelling cultivates a mode of wondering, we may come to see what we thought we knew in a different light or imagine different worlds and the progression of stories. Such insights and imaginings may be unsettling and so care of the storyteller or those experiencing the story is important; and yet moments of astonishing realisations or epiphanies may lead to a transformation in the way existence in the world is experienced (Dobson 2010).

The tradition of phenomenology is well-known in the wake of French philosopher-novelists such as Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. In their work it is the role of the individual pitted against larger societal forces that occupies centre stage. As we try to understand digital storytelling workshops and the collaborative work of participants, we have also been inspired by the later work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He recognised our interconnectedness, even our interdependence, with one another. Merleau-Ponty believed that philosophy should be concerned with establishing a dialogue with the world that makes sense (Deurzen 2009). He introduced the term chiasm to explain the shared intercorporeal space of bodies, signs (signifier, signified) and history working together and giving rise to corporeal experiences of touched-touching, seen-seeing, speaking-spoken to and so on (Dobson 2004). In a handshake for example, who touching who?

This constitutes a radical overturning of Western dualistic thinking, which has been founded upon the separation between body and mind, between the seer and the object of sight, between touching and being touched, and the independence of the I from the Other. We are forced to acknowledge that everything is intertwined with—or interdependent—on everything else. In a similar vein, contemporary existential philosopher and psychotherapist Emmy van Deurzen has built upon the work of earlier existential philosophers to propose a model of human existence comprising four inter-related existential dimensions: physical, social, personal and spiritual [14]. In order to understand another’s experience of the world, a phenomenological exploration of all four dimensions is essential to the process of healing and progress towards wholeness. Figure 1 below represents the dimensions:

Fig. 1
A pyramid diagram represents the following four dimensions, spiritual (good or evil), personal (identity or freedom), social (love or hate), and physical (life or death).

Emmy van Deurzen’s four dimensions of existence

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Even with a layer of judgement or interpretation, the creation of digital stories is not intended to be therapy, but it may be—and often is—therapeutic. With Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm and van Manen’s interest in the therapeutic we are conceptually equipped to understand the digital storytelling workshop itself as a source of experience. Thus conceived, phenomenology provides a useful lens through which to view the lived existential experiences of individuals, before, during and even after a digital storytelling workshop, and ‘explain how a particular group of individuals in a certain place or institutional context have certain experiences’ [15].

4 The Centrality of Phronesis in Storytelling Circles

In the search for phronesis (wisdom), it is said that all roads lead to the same place. Religion, philosophy and belief systems all seek to make sense of human existence and, in doing so, suggest a variety of practices that are designed to support the search for understanding. Phenomenology is one such path; Buddhism is another. There are some striking similarities between these two world views, and both may offer a way to view the practice of digital storytelling. Without going into too much detail, the former operates with a number of steps in examining experience (the epoché, eidetic and transcendental reductionFootnote 2) while Buddhist practice tends to focus on awareness of the here and now, noticing in particular the ways in which we experience our human existence, that is, through the body, the feelings, perceptions, thoughts and consciousness. Ultimately, Buddhist practitioners are encouraged to acknowledge our lack of separateness, recognising the nature of what Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh calls ‘interbeing’, not only with other human beings but with the whole universe [16]. This is also the fundamental truth of the African philosophy of Ubuntu, summarised in the phrase: ‘I am because you are’; Archbishop Desmond Tutu explains this concept thus: ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in what is yours’ [17].

It is worth noting that digital storytelling also passes through a set of stages that mimetically echo an increasing reflection upon the creative shared process of a storytelling workshop. The Seven Steps of Digital Storytelling (see Table 2 below), developed by Joe Lambert and colleagues at StoryCentre are a case in point [18]. Following these steps results in the final story which, in turn, reveals the chiasm proposed by Merleau-Ponty the phenomenologist: the inter-corporeal experiences of touched-touching, seen-seeing and speaking-spoken.

Table 2 The seven steps of digital storytelling
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5 Owning Your Insights

As the story circle begins, there is an air of nervous expectation as storytellers who, until now, have likely been strangers, focus inward, thinking about the words they might use to tell this particular story, or perhaps still searching for a story to tell. Each person is invited to ‘tell the story only you can tell, a story from the heart’, in other words, an individual and subjective view of something important to the storyteller. As each storyteller finds the words to relate their experience, others in the circle are invited to listen with their whole being, with eyes and heart as well as ears, striving to hear the words that are not spoken as well as those that are.

According to colleague and storytelling facilitator Angeline Koh (in a personal conversation with Hardy), ‘StoryTELLING is never complete without StoryLISTENING. In the traditional Chinese character reproduced within Image 1, the word LISTEN 聽 (pronounced “ting”) is made up of several Chinese characters...耳 meaning ears, 十目 ten eyes, 一心 one heart. When you listen to someone in this way, you treat him/her like a king 王. The English word LISTEN also spells SILENT when the letters are re-ordered. To listen is to be quiet so as to give the storyteller your undivided attention.

Image 1
The Chinese characters represent the English words listen and silent.

The Chinese character Listen, the English words listen and silent

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Comments are made and questions are asked in an attempt to help each storyteller understand how their story might be perceived by another. Listeners seek clarification, and offer possible insights from outside the storyteller’s experience, helping to deepen the story, to make it the best story it can possibly be. As we go around the circle, the stories—and the storytellers—begin to interweave themselves as fragments of words and phrases float around the room, some taking root in the consciousness of another.

6 Owning Your Emotions

Tears are not uncommon in the story circle. One storyteller may pass a box of tissues to another while respectful silence allows space for recovery and continuation of the story. Questions asked by facilitators might be: ‘Why this story? ‘Why this story now?’ and ‘How do you want your audience to feel?’ in answering them the storyteller is offered the opportunity to reveal the meaning and the accompanying emotions. As emotions are identified and named, the meaning of the story often becomes even clearer. But this is difficult work to do alone. Working together, facilitators and storytellers can name and share the feelings evoked by the storyteller.

7 Finding the Moment

As we listen with eyes, ears and heart, it is not difficult to identify the moment in the story that may be the moment of crisis or that of greatest change, as the storyteller’s voice drops in pitch, after a pause, and the eyes glisten with tears. If successfully identified, this moment may help to clarify the purpose of the story and illuminate the insight even further. Although the moment in question may be in the past, it is of course, now also in the present, and in the presence of the others in the circle, wending its way to a future in which that moment has led to understanding and possible transformation. Skogvoll and Dobson [19] have used the Norwegian term ‘blikk for øyebikk’ (awareness of the moment) to capture the significance of how particular moments carry more weight and opportunity to influence the future direction of following moments.

These first three steps may take place over many hours, as individual storytellers and their stories gradually become part of the collective story, talking with others who are not, now, quite so other, seeking to understand as well as to be understood.

8 Seeing Your Story

As the script of the story nears completion and storytellers’ insights become more internalised, the focus of the work moves away from the mind and the thoughts that are formed in words and towards the eye and the images that will reveal another layer of the story or tell parts of the story that words cannot describe. Storytellers are invited to attend, mindfully, to the images they see in their mind’s eye and to construct a visual strategy that has been described as ‘a conversation between the words and the pictures’ (Alexandra 2015) in the story. There are some experiences for which words are inadequate; Ansel Adams, the great American landscape photographer, famously said ‘When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence’ [20].

9 Hearing Your Story

Hearing one’s own voice is a less-than-pleasant experience for many storytellers as self-consciousness battles with authenticity in the struggle to convey the emotion of the story. However, storytellers are always the best people to relate their own stories, reinforcing the uniqueness of each story with the indelible stamp of their own rhythms and cadences, their own words and phrases and enabling listeners to hear the hint of a smile, the crack of a voice signalling distress. Listening to their own voice, storytellers also gain insight into how others hear them and often learn to slow down, pause for breath or, aware of their audience, perhaps to choose different words.

The spoken word is very different from the written word and writing a script that is intended to be spoken can be very illuminating for people who are accustomed to writing, requiring them to think about the audience they hope to reach and the impact they hope to have. Preparation for recording a voiceover may include breathing exercises, seemingly endless repetition/rereading of the script, adapting where necessary to eliminate stumbles or inappropriate phraseology. This opportunity to hear oneself repeatedly is like an audio version of seeing oneself reflected in a mirror and often culminates in a sort of self-acceptance or even forgiveness for a voice that has been dismissed or even disliked until this point. Of course, for many people—those who are seldom heard—the creation of a digital story and recording a voiceover may represent a moment of liberation, when one can finally reveal to the world a story that has been demanding to be told.

10 Assembling Your Story

Moving into the more technical elements of digital storytelling, storytellers now focus on how words—mostly spoken but sometimes written—will intertwine with images and perhaps other sounds such as music, birdsong, traffic, waves crashing on a beach or whatever other sounds may enhance the story and viewers’ experience of it. Video editing software enables easy and straightforward mingling of words and pictures, bringing the story to life and adding new dimensions. Storytellers are encouraged to think about the first image viewers will see, and the last, bearing in mind that these are likely to be the ones that viewers remember and to consider whether image editing or treatments such as panning or zooming may enhance or deepen the meaning of a particular image. It is this part of the process that is initially terrifying and ultimately hugely rewarding for anyone who is anxious about technology, often resulting in enormous pride in the completed digital story.

11 Sharing Your Story

Much as Ansel Adams once said ‘There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer’ [21], there are always at least two people involved in a story: the storyteller, the facilitator, all those who share the same workshop experience, and then all the people who watch that story, viewing the story through the lens of their own experience and lending their own interpretations.

From the earliest steps in the workshop, storytellers are encouraged to consider their audience with questions like ‘Who is this story for?’ ‘What is the purpose of your story?’ ‘How do you want your audience to feel when they watch your story?’ ‘What would you like them to do?’ ‘How do you think they might feel?’ ‘How will you feel if someone from your family/school/community or a complete stranger watches your story?’ It is very important to protect storytellers from any unwanted repercussions from sharing their story and so making them aware of the implications of releasing their stories is crucial. Not all storytellers will want to release their stories but those who do should be carefully guided through the entire process to ensure that any words or images that might potentially present a danger to them or to anyone else should be seriously considered. Anonymity is obviously a possibility, but many storytellers are so proud of their accomplishment that they want to be named—again, this is a topic for serious consideration. Ethical guidelines for digital storytelling workshops have been devised in an attempt to pre-empt any possible harm coming to digital storytellers and these should be studied by facilitators of digital storytelling workshops [22, 23].

Ethical issues aside, sharing stories provides such an opportunity for celebration, communion and the deepening of community; at the end of every workshop, the stories that have been created are screened for the participants and, if appropriate or desirable, their friends, family and colleagues. These occasions are always a combination of joy and relief, apprehension and accomplishment, when the story tellers become story viewers and recognise that, in the words of one storyteller ‘Our stories are not just our individual stories, but they are also the collective story’.

As the workshop ends, storytellers return to their everyday lives and their stories, with permission, may become part of the digital universe, the distinction between self and other dissolves and the interconnectedness of stories, storytellers and the wider digital audience seems to illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm as well as the Buddhist doctrine of Interbeing. As Mitch Albom said, ‘each affects the other and the other affects the next and the world is full of stories and the stories are all one.’ [24].

Even this brief resumé of the Seven Steps indicates the range of different kinds of Aristotelian knowledge to be discovered during the course of a digital storytelling workshop: empirical knowledge (episteme) is acquired through learning how to write an effective story and the use of a storyboard; technical knowledge (techne) is acquired through image and video editing and the acquisition of IT skills; aesthetic knowledge underpins the choice and juxtaposition of images and sounds and wisdom (phronesis)—or at least knowing oneself better—is often the result of this deeply reflective process.Footnote 3

12 Conclusion—Storytelling as Transformation

Digital storytelling is both process, that is, the expression and creation of a digital story—and product, that is, the finished digital story. The end and the means are inextricably interwoven, much as the stories in any given group are also inextricably interwoven. Moreover, there is a final stage that must be acknowledged and that is the potential afterlife of the digital story as it is posted potentially on a platform that might be public or of a more private character belonging to the story circle participants.

We have sought to explore the practice of classical digital storytelling as an existential experience; in particular, we have investigated the various activities involved in a digital storytelling workshop through the lens of phenomenology. We have seen how the creation, expression and sharing of stories as part of a carefully facilitated group process promotes a sense of inclusion, interconnectedness and belonging; relationships between storytellers deepen even as the stories develop, and insights abound. The deep listening that is encouraged in the workshop serves to honour and amplify the voices of those who are not always heard while, at the same time, establishing strong connections between storytellers. This inter-corporeal sharing, speaking, listening, reflecting, seeking to understand are the foundations of a sense of belonging, recognised and expressed by many storytellers as being part of the collective story.

Transformation takes many forms, but many storytellers have described what one storyteller described as ‘seismic’ changes. What the German philosopher Novalis described as ‘the wish to be everywhere at home’ [25] is expressed by theologian Jean Vanier as ‘finding the freedom to be themselves and to claim, accept and love their own personal story with all its brokenness and beauty’ [26]. Reconnecting with oneself enables connection with other people and places and so it seems fitting to end with the words of one particular storyteller in a workshop several years ago: ‘I just feel more myself—like so many pieces of myself have been brought back together’.