Interactive Digital Storytelling with Refugee Children

"Stories are more than just good for us-t hey are essential to survival."-Jason Ohler, Digital Storytelling in the Classroom, p. 9It is mid-morning in July, 2011, and I am work- ing with 30 young learners in a computer lab on the college campus where I teach. The stu- dents, members of families resettled as refugees, are learning English as an additional language, and they have spent the last few weeks on our cam- pus, participating in an academic summer camp designed specifically to offer them opportunities to strengthen their skills in reading, writing, listening, speaking, and presenting.In today's lesson, I am demonstrating the ele- ments of an interactive digital story-a multimedia text that includes hyperlinks to allow readers to make decisions about plot divergences in the nar- rative. Before coming to the lab, the students had worked in small groups alongside language arts teachers as they maneuvered through the initial phases of this project: generating story ideas, plot- ting, structuring the divergences in the stories, and outlining. The interactive digital stories serve as a culminating assignment in the intensive five-week curriculum for the camp (for which I served as the lead curricular designer). Week Three has brought the students to the lab to translate their stories from their writing journals and note cards to PowerPoint, a presentation software product often available on the computers in elementary and middle schools in the United States.When I invite a volunteer (all student names are pseudonyms) to come to the demonstration sta- tion to remind the class how to hyperlink an arrow to a scene in the story, at least a dozen hands lurch into the air."Almaz, you'd like to show us?" A smiling nine-year-old girl from Eritrea leaps from her chair."OK, Almaz, walk us through the steps to draw an arrow and then to hyperlink it to the two possible branches of the story." Almaz guides the computer mouse to the Shapes icon. She clicks and selects the image of an arrow."Tell us what you are doing," I prompt.Almaz uses the vocabulary she has been work- ing to develop. She nods at the computer screen as she forms the instructions and drags the mouse across the desk: "This go click, then move mouse, make a arrow." Mimicking the demonstration, the other students in the lab return to their own stories and begin clicking as well.Creating multimedia ProjectsJane Hill and Kathleen Flynn point out in Class- room Instruction That Works with English Language Learners (2006) that "nonlinguistic methods of learning are particularly important" for English lan- guage learners (ELLs; p. 36). Digital storytelling, "the art of telling stories with multimedia objects including images, audio, and video" (Rossiter & Garcia, 2010, p. 37), is a versatile instructional strategy, easily adapted for a variety of language arts objectives. It holds unique potential, however, as a literacy-building tool for children with refugee status, whose lives have been disrupted by politi- cal conflicts, ethnic strife, and war. The disruption typically includes extended stays in refugee camps, limited access to quality formal education, and minimal opportunity to develop the types of school- related skills required to thrive in US classrooms, all factors that compound the difficulties implicit in studying in an additional language. To produce an original digital story, students must practice a rich array of literacy skills and technology proficiencies. Furthermore, the emphasis on visual language-in the form of structured sequential images-offers speakers learning English a mode for sharing per- sonal narratives that feels engaging and "taps skills and talents . . . that might otherwise lie dormant within students [and] that will serve them well in school, at work, and in expressing themselves per- sonally" (Ohler, 2005/2006, p. 47).Refugee students are "capable of success when given the right kind of support" (McIntyre, Kyle, Chen, Kraemer, & Parr, 2009, p. …