Teaching Through DST

Digital Storytelling (DST) is a student-centred approach to learning that puts students in the driver's seat, helping them to develop creativity, critical thinking, decision-making, and digital skills (Quah & Ng, 2022). Social studies can be viewed by students as a subject that either lives in historical times or requires memorization of irrelevant information and DST can be an effective tool to change how students think about the subject.

This section provides a few examples of ways that using DST in the social studies classroom can meet the needs of 21st century learners. 

The process of creating a digital story is inherently interdisciplinary. Students must use literacy skills, including writing, speaking, reading and listening skills throughout the process, as well as digital literacy skills to find and properly cite or create media, and content knowledge for the subject area (Quah & Ng, 2020; Rohloff, 2022). 

There is also a trend toward connections between storytelling and the maker movement, for example, by making scenes or props for stories and integrating applied design and engineering subjects. Within different curricular areas, DST also helps develop organizational skills, technology skills, presentation skills, interview skills, and interpersonal skills, among others, helping prepare students for college or the workforce (Rohloff, 2021). They highlight how preparing students to use digital technology “is not just another option, it is a necessity” and how even digital natives need these opportunities as educators cannot assume that students are more technologically literate than their parents.

The example below is a digital story that can be used to teach students about social studies concepts related to global inequalities, which also integrates literacy and/or ADST:

Educators can teach narrative story structure as they would through normal story-writing activities, including a three-act structure, hero’s journey or seven-point story structure. 

The Center for Digital Storytelling states there are seven interrelated elements to consider when creating meaningful and desired stories: 

• the point of view

• the dramatic question

• the emotional content

• the gift of voice

• the economy or length of the story

• the soundtrack

• the pacing 

Moreover, DST has been described as having five stages (Kirikci et al., 2020) : 

1. writing the story

2. voicing and recording the story

3. collecting media

4. creating 

5. sharing 

However, as students could make their stories about a concept in any content area, Quah and Ng (2020) state that this process begins with selecting and researching a topic.