Potenza

About Me

Professional background and current role

I am a health librarian working in an NHS Acute Trust. We have Technology Enhanced Learning in my team so we are always innovating by levering the advantages that technology can bring. The reason why I wanted to do the MA in Online Distance Education was to learn about the pedagogical theories that can be used to underpin utilising various technologies and wanted to make sure my team and I were making evidence based technological decisions too. I manage the library services but also have a wider education role.

Why you found the project interesting and how this project maps to the context I have described

Pre-COVID I was due to be involved in a project that was looking at using digital storytelling to explore the issues faced by offenders in accessing healthcare services whilst in prisons. The digital stories were to be shown to clinicians external to prisons to establish whether these would enable them to understand the stigmatisation and the issues faced by prisoners when accessing healthcare services. This was to me an extremely interesting concept.

In addition, our Trust Executive Team have spent a lot of resource to address some of the social, ethical and cultural issues that staff have indicated are problematic in the Trust. This included having one word respect as a new value and also having training courses, changing our appraisal paperwork and creating a pledge which features staff members’ faces plastered on the walls of our Trust. My question was if digital storytelling could help too. There are some digital stories that could be used so I wanted to explore this further.

In addition, the awful events around George Floyd’s death and the use of technology to showcase and tell the stories of George Floyd and others, similar to Anna’s comments, enable telling the story in a very emotive way. Some of the interesting digital narratives following the George Floyd case have highlighted some key social, ethical and cultural issues.

I think this is highly topical and links well to my context.