Don’t Keep It To Yourself! Digital Storytelling with South African Youth

This article, published on Seminar.Net, reviews the successes and challenges of a digital storytelling project initiated by Sonke Gender Justice Network and the Center for Digital Storytelling's Silence Speaks programme in Eastern Cape, South Africa in 2008. The two organisations worked with a group of rural youth to produce eight digital stories by young Xhosa people to capture the challenges they face and their hopes for the future. The article discusses the process of creating the stories, as well as a school-based screening. According to the article, thoughtfully designed digital storytelling offers both a psychological outlet and a tool for community education and social activism with marginalised youth.

Introduction
The article outlines how the participatory media production method known as digital storytelling has been taken up in numerous community, health, educational, and academic settings. Drawing from well-established traditions in popular education, participatory communications, oral history, and, most recently, what has been called "citizen journalism", practitioners of digital storytelling in localised contexts around the world are working with small groups of people to facilitate the production of short, first-person digital videos that document a wide range of culturally and historically embedded lived experiences. Two case studies are used to illustrate the potential use and impact of digital story telling.

Case Study Part I: Digital Storytelling in Eastern Cape Province
The article explains that it is essential that potential participants understand the methodology and that the stories will be shown publicly as tools for community training and awareness raising, even before any workshop begins. In Mhlontlo Municipality, in the Eastern Cape, Silence Speaks and Sonke Gender Justice staff worked with youth over five weeks in October 2008 and not only enabled participating youth to produce stories but also provided them with health education about gender and HIV and basic public speaking skills. Throughout the process, facilitators talked with participants at length about what content and images they felt comfortable including in their final videos. Facilitators also assisted the youth with linking their personal stories to broader social issues as a way of ensuring that the narratives would reflect the roles of both individual agency and larger structures in identity development.

An assessment of the Mhlontlo youth digital storytelling workshop was conducted in August 2009, comprising in-depth, open-ended interviews with the majority of participants, as well as a group story screening for and follow-up conversation between participants. The assessment suggested some long term impacts from the workshop. One participant who told of her friend who had been raped, attributed changes in her friend's behaviour after the workshop to having finally verbalised the previously untold story of the assault. According to the participant, the girl now serves as a peer educator in local schools, where she discusses the issue of rape with the goal of increasing awareness among young people.

Along with the emotional and psychological benefits of digital storytelling, the project demonstrated the value of exposing young people to new forms of technology and offering them training to which they would otherwise not have access. Other participants mentioned how they gained the confidence to speak in front of others as a result of the project.

Overall the workshop assessment revealed that the combination of skill-building activities and the creativity of digital story production, along with the support of attentive and engaged facilitators, led to a continuum of positive impacts for the youth storytellers involved and for the larger community. On the other hand, the most prominent criticism that arose during the project assessment related not to the workshop process but to the lack of community outreach that has occurred using the stories to date. Though participants felt extremely proud of their work, they were disappointed that more screenings hadn’t yet occurred.

Case Study Part II: The Value of Sharing Youth Digital Stories in the Classroom
During August 2009 the stories were shown to several schools within the Mhlontlo Municipality, sharing them with students who were unfamiliar with the digital storytelling project or Sonke's work. Following the screening, students discussed the concept of human rights with facilitators and were asked to come up with their own version of a list of universal human rights – an exercise meant to foster dialogue about the difficult issues raised in the stories. In the last segment of these workshops, students were asked to create their own written stories, with accompanying drawings, using the digital stories they viewed as inspiration.

One student in these classroom sessions described the experience of viewing the stories as educational and uplifting. The article mentions that these pilot educational sessions were also useful in highlighting the challenges that Sonke and local organisations face as they work for gender equality in rural areas, where particular attitudes about women and men are often deeply entrenched. One boy described how women in his community are lazy and "men are oppressed by the women here." Widespread homophobia also presented a problem in discussions of equal rights for all people, with some students objecting to equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. At the same time, using the Sonke digital stories in the classroom allowed students to talk about issues not normally addressed in school and gave facilitators an opportunity to increase dialogue, counter misunderstandings and assumptions, and provide accurate information on critically under-represented topics in the classroom environment.

The article describes how the story-writing portion of these sessions also offered an inside view of the challenges and preoccupations faced by rural youth. The anonymous nature of the writing activity encouraged students to speak openly about otherwise taboo subjects and allowed facilitators to address the entire class during follow-up rather than single out particular students who may not have felt comfortable discussing sensitive topics.

The article points out that though the assessment showed the strength of using digital stories in the classroom, it also showed the importance of ensuring that adequate resources exist prior to conducting such educational sessions - resources that are rarely available in rural settings like Mhlontlo. In their stories, many students expressed a lack of adults to turn to about difficult obstacles in their lives, raising ethical considerations about the value of using writing or creative arts to surface such obstacles in the absence of trained teachers, mentors, and counselors, and pointing to the responsibility of adults in the community to advocate for funding to support psychosocial assistance and justice for youth.

Conclusion
The article concludes that when carried out with appropriate thoughtfulness and sensitivity, digital storytelling can offer youth an opportunity to learn about new technologies, speak out against local challenges and hardships, and encourage young story viewers to give voice to their own life narratives. It also serves as a tool to illuminate for adults in the community the ways in which the health and safety of young people are not being protected. The digital stories serve as clear evidence of young peoples’ desires to improve their communities. It is then incumbent upon practitioners and researchers working in marginalised, resource-poor settings to attend not only to the individual emotional needs of youth but also to become engaged at the community/political level by advocating for structural changes which will provide viable housing, education, healthcare, and employment.

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