Tag: digital storytelling

Community Arts Interview

Assignment Description:

Students will select, with instructor’s approval, a local community arts organization in which to conduct an interview based on examination of a critical question or topic that has emerged or developed from readings and class discussions.  Students will develop interview questions in class and conduct a one-hour interview. The output of this assignment will be a 5 page paper that includes:

  • Guiding conceptual or theoretical question
  • Rationale/justification and context in the field (references from scholarly articles, etc)
  • Summary and description of the interview, highlighting and providing examples that address the central topic
  • How the interview has changed how the question is addressed

Interview Analysis

Research Reading: Week 10

For my final post I will detail my responses from two experiences:

1) An informational interview with Mickey Stellavato, a UO PHD student finishing her dissertation on digital storytelling and its effects on efficacy

2) My notes from a full day digital storytelling facilitation training by Elaing Walters of  the Trauma Healing Project

Interview with Mickey

I met Mickey last term at a digital storytelling workshop with the Trauma Healing Project. She was teaching the workshop and when I asked her what her research was on, it happened to be on the impact digital storytelling has on efficacy. Small world! Here are my notes from our informational interview:

  • She had difficulty doing her original research plan because of IRB restrictions. She wanted to do an ethnography comparing the  impact of digital storytelling workshops in Sweden (there’s lots of digital storytelling in Sweden!) and the US. She ended up having to just do a narrative analysis of secondary data she collected from the workshops she did in Eugene. She couldn’t talk about the people or their stories, but she could talk about the evaluations. This is good to know as I craft my research idea. I had originally wanted to do an ethnographic approach but figured I did not have enough time to do so. It seems it could have been ethically difficult as well.
  • Her research involved coding themes of responses to look for changes in behavioral experiences or recurring themes throughout workshops. She focused on issues of personal efficacy and empowerment. Overall, she found that most people felt empowered by telling their stories. She did have one example that she couldn’t publish that involved a conflict of privacy.
  • She’s got into facilitating the workshops through the Trauma Healing Project. She was working with Elaine of Trauma Healing on their participatory action research and ended up training with CDS for digital storytelling. Mickey says she’s gotten more comfortable with facilitating over time. She enjoys the creative chaos that often ensues at these workshops. She says she doesn’t force people to share their stories, but often helps people pull them out. I got to see her facilitation in action on the workshop!

Trauma Healing Project Facilitation Training

The bulk of the training was spent on learning how to use Final Cut Express (which will be great for my internship), but Elaine also led a facilitation training at the end of the day that was very helpful. The Final Cut tutorial also touched on some facilitation strategies since teaching the software involves dealing with a range of media literacies, but the following notes are specifically on facilitating storytelling:

  • Storytelling is just as much about giving as receiving. The affirmative process for a storytelling, especially for a trauma survivor, is in the positive acceptance of his or her story. Thus storytelling should always be done in groups or pairs as to provide that listening support.
  • Always start workshops with group agreements. Required group agreements include: respect (being attentive, appreciative and allowing for safe space) & confidentiality (don’t share stories outside of group and don’t bring up story to storyteller; this give the storyteller control over their story/doesn’t bring up issues of trauma at unwanted times).
  • Ask questions; don’t instruct. Don’t say “It would be better if…” Say “Tell me more about that.” If you come at their story from a place of curiosity rather than criticism, you can help guide the stories without (most of the time) hurting their feelings. Always ask permission to give feedback. Ex: “It seems like you’re really happy with this. Would it be okay with you if I share a thought?”
  • Tell people that their story may sound completely different by the end of the process. From Elaine’s perspective, people are usually more satisfied with their stories the more they tweak them. It’s also important from a trauma perspective to reflect on one’s story. But if someone doesn’t want to change it, they can still tell it. Always end on a winning note. You want people to open up rather than close down.
  • Help participants keep their story short (every extra minute = another hour of editing). Use questions like “If you had to cut something, what would you?”
  • Push for a single story/narrative. Focus on the main theme and feeling of the story. Example of question: “If you could only say one thing, what would it be?” CDS teaches narrative structure at their workshops, but Elaine found that this instruction can distract from the main purpose of the workshop. It could be useful for setting up vocabulary, but probably not best when working with trauma survivors.
  • Facilitators should not sit outside the circle. Sit down next to a participant and ask how it’s going. You have to be willing to move towards people and be comfortable with being rejected.
  • Key Idea: What matters in the end is whether the participant is satisfied with the product, not whether or not the product is high quality.

Notes: Trauma Healing Project is hoping to bring CDS to Eugene to train facilitators. So far they haven’t been able to get a grant to do this. They also want to start doing professional digital storytelling workshops and charging participants in order to get some revenue. I will be helping with these workshops. Perhaps helping Trauma Healing start a professional series with a core facilitator group could be my research!

Problem: While going through the training, I realized that these methods are copyrighted by CDS. Mickey and Elaine were teaching the methods they were taught by CDS at their trainings. I now realize that I may not be able to use these observations and my observations this summer for my research. CDS charges a lot of money for their Facilitation Training. I’m going to have to talk with them to see what information I can use. This may also be a difficulty in using material from the PYE facilitation training.

OFN Practicum: Week 6 Log

Emily, Maya and I met on Monday to discuss finalizing our first postcards. My postcard is essentially finished, but Riki is going to look over it before I post it. Emily has set up a meeting with Riki to review the postcard. Emily will also be meeting with Riki to discuss the tagline for OFN that will be included at the bottom of each postcard. We also discussed issues of using material from the Oregon Historical Society. Maya has found some information and images about rural artists on the OHS website, but they have a policy forbidding duplication of material. However, since their material has a connection to the OFN, it may be possible to use it with their permission. Emily will be checking in with OHS to make sure. This is mostly important for the older artists we don’t have digital images for. We decided to start working on our 2nd postcard this week. I have selected the artist Tina Aguilar: she lives in Warm Springs and makes Wasco baby boards. Emily informed me that she is definitely still working as an artist since she applied for a TAAP award last year. I have emailed Tina to get permission to post about here. I also created a profile for OFN on the Placestories website so that Emily and Riki can discuss what the profile should look like at their meeting.

Maya and I met on Thursday to discuss some possible guidelines for future practicums regarding this project. The steps for creating a postcard are fairly basic: do research, contact possible artist, create rough draft, get approval from OFN, post to Place Stories. However, we discussed how this project would continue in the future considering there are only a finite number of artists who are TAAP awardees and live in rural areas. Obviously people can continue the research Maya and I are doing, but the project may have to be broadened. There are artists who are not TAAP awardees but live in rural areas and are affiliated with the OFN that could be potential artists for the map. Or future research could be done on the OHS website or in the folklore students’ field work. Maya and I also discussed recording what we’ve already found on the inventories of the archives. I need to email Nathan about this, but it would be helpful to mark on the inventories whether the artists in each box are rural or not, whether we’ve posted about them, and if they are a TAAP artist. This will have to be something I will work on next week.

OFN Practicum: Week 4 Log

This week Maya and I met on Monday to discuss some of the issues we had come across and compiled a list of questions. Maya has sent a list of these questions out to Emily and Riki, which include questions about what links we should be providing (especially for the older artists we found in the archives), whether or not we should contact artists and if we need to ask for permission to post about them. Other questions pertained more directly to the Art of the Rural’s guidelines. We just need to get a better definition of rural so we aren’t picking artist that don’t represent their mission. Also, we were wondering if we should have a postcard to represent Eugene even though it’s a fair sized city. I need to email Savannah about these questions as well some map capability issues I talked about in the last post, though I’m going to wait till after our meeting with OFN on Monday. Maya and I also plan to do some more research in the archives next week now that we have identified more boxes to look through. This week we focused on creating our first drafts of postcards, as discussed below.

I chose to do my first postcard on a current TAAP artist: Alex Llumiquinga Perez. He is one of the few international artists I’ve found so far living in rural Oregon. I created a first draft of my postcard based on information about him on the web, his TAAP application and a newspaper article. You can see my first draft here. In crafting the draft, a lot of questions came up as to how OFN would want the postcard structured. For instance, do we need to describe the TAAP program? Are we focusing on the artist or his/her craft? I essentially tried to emulate the content I found in the TAAP application and I mentioned that Alex is TAAP awarded including a link. Maya and I also thought it would be nice to include a quote from the artist for each post and that the location should be forefront. A lot of the postcards I looked at on the map did not say what town they came from, which I thought was strange for the purpose of the map. Thus, I think we put the location of the artist in the title, so people can see what area this artist represents. Maya and I will be comparing our postcards and trying to find a good format for us both to follow hopefully before tomorrow’s meeting.

OFN Practicum: Week 3 Log

This week put somewhat of a stall on the project. I was going to go look through box 61 of the TAAP files on Friday, but then Maya informed me that she had already looked through the box and it didn’t contain any pertinent artist information. Emily told Maya that she will contact Nathan to see if there are any other boxes we can look through. I did see some boxes labeled Rural Libraries and other TAAP boxes in the inventory. Perhaps we should look through those? In the meantime, Maya and I will be meeting next Monday to discuss what questions we have and how we should move forward from here. We will all be meeting at OFN Mon. Feb 4th to talk with Emily about those questions and present our first drafts of postcards. Next week I will be working on creating a draft of my first postcard based on the artists Maya and I have identified.

Since, I couldn’t do anymore research into possible artists, I decided to take an in-depth look into the Rural Arts & Culture Map in order to get a better idea of what information I should be gathering for our postcards. However, since the content on the map is so varied, I’m still not sure what our postcards should look like. I know we want to have photos, but what about videos? There may be some videos available for the more recent artists. Also, are we describing the art the artist makes or the background of the artist? We could just replicate the format of the TAAP application forms and talk about the art traditions they practice, where they learned them from and the importance of these traditions. Although not all of the TAAP applications has all this information. The current TAAP artists listed on the OFN website also have varying information. I would like to look at their actual TAAP application to see if there is more info not represented on the website. Also, while looking over the Rural Arts & Culture Map, I noticed some functional problems that will need to be addressed. A lot of the postings have a short blurb about an artist and then link to a site for more information. I’m not sure where we will link to for more information about the older artists we found in the archives. Lastly, there are two ways to see information on the map: stories and folks. It seems the folks tab is used for creating profiles for people posting to the map. You can click on their profile and then see all the stories they have posted. Perhaps we should create a profile for OFN and then link our stories from there? The only problem with this, is that not all of the stories I found through this method showed up on the overall map. I’m not sure why, but I want to make sure our stories are visible.