Tag: research reading

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.

Research Reading: Week 8

So this past weekend I went to the Open Engagement Conference on socially engaged art making. Since my research is based in community arts with a focus on collaborative ethical practices, I thought this conference could be a great place for me to do some research. Again, I didn’t find any projects that specifically related to collaborative storytelling, but I think the dialogue from the conference will help guide my research. I find that the most helpful aspect of these conferences is that they expose me to the discussions happening in the field so that I have a better understanding of how to approach my topic. I got to go to several panels, group discussions, artist presentations and even participate in a few art projects! Here is a list of my key findings from the conference:

  • In-person outreach for internet based engagement art projects is still important. Successful artists used the audience at the conference to jump-start engagement with their projects. Using the conference as a platform for these kind of projects was a great way to access a diverse audience and allow the conference attendees to physically experience social practice (instead of just discussing it).
  • It is difficult to evaluate social practice work. Academics disagree on whether to look at the aesthetic or activist value of the work. It’s also difficult to evaluate durational works since many of these projects don’t have a specific end date. Many presenters at the conference were advocating to allow time for evaluations to match the durational nature of the work. Also, many artists at the conference viewed typical evaluation models as stereotypical and causal and some even advocated for the ethic of not being beholden to evaluation. Some artists expressed that these kind of projects requires a degree of trust since an outcome can not be predicted. This issue also forefronts the need for social practice artists to firmly set the expectations of the project with funders and collaborators before starting a project. The keynote speaker Tom Finkelpearl brought up the idea of  “collaborative action research” as an non-economic assessment approach to evaluating these works. Some questions that professionals asked to measure the success of social practice work includes: Did it change us somehow? Does it affect the artist or the non-artist?
  • With the difficulty of evaluating durational process based projects, also comes a heightened need for documentation. A panel of museum professionals discussed how the role of documentation has become dominant as they take on more ephemeral works. They also discussed how working with social practice artists has shifted the role of curators from collectors to producers or the museum as a place of presentation to participation. This issue has caused tension between the curator, the registrar and the artist in an institutional setting. Some panels discussed how  process based art turns everything into a document, such as email communication. They discussed processes of archiving this work to use as proof of process but also as a method for spring-boarding the next project.
  • There is a difference between social practice work by artists and social workers. One attendee to a conference stated that artists have co-opted the work that social workers have been doing for a long time and is now just becoming popular in the institutional setting. The museum panel responded that there is a value differential between artists who imitate other forms and those who add value through reflection. Though since museums are experienced by people who have leisure time, there is a difference in audience to these works. Some people brought of the difference in time commitment that social workers/activists devote to social practice versus an artist who does a residency. I believe this tension could be solved through collaboration rather than competition and comparison.
  • An increase in social practice art within institutional settings has made educational departments more visible within hierarchical organizations. Most social practice work is coming out of educational departments since this work involves a high level of engagement and public participation. The museum is now being treated a social space for connection. One museum professional described his residency programming  as having no set time limit as to allow the artist to fully develop his/her project. This highlights the expanding role of community development within institutions.
  • And of course it is difficult to fund process-based durational projects. This is partly for the politically charged nature of these projects, but mostly because they don’t produce obvious quantitative results, are constantly shifting and happen over long periods of time. One funder at the conference talked of creating broad grant guidelines in order to leave flexibility for social practice artists and provide multiple points of engagement or entry. However, many artists are often left in difficult situations when the funding ends, but the project is continuing. One person asked: How do you even know when the project is over? This is the most difficult part of durational work that relies on community involvement (especially online): the project continues to exist regardless of funding. One artist advocating for make her community her funders in order to connect these elements of social practice work: if the community wants the project to continue it, they can fund it.

Over all, I think I learned a lot from this conference especially about the issues surrounding process-based work. Since I am focusing on the intersections between process and product in collaborative projects, I believe that these key findings will help guide my understanding of how to address my topic. If anything, I now know how difficult it can be to produce, document and evaluate social practice work.

Research Reading: Week 4

This past weekend I went to the What is Radio? Conference in Portland. I attended about 16 hours of panel presentations on a range of topics including: radio’s past, radio in India, community radio, college radio, radio education, radio theory, cultural representations in radio, news radio, new forms of radio, web radio, the difference between radio and audio and finally radio’s future. It was a lot to take in one weekend, but this conference will definitely be a shifting point in my career, though unfortunately not because I found a perfect fit for my interests in collaborative storytelling. In fact, this conference actually proved that I should not be looking into radio, or at least the classic radio paradigm. There was very little discussion of collaboration at this conference and it seems that there is a definite divide between broadcast transistor radio that favors the professional producer and podcasts that can be easily made by community members. Since my interest is in community cultural development, I a more interested in using the tool of audio recording to create projects like storytelling podcasts. I did not meet or hear of anyone involved in this kind of work at the conference. Most of the presenters were either academics who study radio or radio hosts who’ve worked in news. There was some cross over with community radio and web radio, but those weren’t storytelling based. Thus, while I don’t know if I’ll be using any of the presentations directly for my research, I do think this conference has shaped how I see the radio field. I now know where not to look and that my interests in storytelling community projects could be an emergent form of radio, but not generally supported by the field. I also heard some ideas that I think will shape how I approach looking at collaborative projects:

  • Community radio is focused more on locality than quality: “Production values don’t matter in the face of connection to local community”
  • Western society tends to value performance of participation above all else regardless if people are listening – Kate Lacey
  • It is difficult to translate small localized community radio to an urban landscape
  • Social media can be used as a way to create dialogue and reciprocity from radio broadcasts
  • Transistor radio is still more accessible to a larger audience than internet radio
  • Increased autonomy in production has lead to more competition and less distribution: too crowded to hear
  • Podcasts are seen as disruptive media (fragmented, delayed); Live broadcast radio as public good (collective, simultaneous)
  • Younger generation does not see streaming audio as radio although they are listening to the same content (NOT ME)
  • Radio art happens where it is heard, not where it is made
  • Radio as conversation ender; audio as conversation starter
  • Radio takes us out of our me-egotism and into a collective experience – John Durham Peters

I’ve also been collecting more materials as can be seen in my Diigo list. I’ve discovered some storytelling organizations that have lists of ethics for how they do collaborative projects. These will be perfect for forming an understanding of best practices. I have also worked on a conceptual framework which I will be posting soon. When I post that I will explain the direction my research process is taking including my methodologies, scope and question.

Research Reading: Week 2

In the first 2 weeks of the term I read the book Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound. This book is a collection of essays written by well-known and respected radio producers on how to create storytelling radio. As one of the mediums I am most interested, I felt this book could give me a good overview of the field. It also serves as a selection of best practices in facilitating storytelling, at least in a journalistic context. I will have to spend some more time over the next few week writing up quotes from this book (since it is a library book), but my overall impression is that best practices for creating storytelling radio are very variant. Each producer had their own style and their own opinions on how to approach the process. While this book may provide some great quotes on storytelling, I don’t know if I’ll be able to use it to demonstrate overall best practices. However, once I start copying down the quotes and coding them, some themes might emerge. I will be posting about my findings in this regard in the next post.

That being said, I believe I am already leaning towards one of my questions: best practices for facilitating storytelling. I’ve been thinking about what I’m most interested in, what will help me and my field and what is  feasible. This question seems to fit all those criteria. This realization is partly through reading an article about the Scribe Video Center and their collaborative video projects. They work with community organizations on video advocacy projects and bring facilitators to guide them. The article talked about the difficulties of facilitating these projects and making decision democratically. These discussions brought up a lot of issues for me around how to facilitate in a way that both ensures quality but doesn’t squelch the storyteller’s confidence. This lead me to the question: How do you facilitate storytelling that supports creative agency? I will have to refine this question, but I think this is the new direction my research will take. I would get to research and learn facilitation practices while still looking into creative agency. This also connects to my interest in community cultural development and can be applicable to the whole community arts field. I’m getting really excited about this idea!