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!