Using Digital Storytelling as a Turn-Around Pedagogy

Digital storytelling is the process of telling stories in a multimedia platform while foregrounding meaning making, collaboration and the amplification of marginalised narratives. Grounded in a theory of "turn-around pedagogies," this research article aims to expand discussions of digital storytelling to include providing opportunities for primary students labelled "struggling readers" to tell their own literacy stories multimodally. Data were drawn from a 2-year long research project using digital storytelling with preservice teachers and primary students to document shared learning during a reading collaboration programme. Specifically, this article centres two of 21 digital storytelling collaborations as case studies to represent themes that emerged through multimodal analysis in order to address the research question "in what ways are preservice teachers and primary students making meaning of their individual and shared learning multimodally through the process of digital storytelling?" Findings highlight how allowing primary students to use digital tools to tell their stories opened up new spaces for students to represent their literate identities and literacy learning on their own terms, which supported preservice teachers in planning for meaningful reading instruction. Strategies for planning to use digital storytelling in the primary school classroom as a turn-around pedagogy are shared and areas for consideration are raised.