The Dialectics Informing Identity in an Urban Youth Digital Storytelling Workshop

Abstract

This article examines an after-school program entitled Silk City Media Workshop. Briefly, the workshop engages youth in digital storytelling as a means of enhancing both their technology and literacy skills. Transcending these goals, this workshop also provides opportunities for youth to reveal multiple aspects of their unfolding identities as well as the employment of their agency in the process. The article draws on aspects of cultural sociology and concepts of identity and agency to explore one student's digital story. The study of this student's digital story suggests how it both reveals and embodies her identity and agency. Analysis illuminates connections to her histories and interactions between herself and others. Examining the digital story through the explicated framework assists educators in understanding the ways in which students identify themselves and how those identities relate to a set of organized actions that form and re-form over lifetimes, and through collective histories.