Gathering Stories: Creating Spaces for Young Women to Connect and Build Community through Multimodal Storytelling

Abstract

Digital storytelling prioritizes real-time connections, story creation, contextual adaptability, multi-media expression, and accessibility. This article discusses the unrecognized affordances and value of digital storytelling practices for teens living in precarious (neo)colonial lifeworlds. We review the workshop methods developed as designers and leaders of “Gathering Stories: A Digital Storytelling Workshop for Young Women” in July 2021 to enliven and illuminate high school students’ voices while also addressing social, emotional, and affective experiences and needs during the pandemic. The article details how we co-realized spaces where teens’ lived experience of gathering and the draw of story were the driving forces for their diverse storytelling practices. Identifying positive outcomes for the first iteration of the workshop, we also identify challenges that will inform future iterations of the workshop, such as structural dimensions of intersectionality and the challenges predicative AI such as ChatGPT poses to such efforts to prioritize experiential dimensions of learning through storytelling.