Keywords

Background

In July 2017, I witnessed “Washing the Dead Bed,” a Tobago Heritage festival ceremony (Small, 2011). In response, I wrote a reflective poem and then set it aside for three years. Recently, with the support of Massimo Lambert (videographer) and Robert Yeates (audio-technician), we converted the poem into a digital story. In summary, my aim in this paper is to explore the refractive and illuminative capacity of digital storytelling by signposting the soulful, spiritual, and community connections required to navigate the complexity of my late life learning as an Afro-Caribbean (Tobagonian) woman. Much like a cartographer, I want to map the transformational terrain of the poem and reveal the dynamic interaction of place, history, community through personal and participatory story-making.

The initial writing of the poem coincided with a number of significant life events. These upheavals included dramatic changes in my personal lifestyle, heightened career and family demands, cross-jurisdictional caregiving responsibilities, and the loss of older family members including my mother.

The experiences of uncertainty, loss, and grief triggered a period of introspection and experimentation with creative expressive forms and rituals drawn from my Caribbean heritage. Bolton and Delderfield (2018) notes that reflective writing is the mirror in which we recognize and work with our “other” selves. In this instance, my mirror was the poem Washing the Dead Bed.

Bourdieue (1984) cited by Field (2012) notes the salience of “dispositions” and the disciplinary role of “habitus.” We are bound by the socio-cultural context of our biographies and sustained by constantly reworked “positioning narratives.” The poem Washing the Dead Bed explores the impact of disengagement with habitus and the overwhelming sense of personal negligence and consequent displacement.

These mid-life feelings of disconnection are not unusual. In response to a widespread recognition of the twenty-first-century shift in longevity patterns, Bateson (2011) describes the “third age” and documents the challenges of navigating life after 55. Waxman (2016) rejects one-off time bound constructions of “mid-life crisis” and suggests instead the idea of a sustained middlescence life period of multiple challenges requiring skillful navigation. Conley and Rauth (2020) ask us to consider this mid-life period as an opportunity-rich life stage extending from 45 to 65.

There is an adult education history of drawing on narrative and the autobiographical for learning. Yet we should distinguish sharing narratives, from story-work and the participative practices that explore meaning, challenge assumptions, and reveal transformative possibilities (Chlopczyk, 2018a). Swarts in Chlopczyk (2018b) explains that storying distills memory in ways that facilitate the recognition of the instructive moments of lived experience.

In Identity and Lifelong Learning, Becoming Through Lived Experience, Motulsky et al. (2020) demonstrate the timely convergence of lifelong learning, identity formation, and narrativity. This is preceded by a sustained adult learning narrative turn stretching all the way back to learning biographies (Dominice, 2000), life history inquiry (Biesta et al., 2011), and adult learning biographical research practices (Merrill & West, 2009). This has taken adult learning out of classrooms and into everyday life.

Bhat (2019) describes her transformative encounter with Storycenter’s Stories of Home workshop. She explains that the hands-on learning experience included: “identifying a story, writing a highly focused story script, audio recording the script, selecting images, creating and editing the storyboard and producing a short digital film.”

Storycenter, the founding home of digital storytelling, insists that digital story-work must be self-revelatory and insightful; stories are personal and written in the first-person voice. Digital stories are no more than three hundred words and reflect a commitment to aesthetic values (Lambert & Hessler, 2020). Digital story-work has much in common with Mezirow’s (1991) transformative learning model in so far as both practices aim to facilitate the emergence of insight based on altered perspectives and consequent shifts in meaning making (Lambert & Hessler, 2017).

Methodology

This paper describes the curation of a digital story. The story-center practice model anticipates a group work process somewhat similar to Freire’s (2013) “conscientization” cultural circles. While I wrote the poem, Massimo (videographer) and Robert (audio-technician) participated in the curation and assembly of the digital story. Massimo in his role as videographer and co-creator has been an integral part of shaping the digital story.

This paper offers snapshots of the poem to digital story conversion experience through the lends of Cranton’s (2016, p. 25) three-dimensional content, process, and premise reflective model.

A multi-voiced elaboration of the process dimension is created by drawing on Formenti and West’s (2018) delightful application of Bateson’s concept of metalogue. This allows Massimo (ML) and I (JF) to share samples of the things we thought about and said to each other as we worked together in the story-making space.

The Cranton (2016, p. 25) and Formenti and West (2018, p. 27) combination is outlined here:

  • Content

    • What image/audio is used?

    • What is the context of the image/audio use?

  • Process

    • How and why, are these choices made?

    • What do you see?

    • How does what you see shape your seeing?

    • How did you come to think and answer like that?

    • What are your assumptions?

    • What do you believe? Who are you?

  • Premise

Afterthoughts

Upon witnessing the Washing of the Dead Bed, I experienced a sense of release; something that needed to be said had been expressed. Back then, I had no idea of how digital story-making and reflective writing about the experience could reveal new insights.

This reflection is multi-layered; the poem, the digital story, and an exposition based on Cranton’s (2016) reflective model have surfaced a constellation of stories that were not previously visible or available.

The lens provided by the content, process, and premise dimensions of the reflective schema has revealed the ways in which the particularities of my socio-cultural context had shaped the poem. The digital story-making work brought these to the surface.

For me a poem is an authentic expressive outpouring, a narrative exploration of the landscape of identity that paints images with words. In this instance, digital story-making brought to light a bricolage of hitherto unseen narratives.

This doubling back and deepening of awareness revealed the multi-layered socio-cultural context that informed the writing of the poem.

Digital storytelling enables us to convert powerful moments in our lives into creative multimedia expressions of truth and insight. Poetic reflection, an inherent quality of this kind of story-making, distills memory and narrative and consequently brings a transformational lens to the practice of learning from experience.

Massimo Lambert (videographer), Robert Yeates (audio-technician), and I (the writer) created this digital story. Along the way we engaged in spirited exchanges that included significant questions and observations. As Massimo and I worked on the poem resolving the issues of the geographical distance (he lives in California, I was “CoVid sheltering in place” in Tobago), editing the poem so that it was concise enough for a digital story, and engaging Robbie the audio-technician, we were also building relationships across generational, cultural, and gender differences.

Most importantly, through our collaborative engagement, we were shifting each other’s perspectives and broadening our understandings of the world (Table 13.1).

Table 13.1 Questions and the following observations and comments
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In closing storytelling, an emerging genre, is a unique feature of late-modernity, an admixture of creativity and digital technology inspired by the human compulsion to share lived experiences by telling stories (Table 13.2):

Table 13.2 Washing the Dead Bed – Digital Story—https://youtu.be/-QluWHV9g-s
Full size table

Verse

Verse “It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”

—Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge