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Introduction

This book project was initiated by scholars who have practised digital storytelling in higher education over many years. We, editors and authors alike, have been deeply inspired by the model developed by the Center for Digital Storytelling (now StoryCenter) in Berkeley, California, and have met and discussed common concerns in seminars and conferences over the years. We talked about how our workshops with diverse groups of teachers and researchers in higher education, as well as students and practitioners inside and outside our institutions, share similarities as well as differences. We sought a frame of reference for understanding higher education as a more diverse set of activities. Our question was whether there was a model that would provide space for our concepts of voice, emotion, multimodalities and deep reflection. In Ernest L. Boyer’s notion of the four scholarships, we found a common ground on which to land our ideas.

Since its publication in 1990, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate has evolved theoretically and continues to shape our thinking about the complexity of the roles and tasks of higher education. As academics in higher education, we assume the responsibility of serving the four scholarships of “discovery”, “teaching and learning”, “integration” and “application”. In this book, we have expanded the scholarship of application to a “scholarship of engagement and collaborative action”. We will now go on to justify the use of Boyer’s model as a way of understanding how and why digital storytelling can be successfully used in higher education.

How often is higher education referred to as solely “bookish” studies, where reading and writing are the only media students get really involved with, and where distant and disengaged “reason” rules? The history of education offers many examples of how teachers have designed teaching differently, building on emotions and engagement, with the aim of empowering students and developing their voice, not only in text but also through the use of images. However, the sources are scattered, and there has been no coordinated effort in this regard. In this book, we will look specifically at examples of openness to voice, emotion and image in higher education and beyond. The classification offered in Boyer’s book has evolved as a strong narrative about the function and meaning of higher education in modern society. Our argument is that placing digital storytelling at the heart of the story of the four scholarships is vital for improving higher education in the digital era.

A visual introduction is appropriate here. From Laurentius de Voltolina’s painting (circa 1350) of a lecture hall at the University of Bologna, we can see Henricus, the German professor of ethics, talk to his students. His book on the subject is placed on the lectern in front of him, from which he reads or tells stories about the subject. Professor Henricus was a scholar who excelled in the area of Law, and he had compiled his research into a book. The picture illustrates the close historical links between the scholarship of discovery and the scholarship of teaching and learning. It is still an ideal that practising researchers also teach undergraduate as well as postgraduate students. In the painting, we also see students chatting, probably arguing about something the professor said, or relating it to an observation. The students’ activities show how the scholarship of integration is also apparent: students discuss matters presented by a teacher to make sense for their future. Last, the scholarship of engagement and collaborative action is demonstrated by these background facts: in Bologna, the students hired the teachers, retaining them as long as they were considered useful to the students, while the community checked for the relevance and applicability of the wisdom provided by the professors.

We also think the painting shows us that higher education was not always conceived of as an arena mainly defined by the written word. In fact, texts were difficult to get hold of, and teaching in mediaeval universities was based on teachers reading, or discussing quotes, from texts. Teaching did not rely on the spoken word alone, but incorporated body language and student participation. Students needed both visual and aural competencies for a full understanding of what was being taught.

There is a long way to go from fourteenth-century Bologna to the higher education classrooms of today. Today, Henricus’ stories would be taped, streamed or even exposed to reiterating practices of “student-response-systems”; we could even imagine students being invited to create digital stories in order to engage with the puzzles of legal ethics that were Professor Henricus’ speciality.

Teaching with Engagement and Emotion

We know that the students of Bologna hired their own teachers. To survive for more than one term, they needed to communicate well and engage their students. One of the first authors of handbooks for teachers, Hugo St Victor (1096–1141), complained that too many teachers failed to stick to their topic when they taught. They were far too tempted to talk beside the topic with stories and digressions. His complaint goes back to AD 1128, in the cloister school of St Victor in Paris. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a teacher more to Hugo’s liking: cool, analytical and logical, talking almost like a robot to his students. Kant’s former teaching assistant at the University of Kønigsberg (now Kaliningrad), Johann Herder (1744–1803), however, was his direct opposite. He took the idea of evoking students’ emotions in his teaching to a peak. His topic was ethnology and folklore, and he taught with fire and thunder, reading poetry, singing and chanting, putting up tableaus for drama and so on. Being a student under Herder meant identifying with the people and cultures in question, seeing it their way. Herder became the most influential intellectual inspiration for the development of the Nordic Folk High School, which emphasises the “living word”, the use of body and mind, experiential learning and the formation of students’ character over the learning of facts. Combining logic with emotion, overview with empathy and mission with clarity are clearly historical origins of the “scholarship of integration”. In particular, Immanuel Kant’s essay on Enlightenment was a clear argument for the ethical commitment to truth, to the quest for certainty and involving the whole person in pursuit of progress for mankind.

Identifying a Voice

The result of learning to be an engaged member of the academic community would be to produce significant contributions. Historically, the academic product would be the oral defence of a thesis. Academics would, if they were diligent, be happy to produce a collection of quotes from the classics as their “book”. The art of writing entered the academic curriculum in the fourteenth century as a result of demands from the Merchants’ Guild. Trade relations between merchant cities like Genoa and remote places like Iceland relied on the ability to communicate in a friendly and diplomatic way, at a distance and in Latin, so that mutual trust could be built. Teaching the ars dictaminis—that is, the art of prose composition—relied on a particular set of rules and so ancient rhetoric from Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian became essential reading and formed the basis for practice. Impressive writing and overt politeness were necessary to build a strong sense of trust when money was not easily sent. The voice of the writer was shaped by his eloquence and mastery of the rhetorical rules, while trustworthiness was built through knowledge of the classics and the provision of ample quotes. Umberto Eco captured this fascination with good writing in The Name of the Rose.

This is still an important part of academic writing, with a great deal of emphasis on finding a suitable and individual tone and voice. One might say that elaborating the voice of young students started in the Renaissance. Mornings were spent listening to formal lectures delivered by expert professors; after lunch, junior teachers took over and led more informal talks. In these sessions, students discussed the contexts and relevance of the expert utterances. Generally, students lacked access to university libraries until the late seventeenth century and so these discussions offered them an opportunity to memorise facts and figures in a familiar, accessible language.

When the Halle University of Germany was established in the late seventeenth century, the theologist August Hermann Franke (1663–1727) assisted poor students by hiring them to teach orphaned children in the Waisenhaus. He spent evenings with the student teachers, inviting them to tell about their experiences through the day, wove the stories together, prompted reflection and developed ideas about how to improve their practice. He called this activity a “seminar”, meaning a “seedbed” or “nursery” where ideas of the students met the opinions of the elder and more experienced people, and they reflected together. These seminars became influential learning contexts in German universities from the early nineteenth century onwards and were brought to the USA by the founders of the Johns Hopkins University, where John Dewey graduated in 1884 (Dykhuizen 1961). The seminar model spread out through the USA via the progressive idea of Dewey and his followers.

Educational institutions have traditionally been fora for free speech, and the students of University of California, Berkeley, had to fight for their right to speak freely against local government, Governor Reagan and police forces as late as in 1962. The student uprising against suppression of free speech was part of a global movement. It was no accident that bringing free speech into new media also took place in the San Francisco Bay area, where media technologies developed rapidly in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

Free speech and creative writing were closely linked historically while inclusion of the student voice was also an important aspect of the Anglo-American tradition of higher education. The philosopher George Jardine (1742–1827), who worked at the University of Glasgow from 1774, had many poor students who were unable to buy books. The logical thing was to make students write notes from their lectures, develop these notes into essays and then let students read and comment on each other’s work. Gaillet (1994) sees his actions as the start of “creative writing” in the curriculum, a trend that was successfully transferred to secondary and tertiary education in the USA. The first writers’ school was established in the Soviet Union at the Maxim Gorkij Institute in 1933; creative writing is now commonplace in higher education.

Learning with Images

While we easily can justify the claim that emotions and voice have historically been important dimensions in higher education, the importance of the visual is less obvious. One way of arguing for its importance is to start with medical education. For centuries, medical education was the province of wise women or men who passed on their wisdom to their apprentices; war offered plenty of opportunity to practise surgery. The body was visualised in an illustrated textbook depicting the anatomy of apes, because religion forbid the use of human bodies for these purposes. It was not until 1543 that the doctor Vesalius (1514–1554) had the nerve to break the taboo of dissecting a dead body and let draw what he saw therein. In the Rembrandt (1606–1669) painting, Dr. Tulp’s Anatomy, the textbook lying at the feet of the dead body is Vesalius’ book. The visual verification of what Dr Tulp revealed and the spectators witnessed was compared with the book made 80 years before.

The use of visual aids in academic teaching was further developed by Petrus Ramus (1515–1572) at the University of Paris in the 1550s. Ramus produced tables and figures and included them, together with written material, in textbooks produced for students. The art of teaching gradually turned towards consideration of how students learn, that is, by visualising, speaking eloquently, supporting the acquisition of new information, as the great Czech educator Comenius (1592–1670) developed the “art of teaching”, called “Didactics”. The textbook that demonstrated his principles, Orbis pictus, was published in 1670. Comenius postponed the publication of the book by 30 years until he could find a proper printer who could do justice to the artwork.

The oldest institution for training visual artists has been found in China, dating back to 1104 (Stankiewicz 2007, p. 10), while in Europe, the art academy of Medici was established in 1488. The Accademia del Disigno, established in 1563 in Florence, was both an art education institution and a Guild, but with an emphasis on theoretical perspectives, while most Guilds gave precedence to practice (Stankiewicz 2007, p. 12). Technical and vocational training was initially restricted to the Guilds, where training for the apprentice was a matter of copying the master, being under his tutoring and guidance. Being a “journeyman” meant that, to become a master in your own right, you needed to dissociate yourself from the master and earn your own mastery.

The Guilds became formal settings for training where young artisans studied under the master, undergoing tests to demonstrate that mastery was, eventually, well deserved. Many countries in Europe established national art academies throughout the eighteenth century, first and foremost to celebrate a national tradition and also to counter the strong Italian influence. According to Stankiewicz, the government interest in controlling the style and purpose of the arts was a strong argument for the State to finance and supervise the training of artists (2007, p. 13). In the conservatoire model, higher education found a form with important commonalities between all the arts: techniques were learned and practised, and students were also taught aesthetics, art criticism, art history and philosophy. Schools of fine art, music, painting, sculpture, architecture and design were based on such activities. The famous art school in Berlin, the Bauhaus, established in 1920, was an example of an art education which merged conflicting ideas about theory versus practice into a consistent workshop method (Christie 2012). In the USA alone today, more than 600 colleges offer programmes that include some elements of media production. Making audio–visual products is now a widespread activity in higher education, and across a broad range of subjects.

The training of engineers and architects was also performed by the Guilds. Masters were contractors who designed and built massive constructions. Michael Knoll explains how the Guilds found it fruitful to create different teams of talented apprentices; these teams would compete with bids to determine how the next section of the building would be built. The progetti or project plan required the students to plan, draw, design and make calculations that would result in a solution to the problem at hand. The method of solving problems this way spread across Europe, as well as to the USA, with a strong influence on agricultural colleges, from which John Dewey found great inspiration to formulate the ideas of the “project method” (Knoll 1997). The workshop and the laboratory provided similar spaces in which to test, modify and retest objects and tools, chemical solutions or temperatures. When technical schools and universities started to teach students, they did so in workshops, relying heavily on experienced practitioners as tutors, and with students producing material that was genuinely useful. Massachusetts Institute of Technology was, for a hundred years or so, a collection of workshops, before the emphasis shifted towards the academic and theoretical ways of working after World War I.

Higher Education and New Literacies

We fail to understand higher education if we see it as a place where emotions and voice have been excluded, and where images have been shunned. We can, however, argue that emotions, voice and image deserve more space and sharper focus in the curriculum. First and foremost, we have institutions whose main purpose is to train artists to work systematically with emotions and voice as expression in various types of artefacts. In modern film schools, for instance, voice, image and emotions are crucial elements of the curriculum. In many instances, digital storytelling is a way of expressing the unity of these three elements in a similar way.

The visual and the auditory, the emotional and the meaningful are elements of higher education that we will explore further within this book. We believe that making stories digitally and airing them in an educational institution is a profound way of training students to become literate in new media. But, more importantly, it also connects students to the realms of meaning and purpose of higher education that are vital for transforming ordinary literacies into deep engagement and concern for the social consequences of our actions. We can point to some of the historical roots of opportunities to learn via all the senses and apply skills in seeing, drawing, photography, storytelling, essay writing, lab-work and art work in many forms; but these roots have not grown to be considered a normal or necessary element in what we usually think of as higher education.

Cary Jewitt (2008) points out that media literacy and “multi-literacies” originated from radical adult educators in the tradition of Paolo Freire (1921–1997), the Brazilian lawyer and social entrepreneur, who wished to capture the complexity that children and adults experience in meeting so many forms of visual expression. Learning to read them in the classroom or in other situations was their road to liberation. Within this tradition, to be literate means to master the art of reading words on a page. But contemporary theories of multimodal literacies include reading images, video, facial expressions and textual forms that extend to the classroom, the built environment, emotions and moods and beyond.

Theories about the expertise (or “literacy”) required in order to read and interpret these different modalities was first expressed by the New London Group, named after the town in which they met. In 1996, in New Hampshire, USA, the group formulated a manifesto for “multiliteracy”. The inspiration from Freire gave adult education around the world a strong injection of cultural and social radicalism, which echoed in the student uprisings that continue to take place around the world.

The Four Scholarships, Digital Storytelling and Multiliteracy

In the rest of this book, we aim to show how digital storytelling might fill important roles in taking higher education into the context of new media. In the section on “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning”, the chapters deal with what the essence of a digital story is and how the boundaries of the genre should be described. They also present projects and experiences relating to how reflection is taught and promoted in teacher education and in the health professions.

In the section on “The Scholarship of Discovery”, we present chapters on how digital stories are used in research in medical care, in migration and refugee studies, science communication and establishing understanding in the public regarding research projects. Finally, the section presents a research project in which the process of making digital stories fills an important role as a participatory action research strategy.

The third section, on “The Scholarship of Integration”, gives readers an opportunity to look more closely into the intended effects of digital storytelling in training nurses and nursing teachers to become more attentive to the needs of elderly patients. It also presents a case in which students’ identity and self-presentation can be interpreted in existential terms. Meanwhile, researchers need to work together when they create new programmes, and one chapter shows how digital stories can clarify and communicate the meanings and identities of researchers in their work. A chapter about how libraries work with students to identify their ways of finding information is another example of how producing audio–visual stories supports students in deriving meaning from complex situations. Another chapter in this section offers a theoretical reflection on how theories of pedagogy and didactics relate to Boyer’s notion of “integration” and the European continental tradition of Bildung (or self-cultivation) as the aim of higher education.

In the final section, we present chapters on how digital stories can be used to connect with the world outside our colleges and universities. One case study from New Zealand demonstrates how digital stories were used as part of a process of empowering voluntary social work organisations to make a stronger impact on those with whom they worked. In the next chapter, the author discusses how longitudinal storytelling work helps us understand how we might (re)define our notions of engaged scholarship within a community of practice. Digital storytelling as an engaged scholarship practice is considered at the programmatic level in Greece, and in the final chapter, scholars from Baltimore show how digital storytelling is a tool for connecting students and communities with the university.

Sometimes we are challenged by faculty who think learning to teach with new media is too modern or outside of the scope of what teachers in higher education normally are supposed to do. We think differently. Audio–visual expression has always had a space in higher education—and this space is vastly expanded by the current influence of new media. We speak today about living in “the mediatized society”, in which communication in general is more and more a multimodal phenomenon (Lundby 2008). Media theorists explain that living a mediatised life demands that we develop new skills and competencies in mastering media, as both producers and consumers of media. Communicating through media substitutes actions formerly performed face to face and alters patterns of communication in daily life. This changes the ways in which people relate to each other and opens new possibilities for communication as well as closing down or hampering some established ways of communication (Hjarvard 2008).

We hope this book will demonstrate that digital stories have relevance for many other dimensions of higher education and that it will illuminate how visual, auditory and emotional communication play together in the process of mediatising higher education. Digital storytelling has the potential to include young and elderly students, teachers of all ages and positions, as well as members of the wider community. This is an essential part of what we understand as the heart of scholarship today.