Keywords

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The Scholarship of Integration is a way of performing scholarships so that our students and the public are able to make connections across disciplines, relate isolated facts to each other and put them in context, illuminate data in revealing ways, and relate the teaching and learning to the everyday lives of students. In the academic world, prestigious prizes are awarded primarily to researchers who do exemplary work within their disciplines. Prices for integration would be awarded to those who are able to connect their research to the significant issues and problems that students and the public users of higher education deal with. Placing the knowledge in the broader context and connecting the dots of related information is the core activity of this academic scholarship. Integrating knowledge for students means that the academic addresses meaning first and foremost: what does this knowledge mean? Integration has become increasingly important because of the huge increase in knowledge and emerging specialties and sub-disciplines are immense. Philosophers of higher education describe how the entire ontology of our knowing is different from only a few decades ago. Teaching in higher education tries to solve this question in a variety of ways, by invoking multidisciplinary, intraprofessional, cross-curricular working methods. Catering for interdisciplinary and interpretive practices will allow students to integrate their knowledge. In this section we will see how scholarly knowledge and personal knowledge, which are bodily and often unreflected, meet and how digital storytelling helps students to produce those meanings in critical ways. In this section we try and demonstrate how useful a tool digital storytelling is for teachers and students in higher education to produce such integrating connections.

Digital Storytelling: Learning to Be in Higher Education

In this chapter written by Sandra P.M. Ribeiro of the Polytechnic Institute of Porto, the focus is on the importance of philosophical and personal development of the student. The title, “Digital storytelling: learning to be in higher education”, opens a line of arguments about the importance of developing interpersonal relationships and emotions through studies in higher education institutions. Her point of departure is the need to make education which prepares students for a competent and responsible way of being in society. Education needs to be redesigned to cater for an integration of all aspects of human learning. The author aligns Boyer’s Scholarship of Integration with similar strands of thinking in Europe, such as in the Delors Report published in 1996. This report endorses the idea that education is based upon four pillars: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together and learning to be.

Reflective Information Seeking: Unpacking Research Skills Through Digital Storytelling

In this chapter Brian Leaf, National Network of Libraries of Medicine, South Central Region in the US, and Karen R. Diaz, of West Virginia University, take a closer look at how digital storytelling can play a role as an instigator of a more profound and immersive notion of literacy—or multiliteracy, as it is called. They take as their context a working university library—a place where all academics, staff and students find a place that contains thousands of books, each one of them filled with information representing the soul of the author and the culture they have grown out of. Libraries are designed to signal the sacred and traditional dimension of higher education. They communicate prestige and respect for knowledge, as well as everything that unites all sorts of studies at a university: a place to find information, to study, read and write. It is a demanding task for librarians to teach students all those tricks of the trail, which will open the Pandora’s Box of the library. What Karen and Brian have done is to use digital storytelling as a vital part of their teaching of this complex matter.

“Now I See”: Digital Storytelling for Mediating Interprofessional Collaboration

Grete Jamissen and Mike Moulton work at the Oslo and Akershus University of Applied Sciences and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, respectively, as a professor and a senior consultant. The chapter grew out of a particular experience of two groups of academics who created a joint Masters degree on “Public Health”. The groups represented diverse professional groups at two separate higher education institutions. Since the group worked so seriously to engage with each other in a professional and friendly manner their progress was slower than anticipated and they did not reach their goals in time. They sought digital storytelling as a method to explore their deeper conflicts and problems in communicating about their mutual interest.

Narratives of Age. Embedding Digital Storytelling Within the Curriculum of Health and Social Care with Older People

Tricia Jenkins is the director of Digitales Ltd. and a PhD candidate of Middlesex University, London. Her chapter presents insights from research projects that involve digital stories on several levels. It discusses the benefits of participation in digital storytelling both by active older people and by those who are living with conditions that limit their capacity, such as dementia. It also looks at the learning that can be gained from the stories produced by older people and the benefits of using digital storytelling as a reflective learning tool. It examines the potential for the digital stories to be used within teaching and learning as resources in nursing education, or as rich qualitative data for research—the potential “afterlives”, of the stories once they have been produced.

The Scholarship of Integration and Digital Storytelling as “Bildung” in Higher Education

Yngve Nordkvelle, Yvonne Fritze and Geir Haugsbakk work at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. Their chapter introduces a framework in which to see digital stories and the scholarship of integration in the relation to theories about pedagogy and didactics. The use of digital stories for instruction, collaboration and reflection in various contexts of teaching and learning is considered in a European context. The authors describe how using digital stories can be understood as both a method for teaching and a “signature pedagogy” for a course or a programme.

Critical Story Sharing: A Dialectic Approach to Identity Regulation

Mari Ann Moss is the director of Dreamcatcher Ltd., New Zealand. Her chapter considers the use of digital storytelling as a way of investigating personal and professional identity. She applies a different lens that helps to make sense of the challenges and opportunities of digital storytelling in organisations. The chapter focuses on an exploratory digital storytelling intervention within an organisation and draws lessons that are pertinent to higher education.