I was lucky enough to get a seat in the recent Community University Engagement workshop “Research with Community:
Digital Storytelling as Method and Engagement” hosted by ISICUE and UVic Fine Arts.

I was hoping to learn more about using visual methods and digital storytelling to engage communities.

The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Tamara Plush, whose research focuses on how participatory video can raise citizen voice in international development contexts. Tamara has worked in Africa and South East Asia facilitating a multi-day (or week) process that she condensed into a half-day workshop.

Here’s an example of how Tamara has used participatory video and elements of good practice for using videos to build agents of change:

We broke into groups of four and followed Tamara’s framework where there is a prompt that helps the individual experience inform the collective central theme. This is followed by the creation of a story arc and then a two-phase storyboarding process. This approach emphasizes the building of empathy from the personal to the group and then to the policy maker.

The prompt: Tell a story about a challenge you’ve faced in your work around community engagement.

We reflected individually and then discussed to pull out a central theme:

“Recognizing the imbalance of power that’s inherent when you have a diversity of the participants”

If we’d had time, we would have also come up with some visuals to represent the theme. Care needs to be taken to make sure that the personal experiences connect to the theme.

I opted to be totally engaged to the process instead of trying to divide my attention by capturing our progress on camera. Thankfully, Tamara provided more resources on her site that are useful to fill in the details about the techniques we used to work out the story arc and storyboard.

Storyboarding: Phase I

My group brainstormed how to tell the story that would illustrate our theme using sticky notes and then arranging the sticky notes onto pages labelled with one of four icons.

[👂] Who should hear the story?

[🤔] What do you hope they will think?

[😀] What should they feel?

[🗣 🗯] What is the dialogue you want the film to spark?

Storyboarding: Phase II

Using four pieces of letter paper, we created 4 frames that would make up our film.

Remember

The video itself sparks the conversation. It can be a point of interest that enables the larger dialogue to happen – the video doesn’t need to do it all.

Tamara mentioned other creative processes that can be used to explore the topic to help create a compelling story including body mapping, looking at a collection of photos, or conducting interviews.