Digital Storytelling: Capturing the Stories of Mentors in Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience

Abstract

Digital stories are often considered in terms of artistic forms, as teaching and learning tools, and for their emancipatory capacity to capture the stories and experiences of marginalised social groups. This case joins the recent move to reconceptualise the digital story by positing it as a useful research method that generates rich multimodal narrative data. As a new method in social science research, it seems, at least so far, to raise more questions than it answers. Such methodological questions might include the following: What ‘type’ of digital story to use? How do you analyse, theorise and/or account for the overall effect of the multimodal text? Without offering definitive answers or providing a ‘correct’ account of how digital stories should be used as method, this case begins to offer some clarity by describing step by step how we responded to these questions, what we did, the difficulties encountered and the insights generated from this type of data and analysis. This case describes how digital stories were used as a method in one part of a larger research project that investigates the effectiveness, impact and model of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience mentoring programme. We will demonstrate how digital stories can be helpful in answering complex qualitative research questions.

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