Amplifying Community Voices in Multimodal Story-building

Oral storytelling is as old as history itself. We are two educators with experience in New York, Illinois and California schools, exploring alongside classroom teachers and literacy leaders innovative ways for children to tell stories. Storytelling at the heart of literacy instruction centers children’s unique identities and amplifies community-building across the school year, but this is not exclusive to classrooms. In all spaces, people want to be seen and heard, and the ideas in this workshop will be easily transferred into various contexts. This workshop will share with participants ideas for revitalizing story-building in multimodal ways, tapping into various ed-tech platforms. We will begin by telling our own stories – modeling for participants ways to share personal histories through manipulating images, items and sound. We will demonstrate engagement with multimodal mentor texts to show the ways that authors and content-creators tell stories. Mentors will serve to inspire ideas around presentations, videos and aural recordings of personal histories. Participants will have the chance to explore different ways of story-building around an aspect of their identities on various technology platforms. Participants will co-construct a small moment from their lives to practice multimodal storytelling. After sharing the experience, our hope is for participants to be able to apply a broad sense of storytelling to their own specific context. The entire workshop will be framed through the lens of equity and justice through multimodal storytelling, as we consider diverse ways to share of ourselves that include all modes of composition and communication.