Background of this project
This project was completed by Rebecca McKee for Digital Storytelling, Winter-Mini, 2015, Texas A&M-Commerce, a graduate-level course taught by Dr. Shannon Carter.
When posed with the idea of creating a digital story, I knew that I wanted to capture the essence of how storytelling affects bot the listener and the teller. A real-life example of that transformative power occurred when Dad retold a story to me recently. His witnessing of an historic event in northeast Texas over fifty years ago affected him so much that he told us about it many times in our childhood. His emotional re-telling of this story many years later prompted me to explore how recalling memories and oral storytelling affect literacy and place.
Dad's narration in this project was a product of notes I had taken about our discussion of the event, and improvised parts while he recorded. I experienced a different "take-away" from his thoughts while I was editing his narration. Story indeed adapts to reflect time and place!
How are stories related and perceived across time? What literacy opportunities do personal stories provide? How do personal stories contribute to the literacy of place? Does translating a story into a multimodal format affect its meaning? These are some of the questions that I continue to explore in my work with storytelling.