Situating digital storytelling within African communities

We reflect on the methods, activities and perspectives we used to situate digital storytelling in two rural African communities in South Africa and Kenya. We demonstrate how in-depth ethnography in a village in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and a design workshop involving participants from that village allowed us to design a prototype mobile digital storytelling system suited to the needs of rural, oral users. By leveraging our prototype as a probe and observing villagers using it in two villages in South Africa and Kenya, we uncovered implications for situating digital storytelling within those communities. Finally, we distil observations relevant to localizing storytelling and their implications for transferring design into a different community

Situating digital storytelling within African communities

We reflect on the methods, activities and perspectives we used to situate digital storytelling in two rural African communities in South Africa and Kenya. We demonstrate how in-depth ethnography in a village in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and a design workshop involving participants from that village allowed us to design a prototype mobile digital storytelling system suited to the needs of rural, oral users. By leveraging our prototype as a probe and observing villagers using it in two villages in South Africa and Kenya, we uncovered implications for situating digital storytelling within those communities. Finally, we distil observations relevant to localizing storytelling and their implications for transferring design into a different community

Using Technology to Support At-Risk Students' Learning

A new report finds that technology - when implemented properly -can produce significant gains in student achievement and boost engagement, particularly among students most at risk

Designing Digital Storytelling for Rural African Communities

Chongilala – a long time ago – says Mama Rhoda of Adiedo, Kenya. She looks deeply into our eyes. We record her rhythms and rhymes as she sings and tells a story about her grandparents. She shows us the exact spot where her great-grandfathers and his friends used to sit and drink and how her grandmother used to dance. This thesis situates digital storytelling in rural African communities to enable rural people, like Mama Rhoda, to record and share their stories and to express their imaginations digitally. We explore the role of design, and the methods and perspectives designers need to take on to design across cultures and to understand the forms and meanings behind rural African interpretations of digital storytelling. These perspectives allow us to 'unconceal' how our Western storytelling traditions have influenced design methods and obscure the voices of ‘other’ cultures. By integrating ethnographic insights with previous experiences of designing mobile digital storytelling systems, we implement a method using cell-phones to localize storytelling and involve rural users in de- sign activities – probing ways to incorporate visual and audio media in storytelling. Products from this method help us to generate design ideas for our system, most notably flexibility. Leveraging this prototype as a probe and observing villagers using it in two villages in South Africa and Kenya, we report on situated use of our prototype and discuss, and relate to usage, the insights we gathered on our prototype, the users, their needs, and their context. We use these insights to uncover further implications for situating digital storytelling within those communities and reflect on the importance of spending time in-situ when designing across cultures. Deploying our prototype through an NGO, we stage first encounters with digital storytelling and show how key insiders can introduce the system to a wider community and make it accessible through their technical and social expertise. Our mobile digital storytelling system proved to be both useable and useful and its flexibility allowed users to form their own interpretations of digital storytelling and (re)appropriate our system to alternative ends. Results indicate that our system accommodates context and that storytelling activities around our system reflect identity. Our activities in communities across Africa also show that our system can be used as a digital voice that speaks to us, by allowing users to express themselves – through digital stories – in design

A Critique of Personas as representations of "the other" in Cross-Cultural Technology Design

A literature review on cross-cultural personas reveals both, a trend in projects lacking accomplishment and personas reinforcing previous biases. We first suggest why failures or incompleteness may have ensued, while then we entice a thoughtful alteration of the design process by creating and validating personas together with those that they embody. Personas created in people's own terms support the design of technologies by truly satisfying users' needs and drives. Examining the experiences of those working "out there", and our practises, we conclude persona is a vital designerly artefact to empowering people in representing themselves. A persona-based study on User-Created Persona in Namibia contrasts the current persona status-quo via an ongoing co-design effort with urban and rural non-designers. However we argue persona as a design device must ease its implicit colonial tendency to and impulses in depicting "the other". Instead we endorse serenity, mindfulness and local enabling in design at large and in the African context in particular

Toward a Community-Centric Approach to Address School Discipline Disparity

What you are engaging is more than a dissertation, but a dissertation in practice. It is a dissertation in community-centered practice for educational leadership. This is an agenda driven by the need to improve a problem of education practice that is a grave matter of social injustice. This is a response to the persistent call for educational leadership to be community work, to be community-engaged, as community-centric leadership (centered in the community and central to the needs of the marginalized). The agenda is designed to deliver site-specific examples of problems of practice occurring in school settings. Site-specific examples are demonstrated through auto-ethnographic reports and critical race counter-narratives from the worldview of the author of this agenda. I am a community-centric leader who engages the work as Black Activist Mothering, a perspective that is argued in this dissertation to be a unique and greatly needed vantage point. The problem of how race is involved with the ways in which the practices of suspensions and expulsions are enacted in school settings has become a US Department of Justice imperative; as most school districts in the country stand in violation of the civil rights of its students. The urgency to address this problem in ways that are libratory, emancipatory and transformative, is driven by the need to generate improvements in (a) educational leadership practice; and (b) the education research-practice infrastructure. The relationship of race and discipline disparity is utilized through this agenda to illustrate how knowing is not always enough to transform practices; even when the practice has demonstrated in the research to cause harm both disproportionately and at a disparate rate. And often, deeper, and more critical methods are called upon to discover responses to problems of practice within the context of traditional and nontraditional school settings

Communicating in designing an oral repository for rural African villages

We describe designing an asynchronous, oral repository and sharing system that we intend to suit the needs and practices of rural residents in South Africa. We aim to enable users without access to personal computers to record, store, and share information within their Xhosa community using cellphones and a tablet PC combined with their existing face-to-face oral practices. Our approach recognises that systems are more likely to be effective if the design concept and process build on existing local communication practices as well as addressing local constraints, e.g. cost. Thus, we show how the objectives for the system emerged from prolonged research locally and how we communicated insights, situated in the community, into the process of design and development in a city-based lab. We discuss how we integrated understandings about communication between situated- and localresearchers and designers and developers and note the importance of recognising and centralising subtle differences in our perception of acts of oral communication. We go on to show how the materiality of the software, the tablet form factor, and touch interaction style played into our collaborative effort in conceiving the design.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Race, Resilience, and Resistance: A Culturally Relevant Examination of How Black Women School Leaders Advance Racial Equity and Social Justice in U.S. Schools

This culturally relevant qualitative examination of the leadership of Black women educational leaders (BWEL) committed to advancing a social justice leadership agenda within the contested spaces (Stovall, 2004) comprising United States (U.S.) P-12 schools, employs an African centered emancipatory methodology (Kershaw, 1990, 1992; Tillman, 2002), situated in a conceptual framework grounded in the research on applied critical leadership (Santamaria, 2013). It examines, highlights, celebrates, and makes transparent, the unique leadership of BWEL. Engaged to rebuke the silencing and marginalization of women educational leaders of color in the educational leadership discourse, this study bridges engages a multiple case study approach, phenomenological analysis, and participatory orientation to better understand how eight complexly diverse BWEL leverage positive aspects of their multicultural perspectives and subjectivities to respond to equity challenges linked to educational inequality for HMMS, while simultaneously navigating 21st century school reform policies and practices situated in white privilege, power, and anti-black oppression. This study also opens up brave liberatory space for participating BWEL to engage in a recursive cycle of critical reflection, dialogue, problem-posing, and action on the site-based equity challenges they face within their respective leadership spaces in real-time, filling an important gap in the educational leadership research. Specifically, it responds to calls for more constructive models of social justice leadership praxis centered in the voices and experiences of those engaging the work in communities confronting the equity challenges of our time, thereby comprising research and theory in action, and provoking a necessary dialogue on what it means to lead for social justice. Having implications for how the field might reimagine and reconstruct educational leadership, theory and development, this research bridged critical race and critical multicultural education theories to the discourses in educational leadership, birthing emergent themes for an alternate and culturally-centered approach to leadership I call critically relevant transformative multicultural leadership or CR-TML. This study has import for practicing educational leaders, those who develop educational leaders, legislators and policy makers impacting the work of educational leaders, and anyone with an interest in educational leadership for social justice

We Cannot Call Back Colonial Stories: Storytelling and Critical Land Literacy

This article examines the role of stories and storytelling in both shaping and revealing pre-service teachers’ understandings of land. The authors conducted a study using digital storytelling as a participatory method of inquiry examining participants’ conceptions of land. Participants’ narratives reflect stories they have been told about their families, communities, and nations, revealing inextricable links between conceptions of land, nation, and self in relation to others. The authors propose the notion of critical land literacy as a pedagogical goal in Teacher Education. They define critical land literacy as an understanding of, and relation to, land informed by Indigenous knowledges and a critique of ongoing settler-colonialism in Canada