In 2009, the Parsons StoryCorps qualitative case study was designed to closely observe the complexity of youth engagement with digital media for self-presentation in an afterschool digital storytelling project designed to provide students with rich, varied uses of technology in a urban middle school in North Carolina. Several frameworks were utilized to analyze student work and the interactions among teacher, students, and curriculum that affected the construction of students' digital autobiographies. These included theories on self-presentation and autobiography and critical social theory about representation, articulation, and visual culture. Multimodal discourse analysis was employed to analyze data that included: field notes, interviews, and participants' digital stories. Findings suggest that teacher expectations, recruitment, and family involvement play a large role in framing the kinds of stories that young people tell, and challenges other findings that suggest digital storytelling projects provide the freedom for students to tell whatever stories they want. Findings also confirm theories on autobiography and personal narrative that argues autobiographical storytelling is never static and always co-constructed by author and audience. Students' use of multiple media displayed sophisticated digital literacy skills although these were not overtly supported in the curriculum. Recommendations for future curricula directly address issues of representation and provide concrete examples of how to engage students in learning the necessary digital literacy skills to become producers and critical consumers in our technology-mediated culture
