Digital Storytelling and Reflexivity in Critical Multicultural Pre-Service Teacher Education

In this presentation, I discuss how an autoethnographic multimodal narrative activity, in the form of a Digital Storytelling (DS) project, can provide insight into infusing critical pedagogy into pre-service teacher (PST) education for language teachers. The in-progress dissertation study explores how PSTs perceive and demonstrate reflexive practices, a first step in understanding critical multiculturalism, through the process of creating, editing, and sharing their digital stories about (inter)cultural experiences. Reflexivity is especially important in teacher education for English as a second language since language ideologies and multicultural awareness can either enhance or inhibit an understanding of critical pedagogy (Gay, 2000). Through a focus on four purposefully selected PSTs, I describe the development and collaborative interactions that culminate into individual student-created 3-4 minute digital stories. To understand both the digital storytelling process and the product, I use data from in-depth interviewing, observations, and student narratives and reflections, including visual data and arts-infused digital stories. Narrative inquiry is used to create a case study that combines multiple perspectives and multiple modes of communication and contributes to the long tradition of teacher narratives and case studies in pedagogical studies. Additionally, as the instructor-researcher, I use a postcritical perspective to understand my own role in the process and combine my own narrative with those of my student-participants