Digital storytelling and the narrative turn in psychology: Creating spaces for collective empowerment

In this article, we propose a model that combines digital storytelling with narrative practice to create a facilitated peer-to-peer experiential learning space for collective empowerment. This model was inspired by an educational intervention that utilized participatory digital comic strip making to raise students’ awareness of bullying and its consequences. The makerspace involved allows for the creation of digital artifacts representing participants’ personal narratives. Narrative practice is grounded in the idea that there are no problematic people but rather not effective narratives about how people are supposed to act. Making digital stories, getting constructive peers feedback, and then releasing more polyphonic and adaptive sequel versions is proposed here as an effective way to raise participants’ awareness and help them integrate different points of view, as well as enrich their narratives on critical social phenomena. A significant advantage of the digital storytelling genre employed is that the digital artifacts produced have a concrete material presence: they can be shared, performed, or modified. Participants, with the help of their peers, participate in a group process facilitated by their teacher, aiming to locate and change problematic elements in their stories, and by doing so they materialize and consolidate the improvement in their personal narratives