An image from Nicky Wu's digital video.

The story did not come easily to Nicky Wu. She wanted to tell social workers how she’d been bullied by other foster kids in the past, and how her pleas for help had been ignored by the staff at her group home, but she didn’t know how. In three days, however, Wu found a way to tell her story using a digital camera, a one-page script she prepared for her voiceover, photographs of herself and animated images.

It was all part of a three-day workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, where kids and adults are taught how to create short digital videos about their lives and experiences.

The Center for Digital Storytelling is a nonprofit research and training center that has been exploring the relevance of personal narrative and digital media for more than a decade. The center’s digital storytelling workshop model combines creative writing, oral history, and digital media to assist people with little to no prior media-making experience create short digital videos, or “digital stories”. The center has worked with a broad spectrum of individuals and groups, ranging from artists and historians to college and university faculty and students and K-12 students and teachers. One of the center’s main projects is working with teenagers in foster care.

“The emphasis is in narrative and story,” said Amy Hill, community programs director at the center. “It’s more than getting technology skills.”

For adolescents in foster care, the process of telling these stories is empowering because they realize that they have control over how their lives are being documented Hill said.

“Each of us is best equipped to tell our own stories,” she said.

Digital Storytelling

In workshops of eight to ten people, participants craft and record personal narratives, collect still images, video clips, and music and are guided through computer tutorials that allow them to edit their own stories under teacher supervision.

A typical workshop spans three or four days. The center’s small staff of three teachers and one assistant begins with an overview of storytelling. Then the group sits together and shares ideas. In the late afternoon during the first day of the workshop, participants learn Photoshop basics and work on their scripts. Over the next few days, participants select and scan images—photographs, letters, clippings, drawings, artwork, etc.—record their voiceovers for narration, and edit their stories.

Hill said that the young people who have participated in the workshop aren’t intimidated by the advanced technology involved. “It’s more difficult working with adults—there’s a hesitation about technology,” she said. “The youth are not afraid of it. They jump right in; they figure it out.”

One of the center’s main collaborations has been with the Youth Offering Unique Tangible Help (Y.O.U.T.H.) Training Project, which is part of the Bay Area Academy at San Francisco State University. The Academy trains child welfare and probation staff responsible for children and families in the foster care program in the San Francisco Area.

Digital videos created by young people about their experiences in foster care become part of the curriculum Y.O.U.T.H uses to train child welfare workers who work with teenagers in the child welfare system. The videos help them develop cultural awareness and expand their understanding of what it’s like to be in foster care.

Jaime Lee Evans, project coordinator for the Y.O.U.T.H Training Project, said that she and other staff brainstormed about fresh and unique ways to deliver a curriculum for social workers on the issues that face young people who age out of the foster care system and must deal with the challenges of living on their own for the first time.

“We knew we needed pizzazz,” Evans said. “Before we even wrote the curriculum, we had [foster youth telling their stories] in mind.”

Evans had participated in a workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling when she previously worked at San Francisco Women Against Rape. She produced a digital video about her mother’s alcoholism and her abusive stepfather.

“It had a tremendous healing power over me. Then when I got this job, I knew this was the way to go,” Evans said. “I had to convince people that this was worth funding.”

Initially, the purpose of implementing digital videos into the curriculum was to provide an instructional tool for social workers, but Evans said she realized that the process of making the videos was also empowering for the teens.

The videos cover a range of difficult topics: how hard it can be to cope with a social worker who is absent or uncaring; what it’s like for a gay teen in care to come out to friends and others; the importance of helping brothers and sisters remain in contact after they are removed from their home; the role of advocates; sexual and physical abuse, drug use, etc.

Evans said she believed that watching a digital video was actually more powerful than simply listening to a young person describe their own experience. “You can actually take it in more,” she said. “When they hear it with music, pictures, imagery—it’s moving; it’s like ‘Whoa, now I really get it.”

Fredi Juni, a social worker who participated in the project said that the digital videos have allowed her to reflect on her cases more. “You can give all the theory and statistics about foster youth, but showing the videos is so much more powerful,” Juni said. Although the videos are brief, lasting three to five minutes, Juni said the creativity involved makes the story more powerful.

She particularly remembered a digital video by a young man who had lived in 68 different foster homes, and how moved she was by his personal struggles. After watching his video, Judi said she asked herself, ‘how can I work for a system that’s doing this to these kids?’

Telling Our Stories

Kadia Edwards, who was in foster care in Connecticut, participated in a piloted workshop at the center with the National Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) Association. Young people in care in different states came to the center to share their experiences with CASA volunteers.

“I was all for it,” Edwards said. “I felt like there were some things in terms of helping other advocate workers. I felt that was my way for me to tell them what we need.”

Edwards, whose video contains soft ballads, a biblical verse about love, and photographs of herself with her advocate, is shown in her video telling other advocates to not judge the foster youth they work with. She said that while writing her script she realized how she truly felt about her advocate.

“I had to sit and think back…my advocate has really been outstanding,” said Edwards. “I think I may not have shown her,” she said. “As I was doing it, I realized she has stood by me for so long.”

For Wu, deciding exactly what to write about was difficult, but the creative process proved to be a revelation.

“I think I didn’t realize how much I suppressed,” Wu said. “I didn’t think of all the bad things that happened. They treated me like crap. I could’ve gotten them in trouble had I known my rights, and how.”

Wu used bright red Chinese characters with the word ‘tradition’ glaring on the screen to describe the physical abuse she suffered in her family, which she described as a destructive legacy passed down from generation to generation.

Edwards still stays in touch with other youth from her workshop. “It’s therapeutic in a way,” she said. “There’s a strong bond within the group—we came together and accomplished a tremendous thing together.”

Evans, whose next project will be working with teens in foster care from Hawaii, wants to work with more foster youth throughout the United States. “People don’t believe it’s possible—making a documentary in four days,” Evans said. “We showed them it’s possible.”

Resource:
Center for Digital Storytelling